His Defiant Contract Mate: The Undercover Alpha's Secret

Destiney POV:

I held my five-year-old daughter Daisy tightly in my arms, sitting in the cramped bedroom of my family's old house. Through the thin walls, the harsh voices of my adoptive brother Glen and his wife Consuelo echoed loudly.

"I am pregnant, Glen! We need money!" Consuelo shrieked. "Collin Mckenzie is willing to pay a fifty-thousand-crystal bride price for your sister. He does not even care that she has a bastard child. I am going to see him tomorrow to set the wedding date! With that money, we can buy a bigger house for our new baby!"

Glen's voice was muffled but helpless. He had a crippled leg, and finding a wife had been incredibly hard for him. He used to treat me so well, which was the only reason I had endured Consuelo's insults for so long. I could not be the reason their marriage fell apart.

But I could never marry Collin. He was a notorious playboy with a history of violence and sick, twisted desires for young girls. I looked down at Daisy's sweet sleeping face, my heart aching. I had to protect her from that monster.

Desperate, I pulled out my phone and thought of the man I had saved five years ago. Taking a chance, I typed a message. "Can you marry me?"

To my surprise, his reply came almost instantly, asking for details. I did not want to hide anything. "I have a five-year-old daughter. I just need a married status to solve a huge problem. I will not cling to you, and you do not need to support my child. Once my trouble is resolved, I will divorce you and will not delay your future happiness."

His response was brief. "See you at the Mistfall Blood-Contract Registry tomorrow at nine-thirty in the morning."

The next morning, I shoved open the heavy glass door of the Mistfall Blood-Contract Registry, my fingers twisting the faded hem of my trench coat as freezing wind bit into my neck.

Inside my pocket, my phone vibrated violently.

The screen flashed with the name of my sister-in-law, Consuelo Cain.

I hit reject with a trembling thumb, my stomach knotting tightly.

Consuelo and my greedy stepmother Rosa had already promised me to Collin Mckenzie, the notorious playboy heir of the Mckenzie Pack, in exchange for a fifty-thousand-crystal bride price.

Near the lobby entrance, two yellow-haired thugs in leather jackets craned their necks, scanning the crowd.

They were Collin's hounds, sent to drag me into Mckenzie territory before sundown.

I bit my lower lip and slipped behind a massive stone pillar, checking my battered wristwatch.

Three minutes left until the agreed time.

If the man didn't show up, my only option was to take my five-year-old daughter Daisy, who suffered from congenital bloodline depletion, and flee into the lethal wilderness crawling with packless Rogues.

Suddenly, the temperature in the hall plummeted.

A sharp, aggressive scent of winter cedar mixed with frost surged into my nostrils.

I jerked my chin up and collided with a pair of piercing dark-gray eyes.

A tall, broad-shouldered man in a worn black jacket strode toward me.

Every heavy step he took radiated a battlefield pressure that forced the ordinary werewolves in the lobby to lower their heads and scramble out of his path. I assumed he must have been a soldier who bled on the borders.

I drew a sharp breath and stepped out from the shadow, my voice dry but steady.

"Kane Gutierrez? We met at the border hospital five years ago. You agreed to my proposal?"

Kane halted half a step away, towering over me at over six-foot-two.

He didn't utter a word, simply pulling a chipped identity crystal card from his pocket and slapping it onto the registration counter.

The elderly Beta clerk glanced at the tags reading "Retired, Landless, Inner Wolf Lost" on Kane's file, a sneer curling his lip before he tossed two blood-contract forms onto the desk.

In werewolf society, losing one's inner wolf meant dropping to the very bottom of the gene hierarchy, no better than a genetic defective like me.

I picked up the steel pen and handed it to him.

As my fingertips brushed the rough skin of his knuckles, a violent jolt of static electricity shot up my spine.

My heart hammered against my ribs, and a strange, warm fullness flooded the hollow ache in my chest, as if a missing piece of my soul had snapped into place.

