The Alpha’s Enemy Claims His Human Mate Chapter 06

The Alpha’s Enemy Claims His Human Mate Chapter 06

## Elena

“I have been waiting for you to call me.”

Killian’s voice dropped into a hotel suite I had paid for with my own card in the middle of a city where I was supposed to belong to someone else.

I did not say hello. I did not say it has been a long time. I could not quite remember, in that first breath, what I had planned to say at all.

Then I remembered where he’d last heard my voice.

Three years ago I had been a medical student in the Vitalis Corp fellowship. The only human on a floor of twenty wolf researchers, awarded the slot on a written application that had gone up against people who could grow claws when they disagreed with a lab result.

He had been my patient.

Hormone dysregulation. Pure Alpha line, too much of the wolf for his body, an endocrine profile that did not want to stay inside a human-shaped shirt. For two years he had sat across from me once a week in a consulting office at the research institute while I adjusted his baselines and he asked, politely, whether I had eaten.

The other wolves in the fellowship had stopped saying my name by month three.

He had never gotten it wrong.

At the end of my residency he had offered me any title I wanted in Silvercrest. Head of his pack’s new genetic disorder unit. His personal

physician. Staff of my own. I had turned it down the afternoon Barrett put his hand on my back at a charity banquet and said, Move here. Marry me.

I had not called Killian since.

In three years, his name had started showing up in news clips where Alphas twice his age went quiet when he entered a room.

“Killian,” I said. It was what came out first.

“How have you been, Elena.”

Not where have you been. Not why now. He sounded like a friend calling on a Saturday.

“Fine,” I said. “Busy.”

“Busy.” A small pause. “And the work?”

I opened my mouth and my professional voice came out on its own. “I have been running the internal medicine service at the Ironbound medical center. Full census. A new genetic disorder ward last year. We handled the mild-form pediatric outbreak last winter without losing a patient.”

“That sounds,” he said, “like someone who is not doing well.”

The hotel room went quiet. Outside, a truck reversed somewhere.

“Killian.”

“You called a private number you have not dialed in three years. The last time I heard from you, you had just moved to Ironbound.” He waited. Then, almost gently: “You would not reopen that door unless the room

you were standing in had started to burn.”

I closed my eyes.

I was not going to cry on this phone call. I had decided that in the elevator down from Barrett’s office.

“I am not asking for help,” I said. “I am asking for a job. I want to work. I was trained by your people. I have eight years of hospital practice since then. I am the first human to run a wolf genetic-disorder clinic in A-city. I can do real work in Silvercrest.”

“You can.”

“I am good at what I do, Killian.”

“I know.”

I waited for the offer.

It did not come.

“We should talk in person,” he said, instead.

“In person. When.”

“Soon.”

I almost laughed. Three years of soon from Barrett had left me allergic to the word.

“Killian, I am not really in a position to —”

“Elena.” His voice did not raise, did not harden. It just sat where it was. “Very soon.”

The line clicked.

I sat with the phone still against my ear.

He had not said yes. He had not said no. He had said soon, and something in the way he had said it made soon sound definite.

I set the phone down on the bedspread.

I was going to take this chance. I was going to hold on.

—

## Barrett

Barrett walked into his own house at ten twenty and the lights were off.

He stood in the foyer and listened.

Elena always left the kitchen lamp on when she was not in the house yet. Every woman he had ever known had her small evening tell — his mother’s was the radio on low in the sitting room, his sister’s was a candle on the hall console. Elena’s was the kitchen lamp.

The kitchen was dark.

“Elena,” he said, the way a man says a name when he already knows the answer.

No answer.

He walked past the hall table. Her car keys were not in the bowl. Her coat was not on the hook, and the counter was clean except for a pen next to the fruit bowl and a small stack of printed pages he did not glance at twice.

He frowned.

Elena did not stay out. Elena ran her evenings on a schedule he could have narrated from memory. Dinner, shower, book, bed by eleven, because she had rounds at six. For three years that had been true.

He pulled his phone from his pocket and opened his thread with Reid.

Find her.

The reply came inside a minute. On it, Alpha.

Barrett went into his study and sat down.

The study lamp cast a circle of light on his desk. In that circle, nothing. No notebook open. No glass of water left for him by the woman whose only professional habit outside the hospital was making sure he hydrated.

The quiet of his own house had a different texture than usual.

He made himself stop noticing.

Alpha. Reid again. She has checked into a suite at the Crescent. Alone. Left her car with the valet. Do you want me to bring her home?