The Alpha’s Enemy Claims His Human Mate Chapter 10

The Alpha’s Enemy Claims His Human Mate Chapter 10

## Elena

“I came,” Killian said, “because I had business in Ironbound that needed my presence. I have not been announced to your Alpha. I have not been announced to anyone.”

I tried to line up the sentence in my head.

A quiet Alpha of Silvercrest. In the middle of Barrett’s city. On the night Barrett had stopped taking my calls.

Three years ago, across a desk in the Vitalis research wing, Killian had always come to his treatment sessions five minutes early with a notebook under his arm. He had worn soft sweaters. He had asked me, every week, whether I had eaten lunch.

The man sitting by the window was still that man. The sweaters were gone. Something had sunk into him. He had gotten quieter, and the quiet had gotten heavier.

He was letting me look.

I had the sense he had already done the looking while I was asleep.

“You said on the phone — very soon.” My voice came out thin. “I didn’t understand you meant tonight.”

“I didn’t expect to see you like this,” he said.

The words landed gently, but they cut. I looked down at myself. Hospital gown. Bandaged leg. Swollen eyes. Tear-streaked face. The woman who’d called him twenty-four hours ago pitching her professional

credentials was now sitting in a bed with an IV in her arm and blood on her shin.

I wiped my face with the back of my hand. The tears smeared. I wiped again, harder.

“I must look —”

“You look,” Killian said, “like a surgeon at the end of a bad day. Not like a woman in trouble. The difference matters.”

He did not take his eyes off mine while he said it. It was not any kind of looking I was used to in wolf rooms.

I had forgotten, for three years, what it felt like to be read by someone who was not trying to rearrange me.

“After you joined Barrett’s Pack, you disappeared,” he said. “No publications. No conference appearances. I assumed you’d chosen a quiet life. That the marriage was good.”

He said it the way he said everything. Flat. Factual.

But the fact itself cracked something open. Three years of silence. Three years of vanishing from the world I’d built, trading my research for a kitchen no one visited and a marriage no one knew existed.

“Clearly I was wrong,” he added. His voice softened. Not much. A fraction. “I apologize. I didn’t mean to touch a nerve.”

“You didn’t.” The lie tasted bitter. “I made my choices. Some of them were foolish. But I’m awake now.”

“I don’t have a right to ask you for work right now,” I said. “I came to you

with —

“This isn’t the place to talk,” he said. “Can you walk?”

I blinked.

“Carefully,” he said. “Your leg took fifteen stitches. I asked the resident. I did not ask the Alpha on call.”

I swung my legs off the mattress. The hospital had dressed me in somebody else’s scrub pants. The bandage ran from mid-shin to knee.

I put my weight on the good leg first. I went to plant the bad one and my thigh gave under me.

Killian moved.

He was at my elbow before I finished falling. One hand at my waist, one at my elbow. He let my full weight settle against him for half a second. Then he stepped back as though nothing had happened.

“Wheelchair.”

“I can walk.”

“You can sit,” he said. “And I can push. Please.”

He reached behind the door. The chair was there, folded, waiting. Somebody had thought of it before I woke up.

I sat.

“Do you remember,” he said as he rolled me out into the corridor, “the afternoon you pushed my chair yourself.”

I had been trying not to.

“The sprain. The stairs outside the institute. You told me to stop being a hero.”

“You were a terrible patient.”

“I was the best patient you had.”

“You were the quietest.” I almost smiled. “That is not the same thing.”

He let that sit. He did not push it. I had forgotten this too. Killian let silences open when I needed them open, instead of filling them with his own voice.

I looked down at my wrapped leg. Up at the ceiling panels sliding past. The old walls between me and every other man in Ironbound softened, in the corridor, by one pin.

The memory loosened something in my chest. Not all the way. But enough to breathe.

And then, through the open door of a private suite, I saw Barrett.

My hand went out and caught Killian’s sleeve.

He stopped at once.

The door of the suite was open. Through it: Sophia in the bed, propped up on two pillows, one hand laid carefully over the first visible curve of her belly. Barrett in the black suit he had worn out of the apartment at eight this morning, standing at the foot of her bed. And — a slow bolt ran under my breastbone — Mrs. Halloran. My mother-in-law.

She was sitting on the edge of Sophia’s bed with one hand over Sophia’s hand, using the kind voice I had heard her use at pack charity events with women she had decided to like.

“— and once you are through this, my dear, once you give us the heir, we will put you in Luna’s robes. Properly. The way it was always meant to be.”

Sophia did not look up from her own belly.

Barrett did not answer his mother.

He was staring at the window.

I felt my own pulse come back into the hand that held Killian’s sleeve.

I had been left on a rooftop tonight for somebody I had married. I had walked into three men on a street where nobody had come. My husband, in a chair at the foot of another woman’s hospital bed, was letting another woman be promoted over me in a voice that carried into the hallway.

A slow flat calm rolled through my chest, the kind that used to come before I called a code in the trauma bay.

I lifted my phone.

I dialed him.

Through the doorway I watched him start at the buzz in his pocket. He pulled the phone out without looking at the screen.

“Elena, love. I am still at work — some pack business has run long. Please, just wait for me at home. I will be there as soon as I —”

Sophia’s eyes slid sideways. Mrs. Halloran’s head turned.

Barrett looked up.

And saw me.

In a wheelchair, in his doorway, in another man’s shadow. Killian’s hand was still quiet on the back of the chair.

Barrett’s face emptied.

I smiled. It was not a pleasant smile.

“Stay at work,” I said, evenly. “Sophia could use the company. And so could your mother.”

I hung up.

I opened his contact. I hit Block this caller.

Then I looked up at Killian and nodded once, the way a surgeon nods at a resident when it’s time to move.

“Go,” I said.