The Lycan's Wife, The Alpha's Wish

A man's hand covered my bare breast. My first thought was that I had fallen asleep with my phone playing something filthy. My second arrived when his thumb moved over my nipple and pleasure tightened through a body that could not possibly be mine. I went rigid.

The man behind me made a low, sleepy sound. His chest burned against my back, his thigh lay between mine, and an erection pressed into the curve of my ass. Cedar, iron, and amber clung to the sheets. None of it belonged in my apartment, where the loudest thing at night was the refrigerator trying to die with dignity.

Black velvet filled my vision when I opened my eyes. It draped a carved canopy high overhead, caught by silver clasps shaped into wolves' heads. Moonlight shone through gauze curtains. The phone I had dropped beside my pillow was gone. So were the pillow, my faded shirt, and every sensible explanation. His hand tightened.

My stomach clenched with a rush of heat. The response rose from someplace beneath thought, intimate and practiced. This body knew his weight, his smell, the rough scar crossing the knuckles against my skin. I knew that scar too. I had pictured it while reading, right before deciding the hero deserved to be beaten to death with his own tragic backstory.

Mathias Iglesias.

I pulled his hand off me and twisted toward the edge of the bed. A silver wolf ring scraped my ribs as his fingers closed around my wrist.

"Constance."

He sounded irritated rather than startled. His hair was dark from sleep, his jaw shadowed, his face offensively beautiful at close range. The novel had spent several paragraphs on the severe line of his mouth. It had neglected to mention the heat pouring off him or how completely his shoulders blocked the bed behind me.

"Let go."

His gaze dropped to my naked chest. Familiarity softened it for an instant, and the body I wore answered with another warm, humiliating pull. I yanked the sheet up between us.

Mathias released my wrist, though not because I had asked. He sat back against the pillows and watched me clutch the linen to my breasts. "If this is about Millicent, we settled it last night."

Last night, in another century, I had been reading in bed. Millicent Hurst had stood outside Constance's study with her sweet voice lowered, explaining to someone unnamed that a neglected wife was easy to ruin. First the household would believe her unstable. Then unfaithful. By the time Constance died, everyone would call it grief.

I had stopped reading there. Apparently the story had objected.

"We didn't settle anything," I said.

The words came out in a stranger's voice-soft, low, carefully trained. My hand rose to my throat. A pale wrist emerged from the sheet, smaller than mine, with a faint blue vein beneath skin that had never seen my chipped black nail polish.

Mathias's expression sharpened. "You agreed she would remain under my protection."

"Then I was cornered into saying yes."

Silence collected between us. A fire cracked beyond the bed curtains. Somewhere outside the room, metal wheels rattled over stone and faded into the keep.

"You speak as though you had no part in the decision."

Shit. I slid off the mattress before he could study me any closer. The sheet tangled around my knees, nearly pitching me onto a thick red carpet. I caught the bedpost and found a bare foot, then another. They were narrow, unmarked, and attached to legs longer than I expected. My balance followed a different set of rules now. So did gravity. So did the heavy fall of dark hair over my shoulder.

Across the chamber, a tall mirror reflected a woman wrapped in white linen.

Constance Hearth stared back at me.

I knew the face from the cover illustration: gray eyes, straight black hair, and a mouth drawn too gently for the woman the story intended to kill. The artist had given her sorrow because sorrow sold books. The real face looked stunned, furious, and very much alive.

Mathias left the bed. He made no effort to cover himself before pulling on a pair of dark trousers. Constance's body remembered that too-the shape of him, the easy movement, the old expectation that he might cross the room and draw her against his chest. Want gathered low in my belly before I could stop it.

The body's answer granted him nothing.

I backed toward a chair where a robe had been discarded. "Stay there."

He stopped. The pause lasted barely a heartbeat, but he stopped.

"You woke in my arms," he said. "Now you look at me as though I've broken into your chamber."

"Your new mate lives in our house, and you're surprised your wife isn't feeling sociable?"

Something flickered in his eyes. The novel had called them gold. Up close they were brown with a thin amber flare around the pupils, warmer than a man with his judgment had any right to possess.

"Millicent is under diplomatic protection. Her presence does not change this marriage."

"It changed the room she sleeps in. It changed who sits beside you at supper. It changed what your servants whisper when Constance passes." I shoved one arm into the robe, then the other. The sleeves dragged over my hands. "And last night she threatened to destroy your wife before killing her."

Mathias crossed the carpet. "Millicent spoke to you?"

"I heard enough."

"What, exactly?"

He reached for the loose front of the robe. I slapped his hand aside.

The sound was small. His stillness afterward was not.

