The Alpha's Forbidden Vow novel Chapter 30

POV: Isabella

I lay perfectly still, trapped in his iron grip, my mind a whirlwind of conflicting emotions.

This was it.

The moment of his ultimate vulnerability.

The man I wanted, the most powerful Alpha in the territories, was clinging to me, broken and desperate.

It was a victory.

But it tasted like ash in my mouth.

Because he wasn't clinging to *me*.

He was clinging to a ghost, a fantasy he was projecting onto my face.

“Selene,” he mumbled again, his hot, whiskey-scented breath ghosting across my cheek.

His thumb stroked the back of my hand, a gesture of desperate, possessive tenderness that was like a razor blade against my skin.

“Why?” he whispered to my shoulder, his voice thick with a pain so raw it was almost obscene. “Why did you run away from me?”

I remained silent, letting him pour out the poison that had been consuming him for five years.

“I looked for you,” he continued, his words slurring together. “Every day… for five years… I looked everywhere for you.”

His grip tightened, his Alpha strength immense even in his drunken state.

“And I find you… and you’re with *him*. A human.”

The word was a growl of pure, primal disgust.

“He touches you. He makes you smile.”

A low, wounded sound, half-sob and half-snarl, rumbled in his chest. It was the sound of a god brought to his knees by a mortal wound.

“And the boy… our boy… he calls him ‘Eli’.”

He said the name as if it were a curse.

“He’s my son, Selene. He has my eyes. Why is he smiling at another man?”

His questions were not for me to answer. They were for the ghost he was seeing.

He pulled me even closer, his entire body shaking with the force of his anguish.

Just as I thought it was over, he spoke one last time.

A final, sleepy whisper from the depths of his soul.

A name.

“Selene…”

And then he was gone, lost to a drunken, dreamless sleep, leaving me alone in the dark with his ghost.

I lay there for a long time, listening to his breathing.

I looked at his face, so deceptively peaceful in sleep.

The face of the man who held my future in his hands, but whose heart would never, ever be mine.

And in the quiet, sterile hotel room, my jealousy and my ambition cooled, hardening into a new, unshakeable resolve.

If I could not have his heart, I would settle for his crown.

And I would burn to the ground anyone who stood in my way.

Especially her.