Enslaved by the Alpha: Part Four

by Rivard, Viola

  “How did you end up alone?”

  “I wasn’t at first. I was with Sylvestre and Sabine, but they heard a howl and went to meet up with the other wolves. Sabine said she’d be right back, but…” she trailed off, nervously chewing on her lip. “It was my fault. I should have waited for her. I mean, I did wait for her for a while, but… Please stop looking at me like that. I can’t tell who you’re mad at and I don’t think you should be mad at anyone because it was an accident.”

  “I am not angry with you,” he said, feeling the need to reassure her.

  He lay down on the furs, bringing her with him. She turned, so that her back was against his chest. He placed a hand flat on her belly and pulled her close. The feel of her naked body pressed against his made Erik’s cock stir, but he ignored it for now. Once she’d gotten some rest, all bets would be off.

  “Erik… Why are you doing this?”

  “Holding you?” he asked. “So you don’t freeze to death.”

  “It’s the way you hold me…” She paused, and Erik could hear her pulse quicken. “The way you stroke my hair… The way you talk to me now, it’s different than it was before. You’re different than you were before.”

  “Would you rather I treat you as I did before?”

  “Yes,” she said without hesitation. “I mean…damn, I don’t know.” She rubbed her face. “It’s confusing. You were such an asshole towards me and now you’re taking care of me and being sort of nice. You’re confusing me. I don’t know what you want or what you expect from me.”

  Erik sat up, feeling his temper flare once again. This time, he was pissed with her, but also with himself.

  “I don’t know,” he said flatly. “Every logical part of me wants to drag you across the tundra and drop you at Zane’s doorstep.”

  “Then why don’t you?”

  “Because you’re my mate.”

  She shook her head. “No, Erik, I’m not your mate and I never will be.” Her chin was trembling, and he thought she was cold until tears began to well in her eyes. “I don’t even want to be your mate. That sounds awful. I can’t think of anything worse.”

  He kissed her hard on the lips. Her hands flew to his head, but instead of pushing him away, she laced her fingers in his hair and pulled him closer. Her tongue slipped into his mouth, and her tenacious exploration sent hot waves of pleasure undulating through his body.

  Erik flexed his hips against her, and he knew from the way his blood was pounding and his cock was throbbing that he wouldn’t be able to stop. He had to be inside of her, to give her so much of himself that she couldn’t deny him.

  Hours later, she was curled against him like a contented kitten. After everything she’d been through, he expected her to fall right to sleep after mating, but of course, she asked for food.

  “You’ll be asleep by the time I get back with anything,” he grumbled, wanting to rest himself.

  “No I won’t. It’s hard for me to fall asleep when I’m hungry.”

  He put a hand over her face. “Then you should get some practice.”

  “Ha, ha,” she said, brushing his hand away. “Is that anyway to treat your mate?”

  One corner of his mouth lifted. “So you admit that you are my mate?”

  “No, I’m saying that you think I’m your mate, so you should probably treat me as such.”

  “Hmm,” he murmured in mock contemplation. “So if you were not my mate, I would be under no obligation to feed you and could stay here and go to sleep.”

  She laughed. “Only if you can sleep with me jabbing my elbow into your ribcage.”

  Erik nipped her neck, pressing his canines down hard enough to make her gasp. It was a gentle reminder that he was still in charge.

  He sat up, pausing to appreciate the sight of her naked body. He felt a slight inclination to take her again, but it was easy to dismiss. She was his, and she would warm his bed for countless nights to come.

  “I will get you food, human. You better be awake when I get back.”

  In his room, Erik had been cocooned by warmth and immersed in her scent. It wasn’t until he was out in the frigid tunnel that he remembered how pissed off he was. It didn’t help that he could smell Sabine’s scent up ahead.

  Arms crossed, she was leaning back against the wall where the tunnels forked, one leading towards Erik’s room, the other towards the main room. He wondered how long she’d been there, and if she’d been close enough to listen in on him.

  “Beau went to the den to see if Astrid had made her way here,” she started. “I only came back when he returned to let me know that you’d found her. I searched for hours. You have to know that I didn’t intend on—”

  “But you are disappointed that she’s alive.”

  The words came out calmer than he’d anticipated, and Erik was glad he’d stayed with the human, rather than immediately leaving to confront Sabine. It had given him time to rationalize the situation and plan ahead as to how to handle it.

  To her credit, Sabine didn’t lie. Shrugging stiffly, she said, “You must see how she’s impacting your judgment. And for what? She’s not going to give you offspring. She’ll continue to leech on our resources and it won’t be long before you start compromising the pack for her.”

