by A. J. Downey
I Am The Alpha
The Moon Forged Trilogy: Book I
AJ Downey, Ryan Kells
The pack has ruled over its territory, the wilds of Washington, for a generation, but that has all crumbled with the murder of the Alpha. William Reese is determined he will heal the pack by taking leadership, but in doing so he pits himself against enemies he may not be able to beat.
Chloe has been pulled from her home and thrust into a world she never knew existed, a world her father was careful to keep hidden from her. She is now threatened with a gruesome death by terrifying creatures from legend.
Somehow William and Chloe must find a way to work together to stay alive against the forces determined to see them dead.
See the trailer on YouTube here.
Second Circle Press
Dedication
To RTN, you did it, I’m proud of you. This one is for you in so many ways. – AJ
Dedicated to Lia for encouraging me from the beginning to actually write this story and to AJ for giving me the kick in the ass I needed to actually do it and for giving voice to Chloe – Ryan
The Moon Forged Trilogy:
1. I Am The Alpha
2. Omega’s Run
3. Hunter’s End
Prologue
Chloe
“Good-bye Girl, I’ll catch you later,” I rolled my eyes at my best friend Tabitha and we parted ways in front of Twist, a swanky club in lower Manhattan. It was pushing on toward three in the morning and I was worn out. It’d been a night of dancing, drinking, and just too much fun. I breathed deep the crisp, fall night air and heels clipping sharply against the cracked sidewalk, jostled my way past the corner and to a clear spot of curb.
“Taxi!” I shouted cleanly, hand upraised and one of the yellow cabs slid up in front of me. Wow, that had been way easier than I’d thought it would be. I tried to slip across the vinyl seat, the backs of my thighs sticking where my short skirt didn’t cover. Ew, gross. I rattled off my address which was only forty or so blocks away. I could have walked it, but not in these heels after dancing all night!
The cab I’d hailed pulled smoothly into traffic and I sighed. The cabbie didn’t care to make small talk and I didn’t either. I was already planning on a nice long shower and my nice soft bed. I couldn’t wait for them, in fact. My makeup felt like it was sitting on my face like a painted mask and I was ready to be clean and to sleep. I’d had a blast though, and I was all smiles when we pulled up in front of my brownstone, well, my dad’s brownstone.
He was a CPA for the city’s elite and had been thrilled when his little girl had chosen law; he hadn’t been so thrilled when it’d turned out to be criminal law with an emphasis on prosecution, but we’d come to an agreement of sorts. It wasn’t perfect but it was getting me what I wanted, which was a degree in criminal justice. He didn’t need to know the particulars.
He’d wanted me to be a defense attorney, where the money was at, but a degree in criminal law was a degree in criminal law. He didn’t need to know I’d crossed my fingers behind my back when I’d made the promise to go defense versus prosecution. Once I was graduated, I could do what I wanted. It wasn’t the first thing my father and I disagreed on and it probably wouldn’t be the last.
I paid the cabbie and took the stairs at a sharp clip, letting myself into the brownstone and powering down the alarm. I sighed out and dropped my keys on the table by the door, ditching my fashionable, small clutch alongside them.
“God, I just want out of these shoes,” I groaned to no one in particular. I relished slipping the heels off my feet and digging my toes into the plush carpet as I took the stairs two at a time. I was being exceedingly lazy, stripping as I headed towards the bath, letting my clothes fall as I made my way across my bedroom to the private bathroom. I wouldn’t leave them, I would just pick them up after my shower. It was a tiny, illicit little thrill since Dad would have blown his top to see the mess I’d left strewn across the floor on my way across. I was in my twenties and he still treated me like I was eight, the curse of being an only child, I guess.
The water sluiced hot and delicious down my skin as I stepped into the spray and worked the pins out of my French twist, my red hair foaming around my face until I got it wet, the vibrant, fiery locks turning deep auburn as they soaked to the ends. I shampooed, conditioned, scrubbed myself free of makeup, and rinsed in record time.
Thank God for being clean! I wanted nothing more than to pick up and crawl into bed. I shut off the water, grabbed the first towel and wrapped my hair. I dried off quickly using another and shrugged into my nightgown, satin and lace and a cream that complimented my coloring. I liked sexy night things. Even if I were too damned busy with school for anyone to see them, they weren’t really for a prospective boyfriend, they were for me.
I slipped the matching satin robe over my shoulders and let it hang open. Some hand cream that smelled like peaches and a brisk rub of the towel on my hair and I could get rid of it with the rest of the dirty laundry down the chute in the hall.
I sang to myself softly, one of the songs from the club and snapped out the bathroom light. I walked out into the bedroom and stopped short, a short, startled scream escaping my mouth. I pressed my hands to my chest, over my heart as if to contain it and blinked, willing it to be a shadow, and it was, or it appeared to be.
It’d looked like the shadow of a man, standing just outside the French doors to my balcony. The shadow of a man, standing just outside my bedroom…
Chapter 1
William
I hated New York. I hated cities period, always have and I always will. The stinking, noisy, clinging press of humanity rushing about their meaningless, insignificant lives as if whatever they had to do was the most important thing in the world. They were missing the point.
