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  Alpha’s Passion

  The Obsidian Wolves | Book One

  Leia Hunter

  Copyright © 2019 by Leia Hunter

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Alpha’s Passion

  Blue Beauchamp, Royal Alpha and legitimate heir to his clan’s crown, is one of the few wolves in America who was born to the curse. When tragedy left him to raise his kid brother Skyler, he’s certain that his place in the world is at his foster father’s side, protecting their people and his family’s legacy, no matter the personal cost.

  But when the redhead with amber eyes invades his dreams, he knows it’s more than just sex that drives him to find her. Without his soulmate, the soul sickness will eventually take his sanity and turn him into a murderer, and with the pack suffering from his alpha’s paranoia and growing internal unrest, the clock’s running against him.

  When he finds her, reality kicks his ass and reminds him that easy happy endings are only for storybooks. Instead, he’s forced to make the hardest decision of his life. Does he force his soulmate to bond with him, or let her love who she chooses and give himself over to the death sentence of never having her for himself?

  Alpha’s Passion, is the first book in the Obsidian Wolves Series. Each book will focus on a new couple and their HEA.

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  About the Author

  Free Preview- Stolen by the Vampire

  More Books by Leia

  Chapter 1

  I raced down to the water, barely able to hold my body together as my beast demanded release. Run, it commanded, run faster. I obeyed until my legs were on fire and my lungs felt like they'd burst from the effort.

  They’re okay, I thought to myself, even though the animal inside me already knew the truth. They're werewolves. They can't be killed in a boating accident.

  But before I’d heard the sirens turn and head toward the waterfront, I’d known something was wrong. I’d felt the pain, the sense of being torn into pieces inside without understanding why.

  Within seconds I was out the door and down the path to the street, too shaken and terrified to think to take my car. I ran across yards and streets, taking the most direct path to the waterfront.

  Sweat poured into my eyes by the time I caught up with the emergency vehicles that had gathered on the bank. The whole town was gathered there, from the first responders to the looky-loos, but it was my family they were staring at, or what was left of them.

  A man in a police uniform put his hand on my shoulder and held me back. “Ain’t nothing to see here, son,” he said as he shoved me back toward the yellow tape they’d strung up between the trees.

  “That’s my brother,” I managed to pant the words as I struggled, not against him, but the wolf inside me that wanted to throw the sheriff across the gravel path that led down to the launch ramp. “That’s my little brother, but where’s my mom and dad? He was with my mom and dad.”

  Later, I realized I was crying as I spoke, and that was probably what moved him to let me through to where Skyler was being lifted into the back of an ambulance on a board.

  I heard the sheriff dimly behind me, shouting at the other rescuers that they were looking for two more bodies.

  Bodies, not people.

  My parents were people. More than that, they were werewolves of ancient royal lineage. They couldn’t be bodies. They were too strong, their magic too powerful to let anything happen to them.

  People from the sheriff's department shouted questions at me, then the photographer's flashes began to go off in my face. My wolf reared up, and I felt my spine start to slip, and in a panic, glanced all around for someone, anyone who could control my power and stop me from shifting in front of humans.

  Then I saw Ronnie, my dad’s best friend and lieutenant, coming toward me and all my focus fell on him. “They said Mom and Dad are bodies, Ron. They’re talking about my parents like they’re dead. But Sky’s right here. If he’s okay, they must be, right?”

  He held my shoulder like the sheriff had, but instead of pushing me away, he simply hung onto me, keeping me standing when my knees turned to water, lending me his strength to keep the wolf at bay. Never saying a word but communicating all his sorrow and pain to me through the pressure of his big, work-callused hand.

  It was hours before I learned that Skyler was far from okay, his vertebrae crushed and compressing the spinal canal and nerves that ran down it. I didn’t understand the

  It was days before they found enough body parts to officially declare my parents dead. A boating accident, they said, something wrong with the fuel tank, nobody’s fault.

  But my parents were dead, and my fourteen-year-old brother was in a coma, and even if he woke, he would be paralyzed for life. He hadn't made the change yet, hadn't awakened the magic that lay dormant inside him, so he couldn't heal the damage to his body, and possibly never would.

  In an instant, my teenaged world came crashing down around me, and I was alone, but for my pack.

  I was the lucky one, free from hospitals and feeding machines and the eventuality of being unplugged. Free to plan a funeral at seventeen, to choose how long to keep my brother on life support, to decide whether to donate his werewolf organs when he expired.

  Expired, they’d called it, like Skyler was a library book or a package of chicken from the freezer section of the grocery store and lectured me on the importance of using my loss to save lives.

