The Alpha's Forbidden Vow novel Chapter 101

POV: Selene

I returned to the cave as the first rays of dawn painted the sky a soft, pearly grey.

My hands were full of the fresh, damp Sunstone Moss that Cora had requested, my heart full of a fragile, tentative hope.

The moment I stepped past the curtain of ivy, I knew something had changed.

The air in the cave was different.

The heavy scent of sickness and fever was gone, replaced by the clean, powerful scent of a healthy, dominant Alpha.

My heart leaped with a joy so pure it was almost painful.

I hurried inside.

The scene that greeted me stopped me dead in my tracks.

Cora was sitting by the fire, a look of quiet exhaustion on her face.

And Zane was awake.

He was sitting up, his back against the cave wall, a fur blanket draped over his lap.

He was no longer the delirious, pain-wracked man I had left behind.

The angry black vines of the poison were completely gone from his skin, leaving only a faint, silvery scar on his shoulder.

His strength had returned. He radiated a calm, controlled power that was breathtaking.

But as my eyes met his, a cold, terrifying dread washed over me, extinguishing the flicker of hope in my heart.

His eyes.

They were his familiar, stormy grey. But the torment, the raw vulnerability, the desperate, all-consuming love I had seen in them… it was all gone.

They were clear.

And completely, utterly strange.

He looked at me, his gaze sweeping over my body from head to toe. It was not the look of a lover.

He remembered who he was. He remembered he was an Alpha.

He just didn't remember why he loved me.

He looked at the Mating Mark on my neck, which was now a permanent, silvery symbol on my skin.

His eyes narrowed, a look of primal, instinctual ownership flashing across his face.

“You are mine,” he said.

The words were the same as the ones he’d whispered in his delirium.

But this time, they were not a plea of love.

They were a statement of fact. A declaration of ownership.

And in his cold, strange eyes, I saw no love.

Only the chilling, possessive certainty of a king who had just found a piece of his property.