"Do not touch me."

His nostrils flared. The pupils swallowed most of the amber in his eyes, and a faint point appeared at one canine. Whatever lived under his skin had noticed the command. He lowered his hand, but the heat of him remained close enough to seep through the robe.

"Jealousy has made you reckless," he said.

"You think this is jealousy because the alternative would require you to admit you brought danger into your wife's home."

"I know Millicent."

"You know what she lets you see."

He turned his head slightly, listening for something beyond the door, then brought his attention back to me. Control returned piece by piece: shoulders easing, jaw unclenching, the sharp edge withdrawing from his tooth. I hated that I noticed. I hated more that Constance's body noticed with me.

"You are frightened," he said.

"Yes." The truth surprised him. Good. "I woke with a man touching me in a room I don't recognize, and you expect me to accept every choice you made before I opened my eyes. Fear is the appropriate response."

His brow tightened. I had said too much, but retreating into Constance's old obedience would kill us both. If she still existed anywhere inside this skin, I owed her more than a convincing performance.

I tied the robe firmly and stepped past him. He shifted to block my path to the door. He did not grab me again. That restraint might have impressed me if he had not been using his body as a locked gate.

"Move."

"Not until you explain what happened to you."

"Fine. Your wife discovered she has limits. Here is the first." I met his stare despite the unfamiliar tremor in my legs. "Millicent leaves Courcy today. You exile her from this keep and from your protection."

His face closed. "No."

The answer hurt. Not me-not entirely. Grief moved under my ribs with such depth that my grip tightened on the robe. Six years of marriage lived in that pain. Six years of trusting him to hear Constance before any other woman, and he had refused without asking what Millicent had said.

I let the grief settle. It belonged to the woman whose face I wore, but it gave my anger weight.

"Then divorce me."

Mathias went very still. The fire snapped behind him, throwing copper light across the scar on his hand and the ring he had not removed. His gaze searched my face as if obedience might be hiding there.

When he spoke, his voice held the calm of a sentence already passed.

"You will have neither."

Mathias's refusal had barely left his mouth when I stepped around him and reached for the narrow door beside the hearth.

His hand landed on the wood above my head. "We are not finished."

"You made a decision for both of us. That sounds finished to me."

The robe held closed beneath my fist, but his scent-cedar, iron, and amber-still rose from my skin. Constance's body reacted to his nearness with a traitorous warmth that made anger easier than embarrassment. I ducked under his arm, shoved through the door, and turned the iron key before he could follow.

The door jumped once under his palm.

"Constance."

"Go protect Millicent. You seem committed to the work."

For several seconds, his breathing remained audible through the oak. Then his steps crossed the bedchamber. The outer door opened. A woman's startled voice met his clipped order to prepare his wife for breakfast, and the door shut hard enough to tremble through the bathing room walls.

I kept my hand on the key until the silence felt real.

The bathing room was larger than my apartment kitchen. Blue tiles covered the floor; steam drifted from a copper tub sunk beside the wall. Someone had filled it before dawn and left folded cloths, soap, combs, and a silver tray of glass jars on a marble table. There was no faucet or shower, and certainly no phone. I had gained a palace and lost indoor plumbing in the same supernatural transaction.

A mirror stretched above the washstand. Constance waited inside it with Mathias's rumpled robe wrapped around her and his scent all over her body.

I opened the robe and let it fall.

Looking became harder once I was alone. In the bedroom, nakedness had been a border I needed to defend. Here it exposed the theft in full: narrow shoulders, high breasts, a soft stomach, black hair brushing a waist I had never touched before. This was not a costume. Constance's skin warmed when I rubbed my arms. Her lungs moved because I breathed. Her pulse beat under my fingers when I pressed them to her throat.

"I'm sorry," I said to the glass.

The woman there offered no answer.

I climbed into the tub. Warm water closed over my calves and thighs, carrying lavender from crushed leaves floating near the drain. It should have soothed me. Instead, Mathias's scent lifted in the steam. It lingered at my neck, beneath my breast, along the hip his hand must have rested against while we slept. I took a cloth and scrubbed until the skin flushed.

The water clouded around me. Pale powder streaked from my upper arm.

I stopped.

More powder came away when I wiped the same place again, revealing a bruise beneath it. Yellow faded into violet across the inside of Constance's arm. Four darker ovals curved around the flesh, too even to be accidental. I stood in the tub and searched the rest of her body. Powder concealed another mark near her ribs and a broad discoloration high on one hip. None looked fresh, but someone had covered them carefully enough to survive a night in bed.

The book had described Constance as fragile. It had never mentioned that she was bruised.