It was here, in New York, that I nearly died so many years ago. And of course, it would just have to be here, that I would have to come to bring sanity back to my family. And it would all end with her…
I watched her through the windshield as she called for her cab, my hands gripping the steering wheel so tightly that an audible creaking sound filled my car. She was shorter than I’d expected, adorable really, but it was her. She definitely matched the picture. I wasn’t sure how I felt about the fact that my initial assessment from that photo of her had been dead on. She was just as hot in person as she was in the pictures.
Seeing her now, I realized I would tower over her by more than half a foot. She had vibrant red hair that glimmered copper fire under the street lights and eyes that looked like they were a light color, but from the distance I was at, I couldn’t really tell. I knew from the photos that they were blue, though. A vibrant blue like a summer’s midday sky.
When the cab pulled away from the curb I started my car and pulled into traffic behind them. I held back a few car lengths. I didn’t expect the cabby to be looking for people following him but with who her father was? She might be. I couldn’t be certain, so I used every trick I knew to stay out of sight, to blend in. I’d had plenty of practice with that over the years.
In the end, the cab pulled over outside of a two story brownstone to let her out. She paid the man as I cruised by and I drove around the block until I could park just around the corner from her place.
At just after three in the morning there wasn’t a lot of foot traffic in such a quiet residential neighborhood, not a whole lot of parking either. Still, I was in luck and everything worked out for me as I walked around to the back garden wall of her building and looked up. The room, her room, lit up in a blaze of light from the inside. The room with the balcony that butted up right against a large old tree. This was almost going to be too easy!
I grinned and glanced ar
ound, unable to believe my luck so far. Everything was falling into place just soand I was incredibly nervous that luck wasn’t going to hold. It was amazing to me that the household would be so unguarded despite the identity of the people living in it. There wasn’t a soul in sight either way down the street and I couldn’t see any cameras. I leapt the low garden wall easily and crouched down beneath the balcony, at the base of the tree.
A moment later, when I was sure it was clear, I jumped, the tense muscles of my legs propelling me up, through the air, until my hands just cleared the bottom of the balcony ledge and I was able to grab on. I didn’t even need the tree but it provided great cover from the street or any night owl neighbors across the way.
I pulled myself up and over, the sound of a shower running inside easily drowning out the whisper of my coat sliding over the railing as I dropped onto the balcony. The French doors were locked but that was easily dealt with, all I needed was a credit card for the old latch. I jimmied the lock and slipped into the room, my bare feet making no sound on the plush carpet.
The scent of her filled the elegant bedroom. Sweat, makeup, alcohol and the tantalizing odor of summer peaches. Queen sized canopied bed to my right, desk to my left just next to the French doors that’d let me into the room. The bathroom lay directly ahead of me and through the half open door I could just make out her silhouette through the frosted glass of her shower door. My body moved of its own accord for a moment, taking a half step toward the bathroom before I stopped and forced my focus back onto more important and immediate concerns.
I moved as fast as I could, firmly keeping my attention away from the bathroom. Her closet was easy enough, drawers as well. I pulled out a few different things, not paying significant attention to what but I made sure there were full outfits, at least. These were thrown roughly and hastily into an overnight bag that I found hanging off the back of a chair and the whole lot was tossed over the railing on the balcony and into a flowerbed down below. The sound of the shower shut off and I shut the balcony doors with barely a whisper, leaving me on the outside.
She was singing when she came out of her bathroom, and I distinctly heard her short scream as she obviously caught sight of me, or at least my shadow. I leaped into the branches of the tree that grew next to the building, silently cursing myself.
Dumbass, dumbass, dumbass, I swore mentally. How could you be so careless? Father taught you better than that.
I held still, waiting for her to scream again or to go for the phone to call the police, either action would require I move extremely fast. Instead, she did the opposite of what I expected, she cautiously opened the doors and stepped out onto the balcony. I was hidden well and I knew it, so I held still and waited for her to go back inside.
I was tempted just to take her right there, but the area was too well lit between the streetlights and the lights in the bedroom blazing away like they were. If she made enough noise before I got to her, someone could and would easily spot us. It was too dangerous, too half assed, and it was better to wait… to wait until she was in bed and I had the cover of darkness to aid me. Another thing my Father taught me? That I should spend more time considering all the angles if I wanted to stand a chance. That I needed to be more patient.
She spent several more minutes outside with me. She looked around the balcony, even going so far as to lean over the railing to look down and out over the garden wall. She was trying to check out the street below, there was no one there, of course; the culprit was above her. As with most people, she never thought to look up. I had to smile to myself, then she really gave me something to smile about. When she straightened up hands flat to the stone railing, I had an exceptional view straight down the front of her slinky sleepwear, her arms bracketing her lush tits and squeezing them together for me. Oh, that was nice! A wave of heat ran through me and I forced it down with a ruthless determination. Now was not the time, nor was she the person. Jesus. I settled in, disgruntled with myself and forced myself to be patient. I waited for her to return to her room. My luck held out, she went inside and she hadn’t spotted her bag down there. I let out a slow breath, relieved I was still on track and finally, after what felt like hours, the woman turned out the lights and got her ass to bed.