  Erik placed his hands on either side of her, moving so quickly that she flinched. “You were supposed to be watching her, and instead you removed her from the safety of the den and left her alone in the middle of a storm. If I were going to compromise the pack for her, I would start by ripping your throat out.”

  Her eyes widened. “You don’t mean that. I know you don’t.” She ran a hand down his chest. “This has gone on long enough. Send her away, so that things can go back to the way they were before.”

  Sabine’s hand wrapped around his cock. It instinctively hardened and he pressed his body against her, crushing her against the wall. She lifted one leg to his hip, urging him between her thighs.

  Erik remained still, waiting until she worked up the nerve to meet his gaze. Then, he wrapped his hand around her neck.

  “The only reason I haven’t killed you is because your irresponsibility aside, you are an asset to this pack,” he said. “But I am through with you. Today was the last time I trust you.”

  He let her go and backed away, serving her a final, cold look, before turning and heading back towards his room.

  Astrid could wait to eat. Right now, he needed to get Sabine’s scent off his body.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Erik had eventually fed her, but not until after a few more vigorous climaxes. She’d passed out shortly after eating, falling into a deep, drooling slumber. He’d lain awake for a while, watching her and trying to figure out what it was about her that appealed to him so much.

  He liked to think that he hadn’t developed such a powerful attraction to her merely because she was the first female he’d brought back to his den. There had to be more to it than that.

  But he couldn’t pinpoint any one quality of hers that he particularly liked. In fact, he counted more that he disliked. She was often defiant, and flagrantly disrespectful. She lied often and cried far too easily for his tastes. And most offensive of all, she was physically weak.

  By rights, he should not have cared for her in the slightest. But then there were isolated moments, like tonight, where their bodies were spent from mating. She would drift to sleep, clinging to him so tightly, as though she needed to hold onto him to find her way back to reality. During those moments, he felt as though everything in the world was as it should be.

  She claimed not to love him, yet when she had told him that they were not mates and her eyes had filled with tears, they had also filled with a quiet desperation. Was it a plea for him to let her go, or draw her in closer?

  Erik would do neither. For all he had changed to accommodate her, he would never be able to love her, not in any conventional sense.

  The concept of love was too foreign to him. It had never existed between his pare
nts. His father had come from a time when humans had still feared their kind. Back then, it had been both easy and advantageous to take multiple mates and sire many pups. His mother had been beautiful, but also incredibly willful—something his father had never been tolerant of. Their clash of personalities, coupled with a string of sickly pups and stillbirths, had made their already poor relationship contemptuous.

  Erik was the only pup she’d ever bore that survived infancy, and in the winter that followed his birth, she’d grown ill. He was told she ran a high fever, which she’d passed on to him. He had survived, but she had not. He had no memories of her.

  He was raised by Sten’s mother, Janne. She had nursed him at her breast until he had grown larger than her own, older son. For a while, Janne treated Erik as though he were her own. But as he grew older, Erik’s father would often ridicule her son, constantly insulting Sten because he could not measure up to Erik. Though Erik had always taken Sten’s side and often challenged his father on his brother’s behalf, Janne had steadily grown to resent him. He could not blame her. She was only human, and as such, ruled by her emotions.

  As a pup, Erik had wondered if his mother had loved him, the way Janne loved Sten. Sometimes, he thought she must have loved him, because unlike her other pups, he had been strong and healthy. Other times, he thought she must have hated him, as he looked so much like the mate that she had loathed.

  Though he and Sten were far closer to one another than they were to their many other siblings, they’d fought constantly as pups. After the first fight Erik had won, Sten had spit blood in his face and told Erik that his mother had not died of a fever. He said that their father had snapped her neck when he’d caught her trying to smother Erik, as she’d done with the rest of her pups.

  This had stuck with Erik for years, though he’d never asked if it were true, or if Sten had made it up in a moment of anger. By the time he’d become an adult, he had no longer cared.

  Before he fell asleep that night, Erik thought he knew what it was about this human that appealed to him so much. For all her flaws, she had one trait that he admired above all else: she was adaptable.

  The night that he had attacked her camp, she had been paralyzed with fear, but she had recovered quickly and had refused to allow him to abandon her. Despite hailing from a hot climate, she had managed to adjust to an arctic winter, albeit with frequent complaining. And to survive, she had not tried to become stronger. It would have been impossible for her to learn the survival skills that his kind had been practicing since birth in only a few short weeks. Instead, she’d endeared herself to him—the most powerful and capable male she could find. He was, perhaps, the one person whose strength could compensate for her deficits.

