The First Alpha

  Thank you for purchasing this ebook!

  Please take the time to leave honest feedback in the form of a review when you're done. I very much care what my readers think and take your reviews into consideration when planning new stories.

  If you’d like keep up to date with the latest K A Taylor releases you can sign up for my newsletter. Just click here or head to the following URL: http://eepurl.com/EBk7j

  The First Alpha

  by

  K A Taylor

  Copyright © 2013 by K A Taylor

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  First Printing, 2013

  A Bangkok Nights Publication

  Time.

  They find it funny, the wolves. They laugh amongst themselves - some more bitterly than others - when the humans complain about it, as if they have the slightest clue what time really means. When they bitch and moan about waiting all day for the cable guy to show. When they whine about the endless wait until their summer vacation, and every other insignificant little slice of time for which a touch of patience is required. The wolves find these problems hilarious.

  Imagine waiting three thousand years.

  Adam waited. It was what he did. He'd already seen countless summers by the time Christ was raised on the cross. He rode with the Mongol hordes as they swept across the Central Asian steppe. He stalked the cobbled streets as the Black Plague conquered London, helping the sick pass more quickly to the beyond, and a blink of an eye later stood in the flames as the great city burned to the ground.

  He left Europe behind for the New World, waiting patiently as a nation grew. He fought for the natives to protect their lands, and then fought with the North to free the slaves. He went to war as Europe fell into darkness, and once more as the forces of evil tightened their grip on the world of humans and wolves alike. If nothing else, war passed the time. It helped him release his anger.

  You'd never notice him. Not if he didn't want you to. The wolves had long ago learned to keep to the shadows; they knew the price of stepping into the light. Adam knew safety lay in hiding his true nature, and over the centuries he'd become very good at it. He was careful enough to keep to himself, to avoid the bonds of family and the comfort of close friends. He knew he must roam from place to place, never settling long enough to arouse suspicion; never inviting the curious to wonder why he remained youthful as those around him aged. He'd gone by countless names, but Adam was the first.

  And he waited. He waited as one by one his people found their mates and passed into the blissful embrace of the mortal world. He waited and watched as new generations were born, and the old were finally allowed to die.

  And still his mate failed to come. He roamed the world, ever alert for the soul fated for him; the woman he'd waited three thousand years to find. She was out there, somewhere. He was certain of it. Few of his brethren had waited longer than a single millennium - a breath of wind in Adam's lifetime - before their mate came to join them. His must come soon. Any day now, he told himself.

  He'd told himself the same thing thousands of years earlier, in Aramaic.

  Any day now.

  *

  "Honestly, Cassie, I don't know why you bother studying this crap. Who gives the tiniest damn about the... what are you reading? 'The socio-economic factors involved in the French Revolution'? What the hell does that even mean?"

  Cassie sighed and laid down her pen, rolling her eyes at her friend. "Megan, weren't you in France back then? Can't you muster even the slightest interest in your own history?"

  "Girl, all I remember is being hungry all the time," Megan laughed as she leafed idly through the textbook. "As far as I'm concerned life began the moment McDonalds invented the Big Mac. Before that I don't want to remember."

  Cassie couldn't help but chuckle. She'd been having the same fight with her friend since they'd met a decade ago, and Megan never tired of mocking Cassie's fascination with the past.

  "Must I remind you once again that I'm not quite as old as you? I didn't get to see this the first time around, so I have to rely on the books."

  Megan tossed the book on the table and clucked dismissively. "These guys always get everything wrong, anyway. You want answers, come to the girl who lived through it. Go ahead, ask me any question you want."

  Cassie sighed and dragged the textbook back, flipping through the pages until she found her place. "Megan Millicent Darkfang," she said, keeping her eyes on the page, "if my finals included a question about which member of the Parisian aristocracy had the largest tool you'd be the first girl I'd ask, but when it comes to the political and economic causes of the French Revolution I'm afraid you'd be at something of a loss. Do you even know what happened?"

  Megan twirled a finger around a lock of her long, blonde hair and smiled at the memory. "No, I was in Marseille with a rather hunky longshoreman at the time. Damn, he had the finest, thickest --"

  "OK, OK, I get the picture!" yelled Cassie as Megan grinned mischievously. "I don't need to picture you banging your way through Southern France while I'm trying to study. I still have nightmares about your tribute to the returning soldiers of World War Two. If you could mate with a mortal the eastern seaboard would be littered with old baby boomers with confused memories of their absentee werewolf mother."

  "Well," Megan grinned, "a girl has to find herself a hobby to pass the time until her mate arrives. Anyway, the dashing Monsieur Stevedore had a huuuuuge cock, and he wasn't at all shy about where he put it. Speaking of which, how are things going with Mr. Sexy? Have you guys thrown down yet?"

  Cassie scowled, uncomfortable with the subject. "No, we haven't 'thrown down', and I'm quite happy to keep it that way until he demands it. Really, Meg, I'd rather not talk about it if it's all the same. Now, be quiet and let me study."