  But they couldn’t tell me if werewolf organs made more werewolves, even if I’d been able to ask. So, I kept my brother on life support and refused to sign his body parts over to strangers, despite the frustration of the well-meaning hospital workers.

  Later, when he woke up, I told him that he owed me for not giving away his kidneys.

  He just stared at me for an eternity, then with tears slipping down his face and his hands on the legs that would never work again, replied, “I wish you’d given away my heart. I got no use for it now, anyway.”

  Chapter 2

  “Move yo ass, Blue, nobody cares what you look like!” Skyler shouted up the stairs of the boarding house I’d moved us into when I started at Louisiana State. Skyler wanted to keep the house we’d inherited from our parents, but it was too far from town, and all the doctors and physical therapy he needed, to stay out there.

  So, our house sat empty except for weekends when I went down to clean up the overgrown weeds and sweep the newest layer of dust-off Mom’s precious hardwood floors. Otherwise, we stayed with Mrs. Calhoun and her daughters, Ashley and Emily.

  Over time, we all fell into an easy rhythm, the girls and Skyler going to high school, me commuting into Baton Rouge for the week for college and then home for the weekends, to look after my brother and tend to my pack duties
. Mrs. Calhoun, Suzie, to her friends and boarders, somehow kept us all in line.

  She and Ronnie took over my pack training, teaching me how to control the beast within. I was almost sixteen when I finally experienced my first shift, but when I came into my power, I did so as a full alpha, the first to do so before adulthood in our pack.

  It meant more anger management, more physical training and tests, and more responsibility, backing up Ronnie as acting alpha. The position had belonged to my father, my grandfather, and followed our family as far back as we could remember, but I was too young to take the mantle of power, and back then, I didn’t know if I would ever be ready.

  Instead, I made myself invaluable to our surrogate father, as his champion and peacekeeper. Never had there been so few challengers as when Ronnie made me his second, the one all newcomers had to fight before they could approach him.

  No one wanted to take on the only shifter son of their beloved alpha, and Ron made the most of the opportunity. He trained me harder and pushed me further than any wolf I'd ever seen until when challengers finally dared approach me, no one even came close to beating me.

  Our alpha was completely protected from usurpers, and I was happy to be his right hand, just as I’d planned to be for my father. It was all I wanted, besides seeing my brother walk again. Peace among my pack, the kind of lull that I should’ve known couldn’t last but was too young and too stupid to realize just how bad the undertow could be, even when the water looked smooth and serene on the surface.

  Neither of us was ever in a hurry to talk to Ronnie about our parents’ deaths, and not just because he was the alpha. Ron took care of us for those first few months, made sure Skyler made his physical therapy appointments when I couldn’t miss school, and that I didn’t miss enough school for it to cost me my place on the honor roll.

  But he refused to let us mention my father, not as his predecessor, or as our father. For the past several years, Sky and I found ourselves forced to talk about our family in whispers, far from the Lacassine reserve or even our home outside Lake Charles.

  The pack seemed to only decay a little more each year, wolves fighting among themselves, families breaking apart. I didn’t know if it was because of the loss of their true alpha, or if I’d just been too young to understand the way the world when my parents had been alive.

  Chapter 3

  The room was gilt by the setting sun, painting the walls of my room in ribbons of gold and pink and orange, but I knew that it was the middle of the night, and I was asleep in a pup tent in the red desert of Utah.

  I let the dream weave itself through the second story boarding room in the old colonial I rented with my younger brother on the outskirts of Lake Charles, Louisiana. Skyler wasn't in my dream, though, and the sunset shouldn't have been visible from my east-facing window.

  In the way of dreams though, it didn't bother me to see the play of colors on my wall and mirror. A slender arm appeared slung across my chest, pinning me on my back as I lay in the bed, and when I looked at the woman attached to it, all I could make out in my dream state was a sea of thick, blood-red hair and tawny bare skin.

  And though I’d never met her, I knew her eyes would be shades of golden yellow, the color of honey dripping down a broken honeycomb, mesmerizing and unique.

  Her dream image roused and sat up, staring down at me in shock and horror.

  “What are you doing here?” she gasped, and the dream shattered.

  I opened my eyes and stared at the moonlit peak of the tent. Those eyes, wide and glittering with shock and anger, tinged with fear at my invasion of her sleep, stayed with me as I waited for sleep to find me again.

  There was a comfort in it, knowing that my soulmate was out there and that she was such an unparalleled beauty. But the dream hadn't told me anything about where I could find her.

  Until she’d realized we were sharing the vision and reacted, I hadn’t been sure at all of what I was seeing. Certainly, I’d dreamed of those eyes so often they were familiar to me. I’d waited almost two decades, listening to my father caution me on the importance of finding the other half of my soul, my sanity.

