All Chapters of Claimed By a Cold Alpha: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

He didn’t ask me for my name…he just looked at me from across the busy room and told me, ‘You’re mine,’ as if that was something he had carved in blood.” I didn’t know then that there would be wolves in the room. That the blood he was talking about was real. By the time he said those words, I was already not running away. Mara’s POV I only have three rules when it comes to life. Don’t ask for help. Don’t trust easily. And never, ever go into the woods behind the town of Coldridge after dark. I broke all three in a single night. I ended up stranded on Route 9 with a flat tire, no signal on my phone, and the kind of rain that doesn’t come down… it comes at you. My sister Lily had been texting me for twenty minutes before the bars plummeted. She was probably pacing the living room floor, biting her nails, like she always did when I was late. I pulled the flashlight from the glove compartment, stepped out in the rain, and took the second worst decision of my life. I went up to t

Mara’s POV I took Route 9.Of course I took Route 9. It was the only road that led straight from my apartment to the supermarket, the pharmacy, and the second job I had picked up on Tuesday mornings cleaning offices downtown. Avoiding it would have added 40 minutes to my schedule that already was tightly packed.That’s what I told myself. I was very good at telling myself things.I didn’t tell myself why I had looked at my phone four times before I left the apartment. Or why I’d stood in front of the bathroom mirror an extra two minutes for nothing, doing nothing to my appearance and then getting annoyed with myself for those two minutes.Lily had been watching me from the kitchen table over her cereal bowl, wearing that particular look she’d been rehearsing since she was fourteen… the one that translated “I see you but I’m not going to say anything just yet I’m filing this away.”“You look different,” she said.“I look exactly the same.”“Your jaw is doing that thing.”“My jaw doesn

Mara’s POVI made it three days.Three days of normal — work, Lily, groceries, cleaning the office on Tuesday, doing the budget on Wednesday, the budget that never quite balanced. Three days of my phone lying face-up on the counter like I wasn’t expecting it to ring or alert me to anything in particular. Three days looking at a grey-black wolf on a ridge in the dark in the rain and the thing I’d said out loud without permission.“You’re beautiful.”Like I said. Out loud. To a werewolf. I had a hell of a talk with myself about it on the drive home, and a half dozen since then, and the take-away from all of them was that I needed to get a whole lot more control of myself before I wound up in a place where I couldn’t pull myself out.Then Damien had texted Thursday morning.“I need you to meet my pack.”I had stared at that for a long time. “Why,” I sent back.“Because they know you exist, and they know you exist in my world. In our world, that means they must see you with me. It estab

Mara’s POV I didn't sleep over at the pack house.That seemed important to get straight — not that anyone had told me to, or offered, or suggested in any way that would require a response. But because when the room had finally come to a rest after Damien’s announcement, after Cassius had made his measured retreat and Sasha had uttered that sound that might have been a laugh in another world, after Rhen had arrived in the doorway with his absolutely neutral expression — someone had quietly shown me to a guest room at the end of the east hall and I had perched on the edge of the bed for forty minutes or so staring at the wall before I made the decision that spending the night in a house full of werewolves on a Thursday night was a bridge too far for one week.At midnight I drove home.Lily was asleep. I stood in the kitchen in the dark drinking a glass of water looking at the window over the sink thinking about a man who had looked at me before his entire pack and stated 'she’s mine' w

She picked up on the second ring.“You just left,” she said. Not accusatory. Just observing the timing with the particular dryness I was beginning to recognize as her own version of warmth.“I know. Something came while I was with you this morning. I need to tell you.”A brief pause. The sound of her stillness — I was learning to read that too, the different qualities of her quiet.“Tell me,” she said.So I did.I read her the letter — word for word, including the transfer conditions — because she’d told me that morning she didn’t walk into things without knowing the ground she was standing on and I had committed, from here, to everything.The silence after I finished reading was different from her other ones.“Terms of transfer,” she said.“Yes.”"Like I’m a — ” She stopped. I heard her take one careful breath. “Like I’m a package.” “Yes.” No sugarcoating it. She didn’t want it softened. “That’s what it says.”Another silence. “And can he — is the bloodline claim actually valid? Und