My Fated Alpha's Cruel Game

Elena’s POV

I made it halfway back through the woods before I heard the engine.

It was not the low, quiet hum of the black car at the drive. It was closer, sharper, and it was coming up the rough track that ran behind the row of trailers on our side of the pack. I cut off the path. I took the shortcut through the pines and I came up along the back of our lot, breathing hard.

The SUV was already parked out front.

I stopped at the corner of the trailer.

The driver’s door was shut. The windows were dark. No one was in the cab. That meant he was already inside my home, and he had walked in nonchalantly without knocking, because of course he had.

I climbed the steps.

The door had been left open a crack. I pushed it the rest of the way with my fingertips and I stepped in.

Marcus stood in the middle of my front room.

He looked wrong there. That was the first thing that hit me. A man in a dark grey three-piece suit in a trailer where the couch doubled as my bed and the afghan still lay pooled on the cushions from this morning. His shoes were polished. The shoulders of his jacket were tailored to a line that cost more than the trailer was worth.

He was looking at the little kitchen table with casual indifference.

The empty kitchen table.

He turned his head when I came in.

I shut the door behind me. I did not take off my jacket.

“You’re in my house.”

“Your trailer.”

“Don’t.”

He tilted his head a little. Not quite a smile. Not quite anything.

“I was told,” he said, his tone lacking its usual sharp hostility, “that you threatened an employee at my front door this afternoon.”

“I asked to see you.”

“Aggressively.”

“Firmly.”

His mouth moved. Not a smile. Just a small acknowledgement that I had hit the word he would have chosen.

“You were received by a member of my household during a meeting with another Alpha,” he said. “You made a scene on the step. Viviana was in the hall. She heard you. She had a great deal to say about it, in front of her uncle.”

I folded my arms across my chest, defensive and glaring.

“How tragic for you.”

“She wants you punished.”

“Is that what this is? Your grand performance to appease her?”

He did not answer.

He moved, slowly, and he looked around the front room. At the couch with the afghan. At the stack of schoolbooks I had left on the table. At the cabinet door I had left hanging open when I tore the kitchen apart. His eyes went over all of it without changing.

“Where is it,” I demanded.

“Where is what.”

“That absurdly expensive dress you bought.”

He looked back at me.

“It was in the closet yesterday,” I said, biting out the words. “It was on the table this morning. It was gone by the time I got back from town. Viviana was here last night. You tell me.”

“Beta Hugo took it.”

I went still.

“What.”

“This morning. While you were in town looking for work,” he clarified evenly. “I had it sent out for professional cleaning. It will be returned this afternoon.”

I stared at him.

“You didn’t say.”

“No.”

“You let me walk across the valley thinking she’d broken in and stolen it.”

“I didn’t know where you’d walked.”

“You could have left a note.”

“I don’t leave notes.”

I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes for a second. I breathed in. I breathed out.

When I dropped my hands, he was still watching me.

“Is that it,” I said. “Is that why you’re here. To tell me Beta Hugo has my dress.”

“I’m here,” he said, “because Viviana wants me to punish your disrespect.”

“Then punish me.”

“No.”

The word was flat. Lenient.

I did not know what to do with it. I stood with my arms crossed and my jacket still on, and I looked at him, completely baffled. I could not find the shape of the man who had brutally slapped me in a garden last night. The contradiction of it made my head spin.

He moved again. He went as far as the little kitchen table and he put two fingers on the edge of it. Then he looked at the books.

“You’re studying.”

“Finishing out.”

“You said at the office you’d tested up.”

“I have enough credits. I’m done.”

“Good.”

I laughed, a short, bitter sound. “Good?”

“You don’t need to be in that school.”

“I wasn’t planning to be.”

He nodded, very slightly. He kept looking at the books.

“I got a job today,” I said, lifting my chin. “Distribution center. Out by the highway. The pay is basically nothing, but I start tomorrow morning.”

His fingers stopped moving on the edge of the table. He observed the cramped, worn-down space around us.

“Doing what.”

“Pallets. Unpacking. Sorting for deliveries.”

“Why.”

“Because we eat,” I said fiercely. “Because the furnace doesn’t work. Because I am getting out of this extreme poverty. Pick one.”

He did not answer.

He looked around the trailer one last time. The low ceiling. The water stain in the corner. The desperate reality of my life.

“If anyone asks why I’m here today,” he said simply, “say you’re on probation.”

“Probation.”

“For the incident with my housekeeper. For anything else that’s been said. You’re on probation.”

I opened my mouth. I closed it.

He stepped past me to the door.

He paused with his hand on the frame. He did not turn around.

“Get some sleep,” he said.

Then he was gone. The SUV started. The tires crunched on the gravel. The sound moved away down the road, leaving me alone in the dimming trailer. I was utterly confused. He had struck me down mere hours ago, yet now, he was simply letting it go.

I stood where I was for a long time.

Then I made myself move. I went to bed early, laying out my work clothes at the foot of the couch.

Four in the morning came like a slap.

The alarm blared. I shut it off before the second chime. I lay still and listened for my exhausted mother. Her breathing stayed slow and even through the thin wall. She was still fast asleep.

Good.

I dressed in the dark. I tied my hair back. I let myself out and pulled the door shut behind me with both hands so the latch would not wake her.

The walk to the distribution center was cold and long and very dark.

The lot was already half lit when I came up. Loading bay doors stood open. A string of bare bulbs ran along the overhang, and the breath of the men moving underneath them came out in quick white clouds.

Victor was waiting at the office door with a clipboard under his arm.

“You made it.”

“Morning.”

“Come on, come on. I’ll show you.”

He walked me into the belly of the warehouse. Concrete floor. High metal shelves. Rows and rows of pallets wrapped in plastic, stacked two deep, waiting. He pointed.

“These are all for local pack delivery today. You’re going to cut the wrap. You’re going to break them down. You’re going to sort by the tag. Dozens of them. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Knife.”

He handed me a box cutter. His fingers brushed the back of my hand, lingering just a fraction too long.

“Careful with that blade.”

“I will be.”

He watched me do the first pallet. I cut the wrap. I peeled it back. I started stacking.

He stepped in close behind me and put his hand on my shoulder.

“Like that,” he said. “Just like that. You’re a natural.”

His palm was warm through my sweater. It stayed there, heavy and entirely inappropriate. A wave of deep discomfort washed over me, my instincts screaming at the uninvited proximity.

I shrugged forward, small, pretending I just needed the reach, and stepped sideways to the next stack.

“I’ve got it,” I said lightly, acting unfazed and not turning around, refusing to jeopardize this desperately needed income. “I’m getting the hang of it.”

“Holler if you need me.”

“I will.”

He went.

I worked.

The wrap came off in long sheets. The boxes came down in rows. After a few hours of work, my shoulders started to burn with a vengeance. The cold of the concrete came up through the soles of my shoes and settled in the arches of my feet.

He came back to check on my work excessively.

Each time I heard him coming. Each time I moved to the far side of the pallet before he got there, keeping my hands full, and I answered him over my shoulder without turning, silently enduring the boundary violations to keep my job safe.

By the time my shift neared its end, I had broken down dozens of pallets. My back ached in a long hot line from my hips to my shoulders. Both palms were raw and blistered from the relentless friction of the cardboard and the box cutter.

I straightened up, pressing the flat of my hand against the small of my back.

I looked down at my blistering hands, then rolled my aching shoulders. Exhaustion weighed heavy in my bones, but a strange, hard-won sense of accomplishment burned in my chest.

I had survived the first day.

I gripped the box cutter, bracing myself for another early morning of grueling physical labor, ready to endure whatever it took to buy our way out of this desperate life.