  I wished I could go back to when he was alive and still overseeing my transition from awkward preteen to full-fledged alpha predator.

  Mom, Dad, I found her. We’ll be safe. I’ll keep Skyler safe, from the pack and my own beast.

  I clambered out of my tent and climbed to the top of the outcropping of rock, as close to the three-quarter moon as I could get. It didn’t have the pull of a full moon, but there was plenty of light from it and the star-dotted velvet blanket of night sky to see my way. I knelt at the plateau at the top of the hill and threw back my head, howling to the night sky in appreciation and release.

  My people were both blessed and cursed when the first wolf killed his first vampire in our bayou back home. The blood lust from the monster had given us the sight, according to the old tales. But it had also made us weaker. Without our other half, to calm us and keep us sane, the alphas of my pack eventually gave in to the bloodlust and went feral.

  My pack had been watching me for almost two years as my skirmishes with other wolves had become more frequent, and the nature of those fights was more vicious and made less sense. I'd nearly killed a wolf over the last beer in the cooler one night, another because he got in my face, thinking I was looking at his girlfriend.

  It wasn’t until the day I’d snapped at Skyler and almost broken his neck that I’d realized the pack was right. Skyler had looked up at me with wide eyes and refused to fight back, not that he could’ve done much from his wheelchair.

  The kid had missed out on getting to shift, stuck forever in human form with a resentful creature inside him when the car accident that had killed my parents had paralyzed him for life. What almost became a short life, thanks to my selfish refusal to admit I’d started to lose control. I’d almost lost the only person left in my life that I loved, and that loved me.

  I howled at the moon again, and the coyotes, my little cousins, howled in reply, adding their voices to mine in a chorus that would've made other campers stoke their fires and huddle closer to the light if I hadn't gone to so much trouble to get away from other people. The desert smelled of dust and scaly creatures and the remnants of heat on the red rock the park was so famous for.

  As the coyotes raised their voices, I left them to their song and loped back down to the fire. The desert was colder at night than back in Lake Charles, and the stars seemed farther away and foreign, the constellations in all the wrong places in the south Utah desert.

  I sat at the fire and thought back to the two days before that had brought me so far from the lush, green home I’d barely escaped with my hide intact.

  The pack alpha, Ray, had found me huddled in the dark corner of the boarding house parlor, Skyler leaning against the wall across the room, his wheelchair upended, just so much twisted metal.

  “You used to be my boys, like sons,” he’d said softly. I’d seen the conflict in his eyes and knew my life was over.

  I was fully aware that we survived largely because humans didn’t believe we were real. If a wolf let his bloodlust control him, humans were easy pickings, and public murders would lead to vigilantes and ugly deaths for the weakest among the pack.

  A wolf gone mad didn’t think about modern crime scene analysis, DNA or other evidence that bound them to a murder scene, just how to get the most pain and blood from a victim before their heart stopped and the body was too cold to stoke his hunger.

  “I stopped myself, Ronnie. You don’t have to do this.” My words had echoed, hollow in the black hole of my ribcage. Skyler was my baby brother. My only blood, and I’d almost snapped his neck because he’d rolled through the door as the wolf was taking over.

  He’d also saved my life when he did. If it had been anyone else who pulled me from my nightmare, I might’ve ripped their throats out before I realized what I was doing. But if I’d spilled innocent blood in a feral rage, it wou
ld have been an automatic death sentence, no trial required.

  Instead, they’d put me in chains and taken before the pack at the half moon, the time of judgment. Supposedly, that’s when the wolf and the man share our bodies and minds equally and we are at our most just and fair, but there was nothing just and fair about the proceedings that night.

  Two wolves clamped the far end of my chains to metal rings cemented into the ground. The rings and the concrete squares bore blood evidence of others who had been tried over the hundred years we’d called the Lacassine forests home.

  I strained against the beast, prowling closer and closer to the surface, defying my control. The wolf under my skin demanded blood sacrifice for the insult done to me. Crimson rage boiled behind my eyes as I stood still, listening to the charges against me.

  “Do you deny that you’ve heard the call of your mate from afar?”

  I glared at Nyko. “Naw, I don’t. There’s no shame in hearing the call. Just because you never will, doesn’t mean I deserve to die. Every royal of age in the pack has heard the call.”

  “But you haven’t answered, have you?”

  I snorted and glanced around at everyone in the clearing. Members of the pack I’d known my whole life were murmuring among themselves, and the few brought in by Ron looked ready to fight.

  “I’ve been a little busy, Nyko. Maybe if you could be trusted to run things on your own without getting your dumb ass thrown in jail every other weekend for bar fights, I’d have time to meet a nice girl.”