Sinful Affairs (MM Erotica collection)

ALPHA GREGORY's POV.

The cry cut through the wind like a plea. It was thin, repeated, and fragile.

"Help...please help..."

It lodged itself under my ribs. They were three words pulling at something I had plastered over years ago. My control. Order. And the cold logic of an Alpha who was always on top.

I should have ignored it. I should have let Mateo follow the sound and stayed with the war plans, the maps, and the council that wanted a leader who wasn't weak.

Instead I rose.,

Mateo's ears twitched. He looked at me for a heartbeat before answering the pull in his own way. He shifted into his Wolf form. I watched him in his ash-grey wolf form vanish toward the cliff and the hollow beyond it.

After that, the forest seemed to hold its breath but the voice came again, smaller, as if something in the trees had learned how to sound like pleading.

My Wolf stirred beneath my skin and paced. The scent came after the sound-warm iron, wet earth, and under it a softer, sweeter thing that tightened my chest: fear braided with something untamed.

My legs moved as I ran into the woods. Branches slapped slightly at my face. The forest condensed to my pounding heart and the pull of that scent. As I passed a big tree, I caught a glimpse of her on the right side.

She crouched there like a broken thing, her hands over her head, long hair matted with blood. When I dropped to my knees, she flinched, shrinking inward as if the world would close over her.

I kept my hands open. "Easy," I said. My voice was a low thing I didn't entirely recognize. "I won't hurt you."

She whimpered. The sound was animal and human all at once. She pushed herself upright, her hands trembling, and for one heavy heartbeat, my jaw dropped.

His jaw, his Adam's apple, the way his shoulders fitted beneath skin, corrected me like a slap. He was a man. A wolfless male Omega.

"You?"

I breathed, because sighting him violated the tidy rules I had built around my life. I had sworn out loud, in the hush of the pack's older years that I would never claim again. The last claim had been a blade at my throat; the memory was an ache I hid beneath stone discipline.

But now, looking closely at his body, even in his current state, my knees nearly wobble and my heart skips a bit.

He looked at me with damp lashes, his brown pupils blown wide with panic. "Please...save me." The plea came out thin and ragged, and his body slumped as if the sound had taken the last of his strength.

I caught him before he fell. He was light and jagged in my arms, not the weight of anyone I had known to belong to us. His scent filled my nose-salt and copper and the faint, irresistible tang of something feral I couldn't