The Alpha's Forbidden Vow novel Chapter 1

POV: Selene

The Volkov manor was a palace of gleaming marble and shadowed history, and I was its ghost.

I wasn’t family, not really.

I was an orphan, taken in by the powerful Volkov family ten years ago after my own had perished.

The specific circumstances were a blur of trauma and whispers I learned not to question.

Alpha Roman Volkov provided me with a roof over my head and an education in a world of immense power.

In return, I was expected to be invisible.

I was the Volkovs’ act of charity, a reminder of their magnanimity, and a girl with no name of her own.

And to Zane Volkov, the Alpha heir and the dark, angry god of this household, I was less than a ghost.

I was a stain on his pure-blood world.

Tonight, he was home.

He’d been gone for six months at a brutal Alpha training camp in the frozen north.

The boy who left had been intimidating; the man who returned was a walking blizzard of raw power and cold fury.

His presence sucked the warmth from the air, his Alpha aura a physical weight that made the servants bow their heads and my own inner wolf flatten its belly to the floor in submission.

It was my nineteenth birthday.

No one remembered.

The celebratory dinner was for him.

I sat at the far end of the impossibly long dining table, a silent observer.

Zane sat at the head, a king on his throne.

His father, Roman, beamed with pride.

His mother, Seraphina, a woman of icy beauty and pure bloodline, fussed over him.

And Zane, with his storm-grey eyes and a jaw that looked carved from granite, never once glanced in my direction.

That deliberate, complete erasure was his specialty.

It was a silent, daily reminder that I did not belong.

Later, sleep was a million miles away.

His scent—pine, cold steel, and an intoxicatingly masculine musk—had invaded the entire manor.

It was a scent that my traitorous body had craved for years.

My throat was parched.

I crept from my room in the servant’s wing, my bare feet silent on the cold stone floors.

The main hallway was a cavern of shadows, lined with portraits of pure-blooded Volkov Alphas whose painted eyes seemed to follow me with silent contempt.

To get to the kitchens, I had to pass his door.

The insult was wrapped in a caress of pure filth.

He was fantasizing about me, about being inside me, about owning the charity case he pretended not to see.

A wave of dizziness washed over me, a nauseating mix of shame and a dark, coiling thrill.

“Gonna bend you over my desk,” he snarled to the empty room, his voice a low command.

“Fuck you from behind until you can’t remember your own name.”

“Gonna fill your pretty little cunt with my seed.”

The raw vulgarity of his words painted a picture in my mind so vivid it made my knees buckle.

A hot, liquid shame pooled between my legs.

This was the real Zane, the feral beast he kept chained beneath a mask of cold indifference.

This beast was obsessed with me.

A final, violent groan of my name, a harsh, shuddering release, and then a silence so profound it was more terrifying than the noise had been.

I stood trembling in the dark hallway, my world completely upended.

He didn’t just see me.

He saw me, he wanted me, and he hated himself for it.

And that was the most dangerous thing of all.