It didn’t take me more than a few seconds to smell him. The strong smell of musk and wood. A smell that stormed my wolf side and made me want to nest my head in his wide chest and covered by black silk robes. For a moment, I thought it was a creature capable of becoming the deepest desire of its victim. He would not be the first of that kind to cross my path.

However, my senses did not deceive me and I knew he was a wolf. Or rather, an alpha wolf, watching me with intense eyes and a predatory calm so characteristic of our race. I swallowed it dry. Worse than drunk humans, there was only one thing I should fear even more: alphas.

“Please let me go,” I begged again, resisting the temptation to sniff his smell in the air because it was too delicious for my instincts.

“Don’t beg,” he said in a harsh tone, and I immediately straightened up. An alpha. My own body reacted to his natural command. “Don’t be afraid of this unclean kind of human, it will give too much power to their ego. You can’t let them belittle you and pursue you that way.”

I meant that it was very easy to speak when you were simply the alpha of some pack. I meant that the world was cruel to wolves, but even more so to women wolves. But something told me that I couldn’t convince that alpha that I was naturally defenseless from the moment I was abandoned by my pack.

By the way, if he had known that I had been exiled, he might never have helped me. Wolves could be more cruel to their species than humans. I swallowed everything I wanted to say and gave a trembling but pleasant smile to the subject.

“I don’t know how I can thank you for your help.”

“You can thank me by leaving as soon as possible.”

I was on alert again, feeling the hair on the back of my neck shiver. I looked around, the few humans on the sidewalk had already moved away. The streets were silenced again and only the siren distant from an ambulance was heard. Humans died all the time, so that alpha would hardly have problems taking the lives of some of them. But his tone made me worried.

“Why are you saying that?”

The stranger arched his eyebrows slightly.

“With the number of attacks against our race in recent days, it is necessary to be too dumb or too distracted not to realize the risks of walking alone in this city.”

“Humans don’t scare me,” I said in a firm tone, but I trembled when I noticed the blood of fallen men poking at my feet.

“Your smell tells me something else,” he said, opening a kind of cruel smile. “But you don’t have to worry about walking, I can give you a ride.”

So he moved a step, leaving a way for me to pass by him and leave, but also for me to see the car from where he had left. It was the second car, with open doors and at least two occupants who watched us with curiosity.

Warning signs sounded in my mind. Human bodies lay at my feet, torn by the claws that the man now hid in the pockets of his dark pants. He was an alpha, for God’s sake. Nothing could be stronger than him. There was a pack in their pursuit, men who could be as strong as them, and very lethal.

Going with him would be the same as asking to have done whatever those humans intended with me. I knew how alphas used to take advantage of omegas. I knew that many were interested in our period of heat to ensure their offspring and abandon so many other wolves out there. I knew and kept as far away from them as possible.

No matter how much my body felt at ease and with a desire to touch his body, I would never hold myself of my own free will in the same environment as an unknown alpha. They were dangerous. And I had seen what that man had done in seconds.

“I prefer to keep walking,” I warned gently.

The alpha shrugged, in a gesture that seemed more of impatience than carefree. He didn’t know me, he didn’t owe me anything. On the contrary, I owed him something, and that’s why I wanted to leave before he asked for something I couldn’t refuse. I still felt cornered and a little desperate, and maybe he noticed it in my smell because he made a point of looking a little less weird.

“Then go,” he said with a slight hand movement, exposing fingers that ended with ordinary nails and not claws. “Try not to get into trouble on the way and don’t look back.”

My body acted before my mind, and when I realized it, I was already going around the street to escape that enigmatic look of the alpha. I didn’t know what the hell had just happened. I didn’t know where he had come from, where he would be going, why he had defended me. But I got the scene of his attack on humans in my head.

Mia would like to hear about that. There was no one in the world but Mia who was addicted to repeating in my head how much those humans deserved a lesson for making our lives so miserable. No one like her understood my fear and the way I felt unable to fight back any human evil.

No one but my best friend helped me understand how an alpha could have taken responsibility for a problem of mine and helped me. And I gave a smile that I didn’t know very well why it was happening when I thought about that alpha. Thinking that, somehow very strange, I had the feeling of comfort near him. Something that our species hardly felt even inside its pack.