I touched the mark on her hip. A dull ache answered. Not memory, exactly. The body knew where it had been hurt even if it refused to show me by whom.

"Did he do this?"

The question sounded worse in her voice.

I looked toward the locked door. Mathias had caught my wrist. He had blocked my exit. He had also stopped when I told him not to touch me. That proved he possessed restraint, not innocence. Millicent had threatened Constance. Servants had access to powder and baths. The novel had given me motives without evidence, because apparently fiction enjoyed watching women make fatal assumptions.

I climbed out, leaving wet footprints across the tile, and leaned toward the mirror. The bruises were almost invisible from a few feet away. A dusting of pearl powder waited in one of the silver jars. I rubbed a little between my fingers, then washed it off.

Something dark moved beneath the skin below my navel.

I jerked back. The mark shifted again, gliding toward my left hip. It gathered into a thin crescent no larger than my thumbnail, silver at the edges and blue-black at its center. When I pressed it, the crescent slipped sideways under my fingertip.

"Absolutely not."

The mark pulsed once. Cold traveled inward, deep enough to reach a place the bath's heat could not touch. For an instant I felt water far colder than the tub and an immense, empty darkness beneath it. Then the sensation vanished. The crescent settled above my hipbone as if it had always belonged there.

A knock struck the door.

I snatched up the robe. "Who is it?"

"Judeth, my lady."

The name belonged to Constance's attendant, though the novel had given her little beyond loyal hands and a talent for crying at useful moments. I tied the robe, unlocked the door, and opened it only far enough to see her.

Judeth held a dark blue morning dress over one arm. She was young, freckled, and already dressed for work, with brown hair pinned under a linen cap. Her gaze moved from my wet hair to the discarded cloth, then found the bruise on my arm. Fear changed her face before she lowered her eyes.

"Who covered these?" I asked.

Her grip tightened on the dress. "You asked me to."

"Why?"

"You said Lord Mathias must not see."

"Did you see who hurt me?"

Judeth glanced toward the bedchamber. "My lady, he will hear us."

"He's gone."

That frightened her more. She stepped inside and closed the door with care. Rosemary and wool smoke clung to her clothes. "You never lock him out. You never send him away. You don't look at me as if we've only just met."

I had wanted information. Instead, I had made myself the threat in the room.

"I woke confused," I said. It was true enough to survive repetition. "Tell me about the bruises."

"You wouldn't tell me." Her attention caught on my hand, still braced across the robe at my stomach. "Does the mark pain you again?"

She had said again. Before I could ask what she meant, a bell rang beyond the bedchamber, low and resonant.

Judeth went pale. "Breakfast began a quarter hour ago. Lady Millicent is already downstairs."

The breakfast scene. I remembered it now: Constance arrived late after crying in private, found Millicent wearing her gold and seated at Mathias's right hand, then apologized for disturbing them. The chapter had treated her humiliation as proof that the mate bond could not be resisted.

I reached for the blue dress. "Help me put this on."

Judeth did not release it. "My lady?"

"Millicent expects Constance to walk into that room ashamed." I met the borrowed gray eyes in the glass. "She can be disappointed."

Judeth stared at me as a white bloom spread beneath the mirror's surface. The bath behind us had begun to cool, yet the fog thickened inside the glass and left a clear oval at the height of my face.

From the other side, a woman's fingertip pressed against the glass.

It dragged four letters through the mist.

HELP

I put my palm against the place where the finger had pressed. The glass was cold.

"Who are you?" My reflection mouthed the question with me. "Are you Constance?"

The fingertip dragged downward, beginning another stroke, but the fog shuddered and thinned. I caught only a pale curve before the mirror cleared. Whatever waited beyond it had tried to answer. Behind me, Judeth stood with the blue dress crushed against her chest.

"You saw that."

Her eyes remained fixed on the glass. "The breakfast bell rang twice, my lady."

"That was not my question."

"No." She swallowed. "It wasn't."

The bell sounded again, followed by hurried footsteps in the bedchamber. Judeth flinched toward the door. "If Lord Mathias sends someone else, we will not be allowed another minute."

I wanted to steam the room until the mirror spoke in complete sentences. I also knew what waited downstairs. Leaving Millicent alone with Mathias gave her the scene she had planned, while the woman behind the glass had managed one urgent word and could not afford to be forgotten.

"Bring me back here after breakfast," I said. "No one cleans that mirror."

Judeth nodded and helped me dress.

