Chapter 3: Nasty brother

MARA

“What do you think you’re doing!?” Kael yelled at me, his grip on my wrist tightening even more and causing me to yelp in pain. “Stop it. Whatever you think you’re doing, stop it right now!”

I understood that he found it hard to believe as well, but thinking I had something to do with it was only strange.

“I’m just as confused as you are, Kael! I’m not doing anything to you, I swear. I don’t… This doesn’t make any sense. Let go of me.” As an attempt to get him to let me go, I grabbed his hand and tried to pry it off of me, but he let me go immediately as if my touch burned him.

“Get in,” he ordered, stepping away from the doorway so that I would enter his bedroom.

I stood there, unable and unwilling to move. I couldn’t go in there when I knew that he had so much reason to kill me and pretend like it didn’t happen. I shook my head, and as if he knew what I was thinking, he snapped:

“I know what a mate bond does to people when their mates die. I’m not willing to do that to myself right now. Get in and we’ll talk about this, just like you’ve always wanted to.”

I took a deep breath and decided to take his word for it. I stepped into his room, my heart almost dipping into the ocean of my stomach when he slammed the door shut.

“Will you keep that loud heartbeat of yours in check before my father thinks I’m really trying to kill you?” He said quietly.

I leaned against a wall, taking deep breaths as I tried to calm my heart down. It wasn’t working very much, but it was doing better than before.

“I don’t know what this is, but I refuse to believe that you’re my mate,” he said. That was one thing I agreed with him on. “Besides, most people know that they’re mated with each other from the moment they see each other for the first time. Whatever this is, I want us to discard it. This never happened. We won’t talk to each other about it.”

“I agree.” I nodded. “Nobody gets to find out about this.”

“Especially my father. If he ever shows a hint that he knows about this, I’ll take it you told him, and you don’t want to know what I’ll do to you if you tell him.”

I was no stranger to Kael’s threats in the slightest, but something about this one was different. Perhaps it was the seriousness he had in his voice that was more than the ones he had before to make me know that he would take this to the next level if I went against him.

Luckily for me, I had no intention of trying to draw the attention of Alpha Kalen to the matter at hand. It was mostly because I was also in denial about Karl being my mate. It didn’t make any sense to me. In a sense, he was my brother.

“And about me being chosen to be the next Alpha of the pack, I want you to know that none of it was my intention. I was chosen, and you know that. If I had the chance to step down, I would.”

“You can step down,” he countered. “You can simply tell my father you don’t want to do it. You can get out of the pack while you still can since you don’t even belong here in the first place.”

I didn’t know whether it was the presence of the mate bond now, but his words cut deeper than they used to do. And I knew that he had told me worse than that.

“What happened the first time I did it? Don’t you remember when the pack sage told us that nothing but calamity will befall the pack if I don’t become the Alpha?” I reminded him.

“And you wouldn’t be the first to challenge fate. Lots of people have gone against the words of a sage, and they’re still living perfectly normal lives—”

“What people, Kael?” I interrupted. “If you can show me just one person like that, then I can consider making that choice. If I step down from this, I’ll still have to be in the pack. And if tragedy strikes, I’ll be affected as well as everybody else. If you want to be the next Alpha, why don’t you think about everyone in the pack?”

Kael stood still for a moment, possibly debating whether to keep arguing with me or to consider my words. Finally, he sighed and walked toward the door, opening the door.

“Get out,” he said. Quietly at first, then, “Get out, Mara! Now!”

I didn’t need anybody to tell me that obeying without another word was the best option. I scurried out of the room and into mine to finally get my heart to calm down.

~

Later that night, there was frantic knocks on my door that I chose to ignore at first but couldn’t due to how much louder the knocks were getting.

“Who is it?” I asked, my voice groggy from sleep I wondered who it could possibly be at that time of the night.

When there was no answer, I sighed in defeat as I stood up and walked to the door to open it, only to find Kael standing at my door and looking as if he could explode any minute.

“What’s going on?” I asked, poking my head out of the room and looking around to see if there was anyone around who could take this for what it was not—a strange rendezvous.

“I never wanted to be here. I tried to fight it, Mara. I really…” He sighed and pushed past me, getting into the room and pacing around.

“You’re starting to scare me, Kael. What did you do? Did you do something to someone? What did you try to fight?” I asked, all the possible scenarios playing in my head. Knowing his violent nature, he could have done something that could have led to someone’s death and—

“It’s you, Mara!” he said, taking me aback as I frowned in confusion.

“Me? I don’t understand what you’re—”

“Ever since you were brought into this house, I have never taken note of what you smell like or anything. Goddess knows I’ve always hated you from the start, especially after you were revealed as the next Alpha of the pack. But now…”

I didn’t know what I wanted to hear, but this was not it. J didn’t want Kael confessing to me all of a sudden. He hated me just that morning, this would be too much.

“Kael—”

“I’m not in love with you, Mara.” He frowned as if he could read my thoughts and made to put it to an immediate halt.

“I was asleep when you knocked on the door. You have to get straight to the point. It’s the middle of the night,” I told him.

“Mara, your scent has been infiltrating my senses since this afternoon. It doesn’t help that it’s night now and nobody is moving around with their scent distracting me. You know how much we don’t like each other, and you know that I do not want to be here right now, so just…listen to me.”

I stood with my arms crossed, giving him an ear for whatever it was that he had to say. But he only continued to pace back and forth as if what he wanted to say was the most difficult thing in the entire world.

“You interrupted my sleep, and now you’re wasting much of my time and whatever I have left to sleep before tomorrow,” I told him as I watched him pace.

“I don’t want you to take this as something that it’s not, okay? It’s only affecting me this much because I’m an unmated wolf. It doesn’t have to mean anything.” His words were scaring me, and I had no idea what to think about them or how to respond.

“What are you talking about, Kael?”

“I want you to mate with me, Mara.”