My Alpha Let Me Die for His Childhood Friend

The acrid smell of gunpowder and rust filled my nostrils as consciousness clawed its way back to me. My wrists burned where the rough rope bit into my skin, binding me to the cold metal pillar. The warehouse around me was a graveyard of shadows and decay, broken windows letting in sickly yellow streetlight that barely penetrated the darkness.

But it was the weight strapped to my chest that made my blood turn to ice.

The bomb was crude but effective—a tangle of wires and plastique wrapped around a digital timer that glowed an ominous red in the gloom. Ten minutes. The numbers ticked down with mechanical precision: 09:59... 09:58... 09:57...

Mixed into the explosive compound, I could smell it—wolfsbane. Even if the blast didn't kill me outright, the poison would finish the job. My wolf whimpered deep inside my mind, already weakening from the proximity to the deadly herb.

"Well, well. Sleeping Beauty finally wakes up."

Damien's voice cut through the silence like a blade. The rogue Alpha stepped into the light, his scarred face twisted into a cruel smile. Behind him, three other rogues emerged from the shadows—all of them watching me with the hungry eyes of predators who'd cornered their prey.

"You know what you need to do," Damien said, crouching down until we were eye level. His breath reeked of stale beer and violence. "Call your mate. Tell him to come play hero."

I tried to speak, but my throat was raw and dry. The second attempt came out as a raspy whisper: "He won't come."

Damien's laugh was harsh and grating. "Oh, he'll come. Alpha Kade Sterling doesn't let anyone take his toys without permission." He gestured to the bomb. "Nine minutes, little wolf. I'd start dialing if I were you."

My heart hammered against my ribs as I reached out through the mate bond—that invisible thread that connected my soul to Kade's. The mental link felt strained, distant, like trying to shout across a canyon.

*Kade.* I pushed the thought toward him with desperate urgency. *Kade, I need help. I'm in trouble—*

The response came back sharp and irritated, cutting through my panic like a slap. *I'm busy right now, Mila. Serena's wolf has been sick for three days, and she needs someone to help take care of her. Can't you handle whatever drama you've gotten yourself into this time?*

The words hit me harder than any physical blow. Drama. That's what he thought this was. Just another one of my "overreactions" that he'd grown so tired of hearing about.

*Kade, please. I'm not being dramatic. There's a bomb—*

*A bomb?* His mental voice carried that familiar note of exasperation. *Mila, your imagination is—*

A soft, feminine voice drifted through the bond—not directed at me, but audible through Kade's connection. "Thank you for coming to take care of me, Kade. You're the only one who really understands how much I'm hurting."

Serena. Of course it was Serena.

"I'll always be here for you," Kade's voice responded, tender in a way he hadn't spoken to me in months. "You know that."

The mate bond snapped shut like a door slamming in my face.

I stared at the timer through blurred vision. 07:23... 07:22... 07:21...

Damien had been watching the whole exchange with obvious amusement. "Trouble in paradise?" He stood up, brushing dust off his knees. "Don't worry, sweetheart. The pain will be over soon."

He jerked his head toward the exit, and the other rogues followed him into the night. Their footsteps echoed through the empty warehouse until even those faded away, leaving me alone with the steady tick of the countdown.

Silence pressed in around me like a living thing. In the distance, I could hear the city continuing its nightly rhythm—cars on distant highways, the occasional siren, the hum of electricity through power lines. Life going on while mine ticked away second by second.

I closed my eyes and let my mind drift back through the past three years. Three years of being Kade's mate, and how many times had he actually put me first? How many times had Serena's needs, Serena's problems, Serena's delicate constitution taken precedence over everything else in our relationship?

The answer was as bitter as the wolfsbane burning my lungs: every single time.

I remembered our first anniversary, when Kade had canceled our dinner because Serena was having "a difficult day." I remembered the night I'd gotten food poisoning and spent hours retching while he sat by Serena's bedside because she had a headache. I remembered every birthday, every holiday, every moment when I'd needed him and found myself competing with the ghost of his first love.

Serena—the pack's golden girl, the daughter of a respected Beta family, the she-wolf everyone agreed would have made Kade the perfect Luna if fate hadn't intervened. She'd never let anyone forget that she'd been his choice before the Moon Goddess forced the mate bond between Kade and me.

And Kade... Kade had never let me forget it either.

04:17... 04:16... 04:15...

My wrists were slick with blood now from struggling against the ropes, but the knots held firm. The wolfsbane was making me dizzy, sapping my strength with each labored breath. Even if I could break free, I'd never make it out of the blast radius in time.

With shaking fingers, I reached out through the mate bond one last time. It felt fragile now, like spun glass ready to shatter.

*Kade.*

This time, I didn't wait for his irritated response. I didn't beg or plead or try to convince him of the danger. Instead, I poured three years of unspoken pain into those final words:

*Goodbye, Kade. May the Moon Goddess never curse us to meet again.*

I severed the connection myself this time, cutting the thread that had bound us together since the day we'd first shifted and recognized each other as mates. The emptiness that followed was almost a relief.

01:30... 01:29... 01:28...

The red numbers blurred as tears finally came. Not for the life I was about to lose, but for the life I'd never really had. Three years of loving someone who saw me as an obligation, a burden, a poor substitute for the woman he'd really wanted.

00:10... 00:09... 00:08...

I thought of my parents, who'd died in a rogue attack when I was sixteen. Maybe I'd see them again soon.

00:03... 00:02... 00:01...

The world exploded in fire and light.

Pain beyond description tore through every nerve ending before everything went mercifully black. The last thing I remembered was the taste of copper and smoke, the sound of my own scream cut short by the roar of destruction.

Then... nothing.

Cold. That was the first sensation that crept back into my awareness. Not the burning agony I'd expected, but a deep, bone-deep chill that seemed to emanate from everywhere and nowhere at once.

I tried to move, to open my eyes, but something was wrong. My body felt... distant. Disconnected.

When my vision finally cleared, I was looking down at a scene from a nightmare.

The warehouse was a crater of twisted metal and concrete. And there, in the center of the destruction, lay a broken form that I recognized with dawning horror.

It was me.

My body—or what remained of it—lay crumpled among the debris. One arm was bent at an impossible angle, and my chest... I looked away quickly, unable to process the extent of the damage.

But I was here. Floating. Watching. Feeling the cold that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with the absence of life.

I was dead.

And somehow, I was still here.