Still, I waited. It took time for her to settle in and to stop fidgeting. I mean, fear is a powerful motivator to keep someone from settling down right away and I’d caused her quite a jolt. But as the minutes wore on, she calmed down, the rustling of her unrest stopped and so did her random mutterings which were just that side of inaudible to me, damn it. It would have been nice to know what she’d been muttering about. The scent of peaches lingered in the air behind her even now, for all the time it took for her to settle in. I waited for it to dissipate completely before I made any kind of move.
The air outside was still, crisp and cool, edging toward chilly, and though she had been startled by the brief glimpse she got of me through her curtains, she had left her balcony doors, not only unlocked but slightly ajar. They would have been no barrier to me even if she had locked them, but I found it convenient that she still obviously felt so safe and secure in her own home.
This was one of my favorite parts of the hunt. The moment just before the kill, or the capture in this particular case. She wasn’t asleep. Almost, but not quite, her breathing hadn’t deepened enough, the cadence was wrong for true sleep. My patience had run out though and so I moved with the silence of a shadow, slipping down from the tree and through the open door. I stood, for a moment, looking down at her. She lay on her back, the light robe tossed to the foot of her bed. Her night gown clung to every curve of her in a thoroughly distracting manner where her blankets didn’t cover her body. I was pretty sure she wasn’t wearing anything else under the nightgown.
While I waited, I watched, taking in every minute detail. Admittedly, I stood there with a raging hard on growing in my jeans while I did it. I was waiting for that moment, that one precise moment that was one of the sweetest sensations in the world. The moment she realized subconsciously that she was being watched, that the predator had found her and it was already too late.
The thing about the human mind that so many people have forgotten is that not long ago, on an evolutionary scale, human beings were ruled far more by their instincts than their rational minds. And to this day, in the back of their brains it still resides there. That instinct, that fight or flight reflex that lives on in the primal, animalistic, part of the mind. That part of deeply ingrained humanity that you all try so hard to push down and suppress. The instinct. The sixth sense that tells you when you’re being watched. That tells you when you’re being hunted.
She didn’t disappoint me. Her eyes snapped open and locked on mine. In that very instant I moved, lightning quick, my left leg came up and I leaned over, letting my leg fall heavily across her middle. My left hand covered her mouth as she opened it to scream and my right slipped under the blankets, up her leg, and beneath her nightgown. It landed directly on the juncture between her thighs. I smiled a very unfriendly smile. I was right. No underwear. I was also intentionally being a prick, watching the fear unfurl in those pretty blue eyes. I put pressure on her pubic bone, pressing her ass into the yielding mattress beneath her and leaned in close.
“Don’t scream… and if you value your life? Don’t bite me either. There are things swimming around in my blood that you really wouldn’t want in your system,” I grinned at her and I knew it was intimidating. I wanted it to be. “You’re going to have to pay for the sins of the Father, Little Huntress,” I breathed.
She struggled, of course. They always do. She screamed, of course, they always do that too, but my hand over her mouth kept the noise from being any kind of audible, and there was no way she would be escaping my grip. I was far stronger than I looked and her slight build was no match for my larger one. She threw her weight around anyways, as much as she could but she weighed all of a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet and with my hand between her legs, the lev
erage I had kept her from doing much, if anything, but kick her feet ineffectually.
I waited, calmly, until she had worn herself out in her struggles. Her fists beat at my shoulder but she was unable to move me. Eventually she fell still. Her breath coming hard and fast, nostrils flaring and relaxing rhythmically.
For a wonder, there were no tears. I’d expected tears. Usually people cry when they’re as afraid as she seemed to be. Or maybe she was angry. Come to think of it girls cried more when they were angry. Whatever the case, she hadn’t tried to bite me, so there was that.
I looked down at her, acutely aware of the weight of her breasts against my leg and the pleasant warmth of her body beneath me. Without thinking my fingers moved between her legs, going for an even more intimate touch than I already had on her, but I quickly stilled them. That wasn’t why I was here.
“You’re not going to scream if I take my hand away, now are you?” I asked, calmly.
There was nothing for a moment as she glared at me, but then she shook her head, just slightly.
“Good girl,” I took my hand away from her mouth and wiped her saliva on the sheets next to her.
“Who the fuck are you?” she snapped as soon as my hand was away. “What the fuck do you want?”
“Who am I?” I grinned at her again, I couldn’t help it. That was always one of the first questions asked. Who was I? Did it really matter if they knew who I was when I was usually about to kill them? Would it make any difference to them to know who had them at his mercy?
“You don’t really need to know who I am,” I said. “Not right now at least. As for what do I want? Oooohh… now that, that, my dear, is a much better question.” I jumped into the air, turned and came down straddling her waist faster than she could track it or react. I grabbed her wrists as she shrieked and tried to hit me and I pinned them to the bed above her with one hand, re-covering her mouth with the other. I leaned down until we were practically nose to nose.