Mated to Her Alpha Instructor (Eileen and Regis) novel Chapter 17

In the badly lit corridor, my hand still gripping the frame hard enough that the wood creaked under my fingers, a faint trace of her scent lingered, now soured with fear and grief, and it wrapped around my throat like a noose.

Valdor whined in my mind, pacing restlessly. She needs us to explain. She thinks we’re rejecting her—

“Get the word out,” I said, low and rough. “She’s terrified. If I chase her now, she’ll only see me as a threat.”

But I could feel his pain radiating through our shared consciousness—the mate bond pulling taut between us and the girl who was running from us as fast as her legs could carry her. Every instinct screamed at me to follow, to corner her somewhere safe and make her listen, to hold her until she understood that I had never, would never, think of her as a mistake.

I saw the look in her eyes just before she fled. Pure panic. The kind of fear that came from believing you were about to lose something you’d never really had in the first place.

I exhaled slowly, released my death grip on the doorframe, and turned back into my office. The mug she’d abandoned sat on the corner of my desk, still half-full of cooling coffee, and the sight of it—so small, so ordinary—made something crack open in my chest.

She’d been sitting right there. My mate. The girl who’d saved my life in the Whispering Woods, who’d knelt in the dirt and pressed her hands to my wounds and poured her own energy into healing me even though she had no wolf of her own to sustain the effort.

And now that I’d found her—now that I knew her name, her face, the way her voice trembled when she was afraid—she wanted to pretend it had never happened.

I moved to the window, braced my hands on the sill, and stared out at the training yard below. Students were filtering back to their dormitories, their laughter drifting up through the late afternoon air, oblivious to the storm raging inside me.

“Handled that badly,” I said aloud, more to myself than to Valdor. “I should have been gentler. Should have found better words.”

Or maybe, Valdor said quietly, you should have told her the truth. That she’s ours. That we’ll never let her go.

“Kieran,” I said finally, my voice quieter than I intended. “What happens when a wolfless person gets marked by an Alpha? When they can’t bite back to complete the bond?”

The silence stretched between us. When Kieran finally spoke, his voice had lost all traces of humor.

“That’s… a very specific question, Regis. Why are you asking?”

He paused, then I heard him shifting his weight, considering his words.

“Finally, I had a distant aunt. She was poisoned with silver when she was young, which caused her wolf not to manifest. At nineteen, she met her fated mate. A young Beta. He marked her during her heat.”