Alpha Noah

~Abella

I sit in front of the fire, staring at his wrist.

The scars are silvery, precise lines leading up to a point in the centre, the deepest crimson red lingering in a circle under his skin. When I look down at my mark, my flesh almost completely torn to shreds, I can’t imagine how it will eventually form this very specific mark. I can’t imagine even sharing a mark with Noah in the first place.

“What does the red mean?” I ask, eyeing it sceptically. Noah and I sit upon an ottoman in front of the fireplace, my leg splayed out, bound with white cloth. He holds his arm out to me, letting me see where he was once marked, many years before I was.

It looks like a bruise that has never healed, but a much richer, vibrant red. Will mine be like that, or different?

“It means he’s crazy.”

Glancing over my shoulder, I glare at Cian, who stands with his arms crossed over his chest, looking tense. He had been lingering around since he knocked on the door earlier, assuring himself that the entire time I was here under Noah’s volition. Now he’s convinced himself Noah is manipulating me with a fairy tale that doesn’t actually exist.

“Not helping,” I mutter, shooting him a look that apparently isn’t enough to have him keeping his opinions to himself.

“You were attacked, brutally. We need to be finding who did this, instead of entertaining an idea that you are some kind of Daemon. They don’t exist,” Cian exasperates, throwing his hands up our blank expressions. “And I would know, since I’m Immortal, and I know every creature that walks upon these lands, since my powers control their inhibitions.”

I can feel Noah’s gaze on me as Cian talks, seeing if I’m receiving what my mate is feeding into my ear, but I can’t look at him. How can I doubt this, after what Stace has done to me, having killed me, now this? Noah and I share the same blood colour…there has to be some explanation.

“Cian, my blood is purple. I’m not normal,” I remind him.

My mate’s posture deflates, but his defiance is still evident in the way his jaw clenches and his eyes remain stern. If it weren’t for the crackling fire behind us, the silence in this room would be deafening.

“You can stay here until the wound heals. I can protect you if Stace comes back,” Noah offers gently. My memories of Stace are foggy, but it’s almost like he appeared out of nowhere, making it unlikely to protect me regardless.

“No, she isn’t staying here. She needs to be in the immortal realm, where my powers can protect her,” Cian cuts in.

Noah’s attention shifts. “Didn’t this problem start under your watch?”

I can tell Cian wants to retort, considering the mark on my leg, but at least he has the decency to shut his mouth. Sighing deeply, I shift in my seat, but the pain that lances up my leg has me wincing. This will take days for me to recover from, which means I may not even be able to walk. And once it’s healed, I want to know if Noah and I share a similar mark.

Cian kneels down in front of the ottoman, clearly disregarding Noah, grabbing my hands between his own. “Come home with me. I’m your mate, you can trust me to protect you from whoever this guy is. What happened that night will never happen again, I promise.”

Looking into his eyes, my heart sinks deep within my chest. This is my mate, the one I’m supposed to love, that I’m supposed to put all my trust in.

But I can’t help but feel doubtful.

Maybe it’s because he’s a Sin, and I’m still apprehensive about his morals, his motives. Or maybe it’s because I feel safer here, with Noah, who I know would never overstep boundaries, who I know understand this situation better than anyone. But I still care about Cian, and I want to make things work because he is my mate, and I want that bond.

“Cian, that isn’t fair,” Noah says slowly. I’m assuming from that heated gaze he gives that immortal, he’s talking about using the mate bond to take me away from here.

Cian gets to his feet, my hands falling out of his grasp. “Why, Noah? Why do you care so much about keeping my mate in your home?”

An uncomfortable silence stretches between us before I step in.

“Look, if this is true, then I need to be near Noah. He’s the only one who knows about this, and has been in contact with Stace before. Why don’t you stay here with me, at least until this mark heals,” I offer, reaching for his hand. He pulls it away, looking at me with unfiltered emotions in his eyes, showing me betrayal and hurt.Belonging © NôvelDram/a.Org.

“Forget it,” Cian mutters, backing up a few steps, casting his attention to Noah for a fleeting moment. “Glad you got what you wanted.”

None of a say anything, as he walks away.

Glancing at Noah, I see his head is bowed toward the fire, dark wisps of hair covering his eyes from my view. I should be the only one feeling guilty right now, since I’m Cian’s mate, and he’s clearly upset and me mostly. He just looks at Noah as competition, as if the mate bond is strong enough to him.

“He will understand eventually. He just needs time to come to terms with it,” I hear myself saying, even if I’m not sure I believe it. Cian is run by his emotions, and this jealousy has gotten to the point where he can’t be around both me and Noah. Maybe it’s because of his past with the Alpha, but he has yet to tell me any more about that.

“Cian understands everything perfectly,” Noah murmurs. “He understands what I am, and what I’m capable of. He just doesn’t want to accept that his mate is anything like me.”

An impossible to swallow lump forms in my throat.

“Right now, we don’t know much. There is nothing much to do other than wait for my wound to heal,” I comment, watching Noah carefully, how still avoids my gaze. The fire reflects bright hues of red and orange on his face, shadowing his already sharp features. Now I’m looking away, hating myself for admiring him in the way I do.

“I’ll work on locating Stace immediately to get some answers. Safely of course,” Noah tells me, getting to his feet. I frown, seeing him about to leave.

I look down at my leg, knowing I can’t follow him, even if I wanted to. “Does Cian know something that both of you are keeping from me? You just said he knows a lot about you, and with your past, that confuses me quite a bit. I just want you to be honest with me.”

Noah tries to hide his wince, but I see right through it.

“Do you want to know the real truth?” he asks. I flinch, not expected him to suddenly come out with this. Despite my scepticism, I thought maybe I did know everything, and all my pushing has been because it’s hard to trust these two-powerful people. But Noah looks as though that now, with everything exposed, he wants to lay it all out on the table.

Slowly, he comes to sit next to me again, eyebrows furrowed, gaze cast down to the floor. My heartrate accelerates, wondering what could possibly come out of his mouth, and how it could be ruin my mate bond with Cian, and my friendship with Noah.

“Cian and I share a lot more of a past than I let on. We only keep these things from you because we care about you, and don’t want your life to be so…different,” he says slowly.

My heart almost completely stills.

“Are you brothers?” I ask, before my mind can process how unreasonable that is. Cian’s siblings are the other Sins, not an Alpha. But nothing else comes to mind when I think of how they could be linked. They have almost nothing in common.

“No. Cian and I were once told by a Gaze Reader about a person who would be special in not just one of our lives, but both. We hated each other for it, actually, we still do. We decided the only way we could live with this is to ensure that this special person was not in either of our lives, so they couldn’t get hurt,” he says, sounding as though he is eluding to something that I don’t quite understand.

I blink, dazed.

“But things happened and now we are here…everything happened that wasn’t meant to, so now it’s time to be transparent because there is no going back now,” Noah breathes.

I stare at him blankly. “Noah, none of this is making any sense.”

“The special person is you, Abella,” he says grimly. “You’re not just Cian’s mate, you’re mind too.”