I yanked my hand back in shock.

It had to be a hallucination caused by sheer panic. Everyone in Mistfall knew I was a wolfless defective born without an inner wolf, completely incapable of triggering the Moon Goddess's mate recognition ritual.

Kane's dark-gray eyes darkened at the contact, and he irritably tugged at his collar, briefly exposing a jagged, silver-bullet scar right above his collarbone.

Keeping his face blank, he signed his name across the parchment in swift strokes, his voice rumbling like a cello.

"Eight thousand dollars, plus room and board, correct?"

I nodded hard, pulling eighty crumpled hundred-dollar bills from my canvas bag and pushing the stack toward him.

"Here is the advance payment."

Kane stared at the pile of small bills, the corner of his eye twitching faintly before he pinched the cash between two fingers and shoved it into his jacket pocket.

"I am so sorry for using you like this," I whispered, feeling deeply apologetic. "I promise our marriage will only last for one month. I will not take a single crystal of your property when we divorce."

"Starting today, you are my legal mate, and Collin has no right to touch me," I whispered, clutching the red-stamped blood contract against my chest as a long breath left my lungs.

Across the lobby, Collin's two yellow-haired thugs spotted us and charged over cursing, only to freeze dead in their tracks when Kane shot them a frigid, murderous glare.

Whimpering like whipped dogs, both thugs spun around and bolted out the exit.

I looked up at Kane with genuine gratitude.

"Thank you. Come with me to the old Aguilar house first. I need to announce our bond to my stepmother and sister-in-law."

Kane let out a noncommittal grunt, shoved his hands into his pockets, and walked out the glass doors ahead of me, leaving me staring at his rigid back.

Kane POV:

Walking out of the registry, I stepped out of Destiney's line of sight and headed straight into the alley shadow where a modified, armor-plated black SUV idled.

I pulled the door open, and Furman Nash, my Beta and chief executive assistant at the Gutierrez Apex Syndicate, adjusted the gold-rimmed monocle over his right eye, bowing his head to hand me a classified folder.

"Alpha, are you really going to play house with this low-ranking woman just to recover that mythril rune watch?" Furman projected his voice directly into my mind through our Pack Mind-Link.

In our kind, wolves of the same Pack communicate silently through soul-bound telepathy, a channel a wolfless woman like Destiney could never tap into.

I leaned back against the leather seat, shook a cigarette from my pack, and lit it, inhaling deeply before answering in my head.

"That watch holds the supreme defense codes of the Gutierrez empire, and her little mural shop's IP address is our only lead."

I felt nothing but disdain for my new wife. I had seen countless women throw themselves at me for my wealth. She was using her life-saving grace from five years ago to blackmail me into marriage, obviously aiming for my massive family fortune. I despised women with hidden agendas. If it were not for retrieving my lost mythril watch, I would have just given her a large sum of money to disappear.

She was so hypocritical, setting a one-month contract limit. Did she really think she could captivate me in a month and make me refuse to divorce her?

My thumb rubbed the spot on my hand where her skin had brushed mine, my blood still simmering from the deafening roar my giant Dire Wolf had unleashed inside my skull. Mine!

All five fated mate reactions, the intoxicating scent of moonlit grass, the racing pulse, the electric sparks, the soul's peace, and my wolf's possessive roar, had hit me at once.

This dirt-poor, stubborn gold-digging woman was my fated Luna. This had to be the Moon Goddess's cruelest joke.

Yet five years ago, I had nearly bled out on a full moon night when my watch was stolen, and I refused to let primal instinct blind me to a potential trap.

"Monitor every cent moving through her accounts," I commanded coldly, crushing the burning cigarette butt into the ashtray. "If she's a gold-digging thief who engineered this to climb into the syndicate, I'll snap her neck myself."

I shoved the SUV door open and walked back into the freezing wind toward my "cheap" new wife, who was waiting by the curb for the city bus. Once the one-month deadline was up, I would ruthlessly throw her away.