Page 1 of Betrayed Alpha Mate

Prologue - Emily

A Little Over a Month Ago

“Golden Tree Sisters…”

“Coven…”

“A witch will always get the calling and gravitate toward the coven when it’s time…”

My breath comes hot, crawling up my throat like running your hand over worn wood and collecting splinters beneath your skin, my eyes snapping back to reality after I’d just lost the ability to see for a few seconds.

I want to lift a hand to my dry throat, but the moment I look down, I see my palms and feel the sensations pulsing through the lines mapping them, through my veins beneath my flesh, in my bones.

My breath catches, eyes going wide when those echoes continue thrumming through my head.

I recognize those voices, albeit faint: Delilah, Arianna, and Gwen. My eyes turn up slowly to the fourth witch—the one who just used the full extent of her mystical powers to save us from the evil witch, Morganna, in Montreal—now lying comatose in a hospital bed in Wells. My fingers remain trembling because I just did something I’ve never done before, only to hear the other three witches’ voices in my head.

Whatever it was that drove my actions—instinct, perhaps—I’d been swirling my hands over Donna’s body, from her head to her toes, feeling energy in my palms that moved and swayed with my hands, combating her fatigue, drawing out the energy of her pain, consuming it, and transmuting it into more power.

Crazy, right?!

I scoff under my breath, realizing how absurd this is, while simultaneously feeling more alive than I ever have in twenty-nine years.

What’s even more startling is that I felt another heartbeat pulsing beneath my palms when I swept them across Donna’s stomach.

Did I heal her?

Did I sense the pup growing in her womb?

Is that even possible?

They’ve been waiting for the fifth witch to emerge, to help us fight our adversary and put an end to the dark warlock for good.

What if they’re waiting for me to discover that I have magic? I mean, there’s no other explanation for what I just did, or what I’m feeling now as the sensations become fainter, like a gentle tingle that remains only to answer the questions I have in my head.

As Donna’s fingers twitch at her side, I take a deep breath for composure, because I can’t dump this weight on her right now. What we witnessed tonight was spectacular, unlike any use of magic wielded before, and it knocked her out. She needs time to recover, and I need time to figure out if it’s true—if I do have magic in me, too.

While my heart swells with a sense of excitement I haven’t felt for years, I make my way toward Donna just as she stirs and opens her eyes. I’m going to give her the good news that she’s pregnant, but I won’t tell her I found out magically.

Not yet, at least. Not until I’m sure.

***

Delphine—Donna and Dominic’s mother—steps forward during our meeting as the group discusses what happened last night. The battle against the dark lord’s soldier, Morganna, has left a scar on all of us, and now, we’re plotting our next move, because we can’t be waiting around for the dark lord to make his.

“This,” Delphine says softly, setting down an old, leather-bound book with a cracked spine and browned edges on the coffee table in the center of the room, “belonged to my mother. She was a Golden Tree Sister.”

Donna, who’s opted to keep her pregnancy a secret until she finds the perfect moment with her mate, Nicholas, reaches for the book. Delphine explains that her mother was a Golden Tree Sister—the coven linked to the Black Moon War against the dark warlock decades ago, and the coven that links all four of our witches—and was involved in taking down the warlock back then.

But he didn’t die, instead going dormant while his dark energy continued to haunt the earth and the remaining Golden Tree Sisters for revenge.

“Merlin Grimes…” Donna reads the name from the book, and a barely audible, unsettling gasp of shock falls over the room. A quiet dread shared by the black ops team—who’d faced severe, lethal enemies in the wild during their time in the military squad that protects our kind from ruthless enemies—and their mates fills a moment of pause as they exchange glances with fear flickering in their eyes.

I gulp as I sense a pair of eyes on me, boring into the back of my neck. The awareness pebbles goosebumps on my nape, and I lift my hand to rub my flesh, feeling the first stirrings of magic beneath my palms.

It’s in a moment of weakness, so slight that I could have missed it, that I see a pair of ocean-blue eyes staring at me with a hint of worry knitting the dark brows above it.

I quickly avert my eyes, not wanting to become distracted—not when there’s a book in the room that may hold the answers to unlocking my powers as a witch.