The Alpha’s Enemy Claims His Human Mate Chapter 09

The Alpha’s Enemy Claims His Human Mate Chapter 09

## Elena

The call was gone.

He had picked up. He had seen my name on his screen, and he had ended the call.

I stood on a sidewalk in the wrong half of Ironbound territory, in scrubs under my coat, phone still at my ear. A stranger walking past would have seen a woman checking her voicemail. What was actually happening inside my chest was a small, quiet demolition.

The Rogue in front of me grinned.

“Called your man, sweetheart? Did he answer?”

Three of them now. One at the far end of the block. Two closer in. They had spread out in the minute it had taken me to dial.

“I know what I look like to you,” I said, because my throat still wanted to work and I had to use it for something. “I am the wife of an Alpha. Touch me and he will bury you in a hole you cannot climb out of.”

“Your man,” said the one at my left, “is not coming.”

There was nothing to argue with in that sentence. It was a fact, and they had it, and I did not.

I pulled up Reid’s thread and thumbed the call.

One of them grabbed my wrist and twisted before the call could connect. I bit down on the cry and shoved the phone deep into my coat pocket.

I kept my back to the nearest storefront and my eyes on all three of them.
I had sat through a safety lecture my first year of residency. Put things between you and them. Make noise. Run toward people.

There was a sandwich-board sign on the sidewalk by my knee, advertising a happy hour.

I kicked it over into the legs of the Rogue on my left. He stumbled. I turned.

I ran.

Later, when I tried to line up the next four minutes in order, there were only pieces.

My lungs, too loud in my own ears. The slap of hospital–soft scrubs against the backs of my calves. A parked truck, and my palm skidding over its hot hood as I used it to change direction. The wet copper of my own mouth. A man on a bicycle shouting something I did not hear. A curb I did not see — my knee buckling, my shin opening on an edge of something. The pain arriving late, after I was already up and going again.

Blood running down into my sock.

A lit street. People. A taxi stand ahead of me.

I raised my hand for a cab the way a person raises a hand in a dream. Heavy. Slow.

The car that stopped was not a cab.

It was a black sedan with tinted glass, low and expensive, and the rear door opened before it had fully come to rest. A voice from inside said my name.

“Elena.”

I knew that voice.

I must have said something, because I remember the shape my mouth made — the first word I always reached for when I was hurt, or happy, or glad.

“Barrett —”

The sidewalk tilted before I had finished.

—

## Barrett —

He was there. He had always been going to be there. I had known, under all of it, that he would come.

The Rogues were on the ground before I understood he had moved. His hands were on my face. His forehead was against my forehead. His voice was the low, private voice he used only when there was nobody else in the room.

Elena. Elena, look at me. Where are you hurt.

I’m okay.

I’m so sorry.

Come home with me.

I will never let anything touch you. Do you hear me. Not ever again.

I know.

I was crying. I was crying the way I had not let myself cry in three years, and he was letting me.

—

I opened my eyes.

The ceiling was not ours. It was hospital tile, acoustical, with the kind of overhead panel I had once approved a purchase order for in my own ward.

My face was wet. My leg had been wrapped from knee to ankle.

The memories clung to me. Barrett’s voice. His promises. His hands on my face, his voice in my ear.

He had come for me. He had come.

I pushed up on both hands before my body said yes. Dizziness swung through my skull and down into my stomach, and I held the mattress with flat palms until it passed. I listened for him. His step, his cleared throat outside a door before he opened it, the way his voice changed when he turned the corner of a hallway.

“Good evening,” said a voice across the room.

It was not Barrett’s.

I looked up.

A man was sitting in the chair by the window.

Not in scrubs. Not in a coat. In a plain dark suit, tie loosened, one ankle resting on the other knee. A glass of water on the sill next to him that he had not touched.

Black hair cut close. A face I had not sat across from in three years. Eyes that had, at twenty-nine, made me feel read. Now, at thirty-two, made me feel read faster.

Killian.

“It’s been a while,” he said.

My mouth opened and did not manage anything.

Killian was the Alpha of Silvercrest. Alphas twice his age stopped talking when he walked into a room. He lived two hours by air from Ironbound territory behind four rings of security nobody had names for.

Killian was in my hospital room.

“I wasn’t dreaming,” I said.

“No.”

“You —” I touched my face. The wet came away on my fingers. “You were the car.”

“I was the car,” he said.

“I thought —” I stopped. “I thought it was Barrett.”

He did not fill the silence. He never had.

“It was you,” I said. “Not him.”

“It was me.”

Out in the hallway, somewhere, a cart rolled past. Somebody laughed. The world had gone on being the world while I bled into a sock.

I had one question. It was the only one that would stop my head from spinning.

“How are you here.”

He uncrossed his ankle. He set the glass down on the sill. He met my eyes, as steady as a Sunday morning.

“Very soon,” he said, “was today.”