Page 26 of Betrayed Alpha Mate

Gold light pulses from her palms, but it’s not enough to rock the boulder even slightly. Emily grunts her frustration as she retracts her hands, then circles her fists and cracks her neck again.

I take a step forward—discreetly, because I don’t want her getting furious with me—and slowly inch my way closer every time she attempts to use her magic on the boulder.

“You’re not concentrating,” Delilah tells her, and Emily grunts.

“I’m trying!”

She closes her eyes and straightens up, and that’s when I move in close enough to catch her scent burning in my lungs.

Her eyes shoot open, and she glares at me.

“What are you doing?” she grates through her teeth, low enough that only I can hear her.

“I’m trying to help you, Em.”

“I don’t need your help,” she grinds, eyes ferocious beads of cold blue. “I can do this on my own.”

Emily rolls out her shoulders as she turns back to the boulder, focusing on it again. I can practically feel her frustration when she tries and fails again. Her emotions suddenly feel like my own, and I couldn’t take it anymore.

I take a step forward and reach out, placing my hand on her shoulder with the instinct of my inner wolf that drives my movement. The moment I touch her, a shockwave of sensation bursts between my palm and her shoulder, and gold light shoots out from her palms, enough to crack the boulder down the middle.

Emily gasps in shock when the two pieces of the boulder split and break off to the sides, two half-spheres rattling on the ground. Her eyes fly wide with horror, and she turns slowly toward me just as Delilah and Arianna cheer and praise her from the side.

“What the hell, Sean?!” Emily exclaims through the celebration, turning her glare on the hand that’s still on her shoulder. I can barely move, still stunned by what just happened, and that’s when Emily shoves my hand off her with enough force to have me stumbling backward.

She bolts for the back door leading into the house, and Arianna and Delilah’s cheering abruptly cuts off when Emily disappears. An awkward silence falls on the backyard, and I blink in disbelief at the spot where she’d been standing, now empty.

“Er…” Arianna cuts through the silence, glancing at Delilah. “I’m gonna go check on her.”

“Yeah, me too,” Delilah concedes, and both women head inside the house, leaving Hunter and me outside.

He lets out a steady whistle as he strolls to the boulder, kicking one half over before crouching to tentatively touch the crack.

“Hmph,” he grunts as he retracts the finger, then wiggles his hand. “That was something. It’s still hot.”

“Yeah, that was something, alright,” I scoff, coming back to my senses and shaking my head as if to shake off what just happened.

But everyone saw it—Emily’s sudden burst of magic, and then her irritation when she realized it was because of me.

“So, Em’s powers only respond to you,” Hunter observes calmly.

“I think we already knew what to expect after that binding spell,” I say with a diffident shrug, though my inner wolf is yelling that it’s more than just the spell that’s causing this.

The fated mate bond.

The bond no one knows about.

The one I rejected in the past.

It’s still there, crawling beneath my skin and slipping through the cracks as if it’s dictating Emily’s powers. It’s no wonder she stormed off, angry and frustrated that her powers only respond to me, to my touch.

“I think she needed to see it,” Hunter laments with a sigh as he stands. “Now it’s time for her to make peace with it. I just don’t understand one thing…” his voice tapers off as he looks at me, curiosity in his dark brown eyes.

“What?”

“We were all so close in the squad. I would have thought she’d be open to being bound to you, and not someone else,” he speculates with a frown, but I cut off any suspicions with a lighthearted chuckle.

“Oh, you know Em. She’s Miss Independent, and doesn’t like the idea of being bound to anyone, let alone me.”