The Alpha’s Enemy Claims His Human Mate Chapter 13

The Alpha’s Enemy Claims His Human Mate Chapter 13

## Elena

I took Killian’s hand.

“I accept,” I said.

The children erupted. The boy with the scar punched the air. The small one with the prosthetic threw a cupcake. The girl in my lap shrieked. Killian’s hand closed around mine for one heartbeat and then let go.

For an hour, I forgot.

I cut a cake with a real knife. I let the small one feed me a forkful that was three quarters frosting. I caught up with Mason’s lung function. I asked the wolf twin if her shifts were less painful now and she told me, very seriously, that they were acceptable. I laughed for the first time in three days, and laughing felt like coughing up glass.

When the children’s nurse finally clapped her hands and herded them out, I sat in my chair in the empty ballroom and let the candles burn down by themselves.

Killian stood in the doorway watching me.

“Your suite is one floor up,” he said. “Whenever you’re ready.”

I was ready then.

The suite was a quiet two-room with a kitchenette, a sofa, a desk by the window, and a single key card on the entry table with my name printed on it.

E. HALLORAN. PI, Pediatric Genetics.

I read it twice.

In Ironbound I was Mrs. on the lease and Doctor on a hospital tag I sometimes forgot to wear. I was a woman who had taken her ring off three years ago and put it on a chain under her scrubs and never said her own name out loud at a dinner table.

Here, somebody had typed me onto a key card before I had agreed to come.

I sat on the edge of the bed in a stranger’s robe and felt, for the first time since the rooftop, the floor stop tilting under me.

Then my phone went.

A new banner from the news app I had not unsubscribed from.

ALPHA BARRETT RUSHES IRONBOUND PRESS SECRETARY TO HOSPITAL. MOTHER ARRIVES. INTIMATE PHOTO LEAKED FROM PRIVATE WING.

I knew, in the second before I tapped, that I was going to tap.

The first photograph was of Barrett in the hospital corridor, Sophia in his arms, her cheek against his collar. The second was the one. Sophia in a hospital bed, Barrett bent low over her, his mouth very close to the side of her face, one hand cradling the back of her head.

It was an angle. I knew it the way I knew an angle on an X-ray. The geometry was wrong for an actual kiss. He was probably easing her up onto the pillow.

The comments did not care.

they’re together.

the press secretary getting promoted both ways 😊

good for them honestly the human wife was never going to give him an heir

I closed the app.

I sat there with the phone face-down in my own palm and waited for the floor to come back.

It came back, mostly.

But under it, somewhere, the same thing my body always did when his name showed up on a screen — that small involuntary clench, like the pulse a phantom limb still keeps after the limb is gone.

I had not stopped loving him on a stopwatch.

It was going to take longer than three days.

—

## The Third Person

In the corridor outside Sophia’s recovery suite, Barrett stood at the window with his Beta and pretended to look at the river.

Alpha.

Reid’s mental voice was careful.

She has not left the perimeter, Alpha. The bond signature is still inside Ironbound.

Then where is she.

Alpha. She is human. The bond does not pin a human to coordinates. It tells you she is breathing. Within twenty miles. That is all.

Twenty miles.

He had ruled twenty miles. He could not find the woman who lived in the apartment with his keys in the bowl.

Reid. He kept his voice very level. The press wing.

A pause.

The Tower light show ran. Sophia’s account picked up the photograph. The comment section assumed the show was for her. There is also — Alpha, before you came down here, you should know there is a photograph of you. In the recovery suite. With her. Circulating since six this evening.