  Megan rocked back in her chair and began idly leafing through a book about the Civil War while Cassie gently simmered, annoyed at the reminder of a sore subject. 'Mr. Sexy' was Lucius Ironclaw, the new alpha of the powerful New York tribe, and a man Cassie Darkfang sorely wished she'd never laid eyes on since he'd claimed her as his three weeks earlier. Lucius was the kind of man who wasn't familiar with the word 'no'. He wasn't just an alpha. He was the son of an alpha, who was in turn the son of another, and another, and so on. In his veins flowed the blood of seven generations of leaders, and from the moment of his birth his alphadom had been predestined.

  Sometimes this sense of fate breeds benevolent leaders; men who are so assured of their standing that they can afford the luxury of kindness. Of gentleness, charity and mercy. Sometimes it does the opposite. Some men born into power grow spoiled and cruel, so sure of their superiority that they begin to see people as objects brought into this world only to serve them. They come to see violence as sport, with no empathy to rein in their dark side; no one to teach them that it's cruel to keep beating a foe long after he's lost consciousness.

  Lucius was the second kind.

  Not only that, but he was stunningly beautiful above all that privilege, and painfully aware of the fact. His toned, muscular body was the envy of his pack, and Cassie's arrival had ruffled more than a few feathers among the Ironclaw women, all of whom longed to be given the honor of laying beneath him and submitting to the ministrations of his famously impressive cock. She wished she could grant them all their wish.

  Cassie's first taste of her alpha's violence had come the day she'd arrived at the house when Lucius welcomed her arrival with a sacrifice of a large, majestic stag. Such an offering was traditional and perfectly accepta
ble among the Ironclaws - one was made every time Willem Darkfang visited for trade negotiations - but the convention was to use a sharp knife to sever the stag's jugular, allowing it a quick and merciful death. Lucius had shifted before the poor creature's eyes and chased it around its holding pen, hounding it until it collapsed with shock. Only when it could no longer run did Lucius allow it death, using his teeth to tear at its side until its steaming insides spilled from its still living body.

  Of course Cassie had had no choice but to smile politely through the display, and to thank her new alpha for such a generous offering when he allowed her to sample the meat. Any other response would have been an unthinkable insult to her host. She'd shifted and torn a small hunk of flesh from its side, almost gagging at the foul taste. The meat had been spoiled by the stag's fear, and Lucius had watched her eat with a knowing smile on his face. He was well aware he'd wasted the creature, but Cassie couldn't for the life of her work out what message he'd been trying to send as he ordered her to eat her fill.

  That had been the moment she'd begun to hate him. Now the thought of giving herself to him brought to her memory the foul taste of the stag; the gleeful cruelty in Lucius' eyes as he tore into the pathetic creature.

  So far, thankfully, she'd managed to keep herself chaste, but she knew Lucius was eager to take her virginity. She saw the hunger in his eyes, and she knew he couldn't be refused on the Long Night without starting all out war among the tribes. She also knew the attraction he had for her was nothing to do with lust. It wasn't even to do with pleasure.

  No, his hunger for her was just another symptom of his cruelty. He wanted to see her degraded before him. He wanted to dominate her, to force her to submit completely to his will and debase herself at his feet. That was how he got his kicks. She'd already felt it when he made her give him oral pleasure. He didn't seem to enjoy the experience so much as he enjoyed the knowledge that she despised it.

  For now, though, Cassie was just thankful he kept to the old traditions and spared her chastity. She'd be safe and unmolested until the moon was full, but until that dreaded night came she'd stare through the window of her luxurious prison and wish on every star in the sky that it would forever remain a crescent.

  "You're thinking about the longshoreman, right?"

  Cassie looked up from her her book and saw Megan staring at her with a sly smile. "No! What makes you say that?"

  "Well, you've been reading the same paragraph for the last five minutes. Either the words are too big for your dainty little girlish brain or you've got cock on your mind. So, which is it?"

  Cassie picked up her pencil and chewed on the pink hair of the plastic troll figure fitted over the eraser. "It's neither, Megan. People can think about more than just guys, you know." She fell silent, a little disturbed at how close to the mark her friend had been. In truth, her last thought before Megan's interruption was a wish that someone would swoop in and save her from Lucius. Who didn't matter. A 17th century French stevedore would be fine, so long as he was strong enough to fight off Lucius and protect her tribe from retribution.

  Cassie wouldn't even be in this mess were it not for her interfering mother, a woman who saw her twilight years as an opportunity to become the power broker of her tribe, a small pack who's territory in the south had left them the weakest of the Five Tribes since the Civil War had decimated their holdings. Evelyn Darkfang had been tugging the strings of Willem, her pack alpha, masterfully in the twenty three years since Cassie had been born and her mother had moved into the mortal realm.

