The Alpha's Forbidden Vow novel Chapter 38

POV: Zane

The aftermath was a suffocating silence, broken only by the sound of her soft, ragged breaths as sleep finally claimed her.

I lay beside her in the narrow servant’s bed, my body still joined with hers, the scent of our mingled sweat and sex a thick, intoxicating cloud in the small room.

My wolf, the primal beast inside me, was finally quiet.

It was sated, content, purring with the deep, instinctual satisfaction of having claimed its mate.

It had branded her with our scent, filled her with our seed. She was ours again.

But the man, the Alpha, was drowning in a fresh wave of self-loathing.

I looked at her face in the sliver of moonlight filtering through the cheap curtains.

Her cheeks were stained with tears, her brow furrowed in a troubled sleep.

She looked fragile, broken.

And I was the one who had broken her. Again.

I had taken her not with passion, but with a jealous rage. I had used her body to punish her for a crime I had only witnessed from afar.

I was a monster.

The memory of the hotel room, of Isabella’s fake shy act, of the blood on the sheets, crashed back into my mind.

The scent of her perfume, the shame, the guilt of my own perceived betrayal.

I had come here and taken Selene, my true mate, my other half, while my own soul was stained with another female.

I was filthy. I was unworthy.

The wolf inside me didn’t care about human concepts of fidelity. It only knew that this was our mate.

But I cared.

My honor as an Alpha, the code I had lived by, felt like a joke.

I gathered my discarded clothes from the floor, my movements silent in the sleeping manor.

I gave her one last, long look, memorizing the way the moonlight painted her skin in shades of silver and shadow.

Then I turned my back on the only warmth, the only peace I had ever known, and walked out the door.

I retreated to my own massive, cold, and empty wing of the manor.

I stood under a scalding shower, scrubbing my skin, but I couldn't wash her scent away.

I couldn't wash away the feeling of her.

Back in my own bed, the king-sized mattress felt like a barren wasteland.

I was alone, haunted by the ghost of what I had just done, and what I believed she had done to me.

The chasm between us had never felt wider, or more agonizingly deep.