Chapter 2: Kael

3 YEARS AGO

MARA

“The Moon Goddess has decided,” the sage of Ravencrest Pack announced after a while of silence, his gaze zoning in on me and making me want to sink into the ground from all the attention I was getting.

“You, Mara, are destined to be the next Alpha of the pack.”

~

“Your coronation is drawing closer by the day. How do you feel?” Alpha Kalen, the man who had adopted me as his own, said.

It all felt surreal. Ever since I had been announced as the rightful heir to the throne of someone who wasn’t my biological father, things had gone off the rails. I felt eyes on me every single time I moved, and Kael—Alpha Kalen’s own son—now had hatred for me.

We were having dinner now, and I couldn’t help but notice Kael glaring at me from the other side of the table as Alpha Kalen waited for my answer.

“I feel…” I sighed, not sure what to say. I couldn’t tell if I was more happy than scared or vice versa. “I don’t know, it doesn’t feel real enough for me to believe just yet.”

Almost immediately, a scoff came from Kael that had our heads turning in his direction.

“Do you have a problem, son?” Alpha Kalen asked.

As if he had been waiting for that question the whole morning, he tossed his spoon aside and looked at his father as if he had committed the worst act of betrayal. “How can you sit here and be satisfied with what is going on? Your son is sitting right here, having prepared to be the next Alpha his whole life, and you’re just going to give it to someone you picked up from nowhere!?”

“Kael…” Alpha Kalen called him in a warning tone.

“No!” He slammed his hand against the table, standing up as the chair scraped the floor. “You’re not going to shut me up and shut me out from my right! If you had never brought her here after her parents died, then none of this would be happening!”

“Kael, I understand why you’re angry…” I started, but he was quick to snap at me, his eyes glowing a golden color to signal that he was close to shifting. He was that angry at me.

“Don’t you say a word, Mara! You don’t understand anything. All you did was have your parents die and have the throne handed to you on a platter of gold!”

“That’s enough!” Alpha Kalen yelled, his voice carrying so much authority that even Kael would not dare say anything else.

Kael glared at me before walking out of the dining room, leaving his food unfinished as Alpha Kalen and I shared a glance.

“He’ll come around,” he assured me with a tight smile on his face. “For now, we just… You’ll be under my protection. You don’t have to worry about a thing.”

I completely understood where Kael’s anger was coming from, but it was unfair of him to unleash all that rage on me. He never thought to ask me just how I felt about being chosen to be the next Alpha. It wasn’t something I wanted exactly.

As Alpha Kalen cleared his throat, I was brought back to the present. “So, I heard you want to study at Voltex,” he said.

Just the reminder of it made my heart skip in a good way. I nodded with a faint smile as the images of everything I was expecting started to flood my mind.

Voltex was only the best university in the pack, and getting in would be one of the best things that happened to me after being adopted by Alpha Kalen.

“What do you want to study?” he asked, his brows raised in curiosity as he watched me fiddle the fork between my fingers.

“Human and veterinary medicine,” I spat almost immediately to show just how securely it was plastered in the back of my mind. “After the widespread disease that killed my parents, I just…I need to do something that can help people, prevent them from losing their families to things that can be treated.”

He smiled at me with pride in his eyes that made my heart burst at it. After losing my parents at such a young age, there was nothing I wanted more than to be of help.

“You know what?” He tapped his fingers on the table with a concentrated frown on his face. “I see why you would like to do that. And because I know just how smart you are and how well you will do since you’ve put your mind to it, I will personally enroll you into the university.”

My jaw dropped as I looked at him in disbelief. An enrollment by the Alpha of the pack was a straight ticket into the university without much hassle.

“Thank you so much! You have no idea how much this means to me, oh!” I exclaimed, blinking back the tears that blurred my vision.

“You’re my daughter, Mara,” he said. “You have just as much right to anything you want, as long as I am the Alpha of this pack, which is not a very long reign now since your coronation is in two weeks, but I’ll put in a good word for you before I step down.”

I nodded, not quite sure what to say until I finished my breakfast and decided to see Kael. Whether he liked it or not—which he definitely hated—we had to put everything past us and move on. Even if it wasn’t for the sake of anything else, he had to do it for the sake of his father. For the sake of the pack.

“I think I should talk to Kael,” I said, standing up and moving toward the stairs.

“Do you want me to come with you? Kael is…” Alpha Kalen looked as though he was searching for the word to describe his son with. “He’s quick to anger, and you… I know you would hate to fight him. You never do. If he tries to fight you—”

“He won’t.” I interrupted, not sure of what I was saying as well. “If he does, I’ll find a way to defend myself.”

I walked up the stairs with my last words to Alpha Kalen ringing in my head. Kael and violence went hand in hand, and he always tried to find a way to get to me, but I avoided him as much as I could.

As I knocked on his door, my heart started to thud a little too fast that I believed he could hear it from the other side of the door.

“What do you want!?” he barked, making it known that he knew it was me.

“We need to talk about this, Kael. You can’t keep running away from this…” Before I got the chance to finish, he swung the door open so aggressively that I was forced to take a step back.

“Running away?” he asked, his voice cold and daring. “You have been running away from a fight this whole time. Fight me to the death, and whoever wins becomes the Alpha.”

That was an idea he always brought up each time I tried to talk to him. An idea I would never agree to because I knew him and just how brutal he could be in a fight.

“We can’t fight.” I shook my head.

Kael didn’t argue with me. He only stood in silence, looking at me with knitted brows, tilting his head in confusion as he stared at me.

I was about to ask him what the matter was when I felt it. It was slow at first, but it soon started to grab a hold of my heart and my mind, as if something was reaching into the core of my heart and wrenching it.

And my doubts were only confirmed when Kael grabbed a hold of my hand as he asked me, “What is going on?” and I felt sparks fly up everywhere he touched.

Kael was my mate.