The Forbidden Mate
Chapter Seven – Stalemate

Alex

I have caught glimpses of Katy at work, but she is avoiding me. After our conversation on her doorstep I tried to visit her the next night, but she didn’t answer the door when I knocked and pleaded with her to let me in.

I decided not to push it. I know she has good reason to be angry with me and that I need to stay away until I can come up with a solution to our problem, or at least some kind of plan as to how I am going to announce to everyone that she is my mate.

Staying away is killing me. I can’t concentrate on my work, and I am not sleeping. I am desperate to see her, feel her touch once more. I occasionally walk down a corridor in the pack house only to smell the faint traces of her scent. I have to exert all my will power to stop my wolf from breaking free, replaceing her and marking her.

The organisation for the party is continuing at pace. I am trying to show enthusiasm. My father and Mrs Welsh have been showing me the guest list, the menus for the meals and their plans for decorations to adorn the packhouse. At the best of times these kind of events bore me, but this is worse I feel that the closer this party gets the nearer I come to losing Katy. I still don’t know what I am going to do after the party when it becomes clear that my mate is not one of the attendees. I will face increased pressure from my father and Car, to select a chosen mate.

I have come to the conclusion that my only option is to confide in my grandfather, and hope that he will take my side.

Katy

I am exhausted. I am so glad that today is over. I have put Katy to bed, and I am relaxing in front of the TV. I am not really paying attention to what is on, I am too tired to concentrate. It is the party tomorrow night, and I am going over and over in my head what could happen, what Alex could choose to do.

I have spent the last week preparing for Alex’s party. Cleaning the packhouse from top to bottom, helping to create the decorations and doing anything that I can to help which doesn’t involve spending time with Alex.

I still haven’t forgiven him, and each time the other servants talk excitedly about his search for his mate and our future Luna it stabs me in the heart.

I had hoped that I would be able to spend the night in the kitchen, far away from the guests, but there has been a wave of sickness among the servants, which has resulted in a shortage of waiting staff, so I have been drafted in to help.

I will get to watch all those high ranking shewolves crawling all over him. Doing their best to convince him that they should be his Luna, and they probably should. Better them than someone like me.

I am pulled from my thoughts by a knock at the back door. It is too early for Alex, not that he has tried to visit me for the last few days. He has finally got the message that I don’t want to see him. It makes me feel sick to my stomach for us to be apart, I am missing him terribly, but when I do see him the hurt and anger is even worse.

I open the back door to see Miss Graham standing there. I am surprised, I hadn’t expected to see her, she has been avoiding me since my first shift. Since the rogue attack I haven’t thought once about her or the secrets in my past that she is keeping. They don’t feel as important anymore.

“Can I come in?” She asks. “It would look strange if someone was to see me standing here. “

“Of course,” I open the door wider so that she can enter.

“I am so sorry about your parents. They were good people, and it was terrible that they died in such a cruel way” she tells me sympathetically.

“Thank you” I pause before asking her “why are you here?”

“We need to talk about your future, now that your parents are dead, and with the rogue attack signalling that a continuation of the war is inevitable you are no longer safe here” she says. “I can try again to persuade my brother that following the rogue attack and the loss of your parent that he should think again and allow you to attend a human university.”

“No” I say firmly. “What would happen to Emma? Even if the Alpha allowed her to go with me, I couldn’t take her away from the pack. After everything that has happened, she would be traumatised to be ripped from her home, and everyone she knows. She is too young to try and fit into human society she would not be able to hide who she is, a werewolf, from humans

Anyway, I am not sure that I want to leave.” I tell her calmly “I am happy in the pack. I am building a life for myself, and as much as I used to want to gain an education, there are things that I think are too important to give up.”

“Things like Alex?” she asks.

“What, what… do you mean?” I ask her shocked that she might know about us.

“I mean that this is not the first time I have tried see you. The last time I found Alex standing at your back door. It was clear that you know each other very well, that you have feelings for each other.”

“Really? He just called round to see how we were coping after the attack. He has been doing the same for all of the victims” I lie.

She doesn’t believe me.

“Late at night, after he should have finished work for the day, he came to your back door rather than openly visiting you? That does not sound convincing. What is there between the two of you?” she asks.

I can’t tell her that we are mates, I know she wouldn’t approve. “He is a friend”

“A friend? It is too dangerous to be friends with the Alpha heir, it would draw attention to you, attention that could lead to your enemies replaceing you. But let me speak frankly, you seemed to be more than friends. Are you in a relationship with him? It would only lead to heartache if you are because he will replace his mate soon and then he will abandon you.”

“It isn’t like that” I tell her. Although I no longer feel that I know how it is. I cannot tell her she is wrong, that he is my mate. I am not sure if he will ever openly admit what we are to each other and that I should be his Luna.

“You are fooling yourself if you think that he will choose you, that you are anything other than a diversion. When it comes to it, he will do what he sees as his duty, he has too much pride and arrogance to see you a lowly Omega as his equal. He has been brought up to believe that your kind are inferior.

“But I am not” I tell her defiantly. “I am not an Omega. You won’t tell me what I am, but I know that I am not a submissive wolf. Maybe if I was to tell him the truth then that would make a difference. I have kept my secrets as you have directed me to, but if I was honest with him, if I was to show him my wolf it would change things for the better. I am sick of keeping this secret from the people I love. All I have heard is how much danger I am in, how if I tell people the very little I know about myself, it will put us all in danger.

You talk about the danger I am in, but you will not tell me why. Who my parents were, and why people would still be after me if they knew where I was. If you can’t trust me with this information, then how can you expect me to trust that you have my best interests at heart, that what you are doing is being done to protect me?”

“I want to tell you”, she admits, “but I am scared that the knowledge that I would impart would put you at even more risk. There are so many people who if they knew who you were would try to kill you. I couldn’t even identify them all. It is best that no one knows about who you really are.

“I am not a child, I have been through so much, had to cope with the death of my parents, the trauma of the attack, and now I am the sole guardian of a traumatised six-year-old. Stop treating me like I am a child, or someone unable to cope with life. I have been through more than most and I deserve the truth” I demand.

She sighs “very well. Your parents were high ranking wolves in the royal pack. They were isolated and then targeted by Lucius.”

“So they were not part of a pack which was wiped out? That was a lie?” I ask her.

“No they were not” she replies.

“Then why tell me that they were?”

“I hadn’t confided to your parents who you really were. The truth might have put them off taking you in. Made them fear for their own safety if they adopted you.”

“So, if I am a senior member of the royal pack, why don’t you just contact their Alpha and ask for them to take me back?”

“I don’t trust anyone in the royal pack anymore. The royal family wouldn’t have died if traitors close to them had not betrayed them. Your family were too close to the king and queen not to be targeted even after their deaths.”

I nod. I know so little about the royal family and the war to be able to discern what this new information meant.

I was beginning to get sick of her secrets and half-truths and part of me longed desperately to confide in Alex, tell him everything about myself, and ask for his help. If it hadn’t been for his lies about replaceing a mate I would have. But now I doubted his intentions, that I could really trust him.