Carrying the Alpha’s Heir, Claimed by the Vampire King Chapter 02

Carrying the Alpha’s Heir, Claimed by the Vampire King Chapter 02

I married Kieran Blackwood because he made me feel safe.

Ironic, considering he was the most dangerous Alpha on the East Coast.

We met when his wolves dragged me across a border by mistake. They thought I was the runaway daughter of a rogue Alpha. By the time Kieran arrived, I’d broken one wolf’s nose with a wine bottle and bitten another hard enough to draw blood.

He walked into the room, took one look at me, barefoot, feral, holding a jagged bottle, and laughed.

“Wrong girl, Alpha,” his Beta said.

Kieran didn’t answer. He breathed in. His eyes flashed gold.

“No,” he murmured. “Mate.”

He drove me home himself. Sent white roses the next day. And the next. Every day for a month, until I agreed to dinner.

He was charming. Warm. The kind of man who made you forget he could tear a throat out with his bare hands.

When my father was killed by rogues on a back road in Pennsylvania, Kieran held me together. He stood beside me at the grave. He handled everything. He made the world feel survivable.

So when he knelt under a full moon and asked me to be his Luna, I said yes.

Not for the title. Not for the pack.

Because he looked into my eyes and said, “You will never be alone again, Elara. I swear it on the moon.”

He lied.

The loneliness began six months in, when Selene Ashford came home from Milan.

His first love. Daughter of the Ashford Alpha. Stunning, cold, fluent in four languages and in the art of making me feel small.

“Our packs have history,” Kieran told me. “She’s an ally. I can’t shut her out.”

I nodded. Because I trusted him.

Then came the late-night pack meetings. The phone calls he took behind closed doors. The full-moon runs in the Adirondacks I was never invited to.

I cooked dinner every night and ate alone at a table set for two.

Rhys, his Beta, stopped meeting my eyes. The guards at the gate started looking at me with something worse than disrespect.

Pity.

Every wolf in that pack could smell her on him. Everyone knew before I did.

But I kept smiling. Kept hosting pack dinners. Kept being the perfect Luna, because if I was perfect enough, maybe my mate would come back to me.

He never did.

The ball was my last attempt.

Six weeks of planning. His favorite bourbon. His mother’s recipe for honey cake. A string quartet playing the song from our first dance under the moon.

He spent the whole night with her.

At nine o’clock, I crossed the ballroom.

“Dance with me?” I asked my own mate. At our own anniversary.

He glanced down like I’d interrupted something important.

“In a minute, Elara.”

That minute never came.

At ten, I found the papers.

At ten fifteen, I rejected him.

At ten thirty, I was gone.

Now, in the back of a cab crawling toward Grand Central, I finally let myself feel it. Three years of loving a man who had already written my exit in silver ink.

My phone buzzed.

Kieran.

“Where did you go? Selene wants to say goodnight and you vanished. Don’t embarrass me.”

Don’t embarrass me.

He thought I was fixing my makeup. He thought that ache in his chest was indigestion.

He didn’t know I’d sealed the papers in my own blood.

He didn’t know I was already gone.

And he didn’t know about the second heartbeat.

The first Alpha-born heir the Blackwood line had seen in three generations.

The child every wolf in that ballroom would kill to control.

By the time Kieran found out, I intended to be somewhere no wolf on earth could follow.