  Now all of the Darkfangs cowered and fled when they saw that silver haired harridan take an interest in their dealings. Her move to mortality had, if anything, made her even more ruthless than she'd been as an immortal. She knew she only had twenty years left in her - twenty five, if she went easy on the Bombay gin for which she'd acquired an unquenchable thirst during the British occupation of India - and before she shuffled off this mortal coil she was determined to see the Darkfangs become a true force among the Five Tribes.

  And so Evelyn had arranged an alliance between the Darkfangs and the Ironclaws, using her own daughter as a bargaining chip in her Machiavellian power struggle. Of course she'd never be so brazen as to offer Cassie directly to Lucius, but she had her fiendish ways. Over the last few months she'd engineered enough 'accidental' meetings with the alpha that he'd had no choice but to notice Cassie, with her thick dark hair and her wholesome, plus sized beauty, and once his interest had been piqued it had been only a matter of time before he'd ordered her to move to his territory to prepare for their union.

  That was how Cassie found herself surrounded by books in the silent library of Lucius' summer house deep in the backwoods of upstate New York, struggling to complete her studies by correspondence, all alone but for Lucius' fleeting visits, Rutherford, her alpha's senile human captive, and Megan, the gutter-minded friend sent by Evelyn to ensure Cassie fulfill her duties as her alpha's faithful wife.

  Cassie dropped the heavy textbook on the table with a bang, suddenly feeling the walls of the library close in on her and the stale air thicken. She needed to escape this place, to pretend for a moment that she was free; that she was just a normal young woman studying for her bachelor's degree.

  "Come on, Meg," she said, pushing away from the table. "Time for a study break. Let's go get some fresh air."

  Megan followed obediently as Cassie stalked through the house towards the back door, her mind filled with the simple wish that her mother could resist the temptation to interfere in her affairs. Cassie wished she'd been allowed her to live the life she wanted: to meet a boy; to fall in love; to experience a normal life, and to make the stupid mistakes a young woman came to treasure in her later years.

  What Cassie didn't understand, however, was that Evelyn's plans for her daughter were far from recent. What she didn't know - couldn't know - was that Cassie's marriage to the cruel alpha had been decided two decades earlier, and that in her hands lay the future of the Darkfangs and the Ironclaws alike.

  She'd soon learn the terrible truth.

  *

  Things always seemed simpler in wolf form. The two padded across the cool, neatly cut grass of the expansive back lawn, the fur of their paws sodden with lingering morning dew, and pushed through a gap in the rotting back fence to the dark wilderness beyond. By the time Cassie reached the thick woods her worries had all but slipped away, tucked safely in the back of her mind with the rest of her human side. The complex, nuanced human thoughts and worries that forever clouded her mind gave way to the raw, tantalizing simplicity of the wolf. She raised her nose to sniff the crisp morning air, her vision taking a back seat to the rich intricacies of scent, and took in her surroundings.

  The change in perspective could never be fully explained to a human, trapped as they are in their small, rigid mortal minds. Shifting was much more than just a physical change. It brought much more than a set of sharp fangs and razor claws, but also a mind that became more... streamlined. More primal. The mind of a wolf abandoned the baffling complexity of human thought in favor of simple instinct, hunger and lust. There was none of the deception, greed, pride or wanton cruelty that crept constantly through the human mind; just... simplicity. The mind became clearer... sharper. It was an intoxicating experience, and as the Long Night drew nearer Cassie spent more and more of her time in wolf form in a vain effort to escape her problems.

  Moments after shifting Cassie felt her worries about Lucius drift to the back of her mind. She forgot she didn't want to marry him, that she was repulsed by the very notion of giving her body to him for his pleasure. In fact, she almost forgot his name. Lucius was only the label he gave himself when dealing with the human world. It meant nothing to her now. Here, in wolf form, he was simply her alpha. She identified him by scent and by his beautiful, intensely powerful appearance. As a human she loathed him with the burning heat of the sun, but as a wolf he held complete dominion over her. She would follow him wherever he led without quest
ion. She reveled in the beautiful simplicity.

  That was what made the forest so appealing to Cassie's inner wolf. This was Lucius' hunting ground. His scent marked every tree and hung thickly on every breath of breeze. It was as if the forest was her alpha, as if entering it was akin to entering him. Whenever she spent time among the trees, enjoying his scent, she felt her lithe, slender body respond to that overwhelmingly masculine aroma. She was gripped by the urge to be mounted, to be dominated completely by him. If she could feel that same lust in human form she'd never leave the bedroom. She'd chain herself to the bed and present herself to Lucius 24/7, without so much as an occasional bathroom break.

  Of course he still repulsed her from the moment she shifted back to her human form, but at least the dreaded prospect of wedding him came with the promise of sexual excitement on tap. Maybe once they were married he'd allow her to give up her human form altogether, to live as his willing dog at all hours of the day. She didn't particularly want to, but surely it would be better to escape into blissful submission to a powerful wolf than to endure a loveless marriage with a cruel, cold hearted brute.