The blue gown fastened down the back and covered the bruises without powder. Judeth twisted my wet hair into a low knot as we crossed the bedchamber, her fingers working from habit while I tried to follow corridors I had never seen. Courcy Keep opened around us in gray stone, dark wood, and portraits of people who looked offended by death. Servants flattened themselves against the walls when I passed. Their eyes rose once I moved beyond them and dropped again when I glanced back.

Breakfast waited in a long room warmed by narrow windows and a fire no one needed. Mathias sat at the head of the table in a black coat, speaking to a steward over a stack of correspondence. Millicent occupied the carved chair at his right.

She wore Constance's gold.

The ceremonial collar curved over her dark green bodice, its linked wolves bright against her skin. I had seen it in the novel's illustrations, always on Constance at treaty feasts and household rites. It was not simply jewelry. The wife of Courcy wore it when she received guests in her husband's territory.

Millicent lifted her cup and smiled at me over the rim. Night jasmine reached me across the table, softened by warm resin and sharpened with the clean bite of winter air. The scent made Mathias's wolf stir; amber flashed around his pupils before he looked down at the page in front of him.

"Constance," he said. "Sit."

There was an empty chair beside Millicent. Judeth had gone still near the door.

I walked to Mathias's right and rested my fingers on the back of the carved seat. "Lady Millicent, you're in my chair."

The steward stopped turning pages. Millicent glanced down as if the furniture had only just appeared beneath her. "Mathias asked me to join him while he handled breakfast business. I hope you don't mind."

"You wore the wife's gold to do it."

Her hand rose to the collar. She did not blush or fumble. "A maid brought it with the gown. I assumed it was a gift from my hosts."

"Then a maid has publicly seated the Alpha of Hurst as Courcy's wife." I looked at the steward. "Does our treaty permit household servants to assign rank now?"

His mouth opened, but Mathias answered first. "No."

I kept my attention on Millicent. "I would hate for anyone to think you surrendered your own authority for a chair beside my husband."

The insult was polite enough to serve with tea. Millicent's smile deepened. She rose, unhurried, and the gold shifted against her throat. Beneath it, a finer chain flashed before she tucked it back under her dress.

Mathias noticed me noticing. "Return the collar to Constance's rooms," he told the steward.

I sat. Millicent took the next chair, close enough that her knee touched mine beneath the table. She left it there while a servant placed bread and pears before us.

"You rescued me from a terrible mistake," she said. "How fortunate that you know these customs so well."

The woman in the book had delivered every cruelty from a safe distance. The real Millicent leaned close enough for her perfume to settle at the back of my throat. Her face was all clean lines and generous lips, her voice rich without softness. Attraction was part of her control, offered so freely that refusing to notice it felt childish.

"Some customs deserve attention," I said. "Especially the ones people hope I'll forget."

Mathias watched my mouth instead of his correspondence. His gaze lingered when I bit into a pear, and a memory that belonged to Constance moved through my body: his thumb wiping juice from her lower lip, his mouth replacing it. Heat gathered before anger burned through it.

I set the fruit down. "Is that why you gave Lady Millicent your private seal? To help her remember Courcy law?"

His gaze snapped to mine.

Millicent's knee pressed harder against mine. "I don't know what you mean."

"The necklace beneath the gold collar." I touched the hollow of my throat. "A silver wolf with amber stones for eyes. Shall I ask the steward to fetch the household account?"

The necklace had appeared once in the novel when Constance glimpsed them together through a western window. Mathias had fastened the little wolf around Millicent's neck; by the next chapter, doors in Courcy had begun opening for her. The story had presented it as tenderness. Sitting in the wife's chair, I understood it as access.

Mathias folded the paper in his hand. Irritation tightened his face, but something else warmed his eyes: interest. His compliant wife had just laid a trap at breakfast, and the bastard admired the workmanship.

"The seal grants diplomatic passage," he said. "Nothing more."

"Then she won't mind wearing it where everyone can see your judgment."

Millicent laughed. The sound was low, genuine, and far more intimate than outrage would have been. "I was afraid we would be enemies."

She reached past me and laid two fingers over Mathias's wrist. His hand tensed beneath hers. Cedar sharpened in the air, tangled with jasmine, and Constance's body registered the exchange with a sick pulse of desire and grief.

"We should be sisters," Millicent said.

"I have standards."

Her smile never slipped. "So do I. Surviving them may prove difficult for you."

Mathias turned his wrist, breaking her touch as he called for the steward. Millicent withdrew her hand, then reached beneath the table as if smoothing her skirt. Her fingers closed around my bruised arm.

Pain traveled to my shoulder. I held still.

She leaned toward me, lips near my ear, her perfume sweet enough to hide the threat from everyone else.

"The first attempt to kill you already happened."