Mate

by Ali Hazelwood

“They say she’s your mate.” It’s like the forest hears the words. Like it understands them.

“You’re the most beautiful woman that I’ve ever seen,” he says simply.

“You okay?” he asks, gruff. “Anything feel . . . loose inside?” “Loose? Like what?” “I don’t fucking know. An artery?”

His childhood dream was probably to become a hall monitor.

His leadership philosophy seems to be if inconvenient, why not dead?

“I’m simply going to lock you up, killer. If I have to chain you to my fucking bed to keep you alive, I will not hesitate.”

He stares like I’m trying to sell him a pouch of magic beans.

“You’re such a fucking nuisance,”

“She’s used to stuff not going her way. She’s a bitter pill swallower of great skill and experience.”

Look at her. Just— look at her.

“You know. The issue we discussed with Carter. The one where you look like a medieval peasant who’s about to die of the whooping cough. I’m a pro.”

Her laughter adjusts the spin of his atoms.

“Never thought I’d be into that, and yet. Bane of my fucking existence.”

I picture Koen walking in to find what’s left of me, a beached manta ray lifeless on the bathroom floor, deflated after puking up her internal organs.

beg the god of physiologically dysregulated bitches with sleep disorders to keep him away for ten more minutes.

“Play-fight is an honored Were pastime.” “I guess not everyone has the knees for pickleball.”

He told her that he would never touch her because he didn’t want her enough; in truth, he will never touch her because he wants her too much. The make-believe, he thinks, was kinder to both of them.

That’s when my phone rings with an unknown number. In the past, I’d have eaten glass with gonorrhea smeared on it before picking up.

The covenant was never a big part of his life. He would forget about it for months, even years. It never felt like a sacrifice, just a simple trade-off, an integral feature of who he was: the Alpha of the Northwest. Then she arrived, assumed total control of him, and left no room for anything but her.

He wants to show her every corner of his territory. The deep blue lakes and the snow-capped peaks. Moss-draped trees and rock spires. He wants to be with her for each marveled intake of breath.

Just this once, he could have done without being right.

you.” I pointedly lower my eyes to his dick, which swings between his legs like the world’s wrinkliest Christmas ornament.

He wants to abscond with her. Fuck the rest of the world— it’s incapable of giving her the safety she so clearly deserves. He’ll fix that. He’ll make up for everything she has been put through.

“Why would I come with you?” “Because the idea of having you out of my sight makes me want to flip those cars one by one.”

“I’ll be back tomorrow morning. If anything happens to me, what do you do?” “Buy a black veil, pretend I’m a widow, cash in on your life insurance.” “You call Lowe. Ask him to come get you.”

I’m assuming he can spare the manpower. Clearly, the headline here is Big Man Needs Peace of Mind. “Excessive, probably. Anyone watching out for bald eagles?”

“I’m sure your pretty little head made up a million good reasons and topped them with those gross formaldehyde cherries. Still can’t believe she lets you out of her sight.”

“If you were mine, it would. And clearly, you fucking should be.”

He dispassionately informs Sem of my prognosis, commands him to refute it, kill it with fire, salt it, and then simply gazes stoically into the distance as I put my clothes back on.

I feel his assent. I think he might want to know everything that’s in my head. I think he could shake every thought I’ve ever had out of my skull, rummage through them for years, and still not be bored.

He easily resigned himself to a lifetime without her, but . . . Simply put, he is unwilling to contemplate a universe in which she no longer exists.

He didn’t think she could be more perfect. Then she offered him her bite.

He never thought the world was a particularly fair place. Still, it’s a startlingly vile brand of cruelty on fate’s part, to show him her— what he could have had, if only he’d made different choices.

“The first time I saw you, I thought that of course the universe would deliver someone with the most perfect pair of tits I’d ever seen and then yank her away from me.”

“I would throw away my pack, my life, and my entire world for you. Which is the exact reason I cannot have you.”

His nuisance. That’s what she is.

It’s odd, what her absence does to him. She is missing, but she fills and floods every part of his life.

He is afraid— not only of what might happen to her, but also of what he might do to the world in retaliation.

At last, his mouth softens in one of those self-effacing, disarming smiles that I already know I’ll bring to my tomb.

“When I say that I would do it all over again, I also mean that I would go through what he did all over again. If it brought me to you.”

“If someone had given me a piece of paper and asked me to list everything I liked, everything I dreamed of, everything that I was sure would make me happy, you would have been the final product of it.”

“There is only you, Serena.”

She would make for the perfect Alpha’s mate.

“I should have,” Koen mutters. In the sunlight, his eyes look darker than usual. “What?” “Chained you to my fucking radiator. I still could. I will.”

She’s a small wolf. Cream and white colored, with the same dark brown eyes as her human form, and pale yellow ears that are large for her body and more pointed than most. Her thick tail and delicate muzzle have a few light markings that make her utterly unique. So pretty, he thinks that if she were the last thing he saw, he wouldn’t mind. Not at all.

You’re not the center of the fucking world. She is.

he doesn’t really trust the world to treat her right if he’s not around. She’s simply too beautiful.

He’ll massacre whoever tries to take her from him, of course.

He would die for her, and he would kill for her. More importantly, he will live for her. She’ll be the purpose driving every second of his every day.