Fated to My Forbidden Alpha – Episode 13
Alexander followed the scent of Selene’s blood to Jackson’s study. His wolf surged hard enough to splinter restraint, and he entered without knocking. Jackson turned in fury, but Alexander’s attention went directly to the shallow cut across Selene’s palm.
The injury was small, yet fate magnified its scent into an alarm. Alexander smelled pain, fear, and the wild silver note of her awakened wolf. Lyla stirred inside Selene with wonder because no one had ever crossed a manor simply because she might be hurt.
Alexander moved toward her, and Jackson blocked his path. “She’s bleeding,” Alexander said. Jackson dismissed the cut as a scratch and insisted Blood Moon could care for its own, using pack authority to hide the fact that Selene had never been treated as one of them.
Power gathered between the Alphas. Bookshelves trembled while guests in the corridor retreated from pressure they could feel through stone. Jackson’s aura carried territorial command; Alexander’s felt colder, shaped by battles that had made Nightwind feared.
Lyla sensed Alexander’s wolf trying to protect them. The concern bewildered Selene because he knew almost nothing about her, yet it felt more honest than Jackson’s years of hidden possession. Before she could examine the difference, dizziness tilted the room.
Both Alphas stepped toward her at once. Warmth opened through Selene’s chest, letting her feel Alexander’s fear from one direction and Jackson’s jealousy from the other. A tumbler shattered without being touched, bringing Luke and Drake running to the open door.
The Betas had witnessed Alpha challenges and mate bonds, but never two genuine claims reacting around one woman. “This isn’t normal,” Drake murmured. Luke’s grim silence agreed as both men calculated how quickly instinct could turn the study into a battlefield.
While the crisis built upstairs, Ethel entered Blood Moon’s archive. Dust covered neglected ledgers that held transfers, deaths, adoptions, and secrets no one expected a visiting Alpha to examine. He searched for any record of a child arriving after the Bloodwind attack.
Near the bottom of a weathered page, he found an unnamed three-year-old girl discovered unconscious in the eastern forest two days after Selene vanished. No relatives were contacted and no investigation number appeared, although pack law required both. The absence felt more deliberate than any false entry could have been. The pack had assigned the child one name: Selene.
The possessions listed beneath the entry made Ethel’s hands tremble—a moon pendant, a child’s blanket, and an “unknown” crest embroidered in blue. His wife had sewn that blanket and stitched Bloodwind’s oldest crest into the corner. Calling it unknown required either astonishing incompetence or a deliberate lie.
Footsteps approached the archive. Ethel hid the ledger beneath his coat and waited in the shadows. Before revealing his discovery, he needed proof no one could alter and an answer to who had concealed Selene’s identity, because announcing his suspicion might place her in greater danger.
Back in the study, Jackson seized Selene’s hand before Alexander could reach her. His thumb covered the cut, but possession roughened the gesture. Alexander looked at their joined hands and told Jackson he was lying when he claimed Selene was fine.
“I know exactly how she feels,” Jackson snapped. Alexander’s golden gaze moved across Selene’s exhaustion. “No, you don’t.” Jackson understood how the bond threatened his ambitions, but he had never asked how its secrecy, rejection, and years of humiliation affected her.
Selene pulled free. Both Alphas looked at her as though her next movement must select one of them. “I’m tired,” she said, and the quiet words cut through their power more effectively than a shouted command.
She faced Jackson first. He had chosen to hide and reject her. Alexander had chosen protection and an implied claim before learning who she was. Their choices differed in kindness, but both treated Selene as the object of a decision rather than the person entitled to make it.
“Neither of you asked what I wanted.” Lyla’s pride warmed her as she stood without leaning on either bond. Alexander accepted the rebuke; Jackson’s jaw tightened, still struggling to hear refusal without interpreting it as defiance against his authority.
Selene demanded answers before offering anyone trust. She needed to understand why two bonds recognized her, why Lyla remained silent for so long, and where she came from. Questions buried beneath survival returned at once: who named her, who abandoned her, and why no one ever searched.
“I need to know who I really am.” Beyond the half-open door, Ethel stopped with the ledger hidden against his heart. He longed to enter, call her little moon, and end fifteen years of distance in a single embrace.
Hope alone could still harm her. Ethel remained silent because Selene deserved certainty rather than another Alpha imposing an identity. Before he claimed the right to call himself her father, he would discover exactly who stole her and why Blood Moon raised an Alpha’s heir as a servant.
As Selene looked toward the moonlit window, the blood on the study floor seeped into a nearly invisible rune between the boards. Far beneath them, the forgotten lineage call strengthened. The archive had revealed who Selene might be—but the power waking under Blood Moon already knew her true name.