  As he lay beside her, listening to the even sound of her breathing, he knew that he could not love her, but he would give her everything he was capable of. It would likely not be enough, and he could never put her ahead of his pack, but he was too selfish to let her go.

  ***

  Erik woke before the human, his cock painfully hard. He tried to go back to sleep, feeling more annoyed than anything. The human squirmed in her sleep, wiggling her body to get closer to him. Groaning as she rubbed against his swollen member, Erik reached between them and grasped his cock. He’d intended on tucking it in and willing himself back to sleep, but the moment his hand wrapped around it, he knew that he needed to relieve himself.

  He felt so full, as though he hadn’t fucked in days, rather than multiple times just hours ago. He considered his next move, knowing that she was going to complain when he woke her. She never wanted him in the mornings, not like she did at night. She would complain that she was sore and often grimaced when he entered her, even when he was gentle.

  This morning, he did not feel as though he could be gentle. Were he to give in to his baser instincts, he would have rolled her over right then and fucked her hard and without contrition. That wasn’t the route he wanted to go, though one way or another, he was going to get inside of her.

  Erik moved a hand down past her belly, slipping it between her thighs. He rubbed two fingers over the fine hair, before nudging aside her outer folds. He took in a sharp breath as he came in contact with her wet, hot flesh.

  She let out a guttural moan and clamped her thighs down on his hand. He grew excited, his body instantly ramping up for what was to come. Then, she smacked his hand.

  “Stop it,” she muttered, her voice muffled by the furs. “I’m trying to sleep.”

  Erik kept his hand where it was, refusing to be rebuffed. “You can sleep later.”

  “I have a headache.” She sniffled. “I think I might have a cold. Can you go get my bag? I’m pretty sure I have some Tylenol in there.”

  Erik suppressed a growl as a rush of bizarre emotions assaulted him, chief among them being anger. She rebuffed him almost every morning. Usually he gave her a pass, sometimes he coaxed her into submission, but it had never made him angry.

  Everything about this morning was different. She always made him hard, but this wasn’t pleasurable. He was uncomfortably hard, more so than when they had first been together. He didn’t want to be inside of her, he needed it.

  I need to mate with her.

  “Ugh, my nose is so stuffy. How could I even get sick up here? Isn’t it too cold for germs?”

  Even if Erik knew the answer, he wouldn’t have responded. His awareness had turned inward, as a realization slowly settled over him. His nostrils flared, taking in a long drag of her scent. It was muskier than usual and it made his mouth salivate. He’d never smelled it before, but primitive instinct told him what memory could not.

  She was ready for him to mate with her in the truest sense of the word. His body was not primed for pleasure, but for purpose.

  He rolled her onto her belly, cutting her off mid-sentence. Gripping her hips, he lifted them up, aligning her pelvis with his. Before he could position himself for entrance, she pulled one leg back and kicked him hard in the knee.

  She must have hit him in just the right spot, because it hurt like hell.

  “What the fuck was that for?” he snapped.

  She pulled free from his grasp and turned to glare at him.

  “I told you to stop it and I meant it! I’m sick. I need fluids, medicine, and sleep,” she said, ticking each one off on her fingers. “Unless your penis is full of acetaminophen, then you need to keep it to yourself for a few days.”

  “What the fuck is acetaminophen?”

  She put her hands over her ears and squeezed her eyes shut. “Stop cursing at me!”

  Erik took a deep breath in a feeble attempt to calm himself. Yelling at her wasn’t getting him anywhere. It wasn’t even making him less aroused, if anything, it was wearing on his already frayed self-control.

  He reached out and put a hand around her wrist. It was so small. He pulled at it, uncovering one of her ears.

  “You’re fertile.”

  “Erik, we’ve talked about this and I don’t feel like having this conversation again right now, so—”

  “Astrid.” It was the only way he could think to silence her, and it worked. “Your scent is different. I don’t know how long it will last, but I know that if we mate right now, I can put a pup in you.”

  She shook her head in a jerky motion. “Regardless of what you think you smell, you have no idea what’s going on inside my body. I can’t get pregnant and you’re only setting m—yourself up for disappointment, so stop it.”

  Tugging her wrist, Erik pulled her into his lap. She didn’t help or hinder him as he placed her legs on either side of him and positioned his erection at her entrance.

  “I’ll take my chances with disappointment. Now shut up and put your arms around my neck. I won’t be gentle.”

  PART FIVE

  Bad news leaves Erik torn between the mating thrall and securing his pack. Meanwhile, Astrid struggles to manage her expectations about the outcome of the thrall and her growing feelings for the abrasive alpha.


  Coming November 10th

  ***

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