Craved by an Alpha Read Free

again.
    Cavanaugh silently cursed her. When he had imagined their reunion, she hadn’t been so damned meek. She had been the woman he had known a decade ago, before shit had gone south. She had been as beautiful and radiant as she had been back then too, her eyes bright and not haunted, her skin pale and clear, not scarred around her wrists and dark beneath her eyes.
    The sight of her and her behaviour clawed at him, filling him with a dark need to discover what had happened to her and take action against anyone who might have harmed her.
    He shook with that need, a storm brewing in his heart, a dangerous tempest that needed a target—someone he could make suffer as Eloise clearly had.
    A target other than himself.
    Right now, he could only place the blame on his own shoulders and it tore him apart, ripping his heart to shreds and filling his mind with poisonous words, ones that stung and made him bleed.
    Eloise would never forgive him.
    Eloise would never be his.
     
     

Chapter 2
    Cavanaugh mastered his fear and drove it back into submission, clearing his head of the dark words that taunted him and steadying his heart, reassuring himself that all wasn’t lost. Eloise was here with him. She had come for him. He needed to focus on taking care of her and discovering what had happened to her to bring her to London, a world away from their village in the mountains of Bhutan.
    “What are you doing away from the pride?” He ventured a step towards her and was thankful when she didn’t move away to maintain the distance between them. He needed to be close to her. He needed reality to sink in so he could believe she was here with him, standing in the bright back room of Underworld, and he was talking to her for the first time since he had assumed the role of alpha a decade ago, about to hear her sweet voice again. “What happened to you?”
    He reached out and gently caught her wrist, bringing it up between them and luring her towards him. He lightly rubbed his thumb over the scarring on it, marks that looked as if they had been made by ropes. Who had done this to her? Whoever it had been, Cavanaugh was going to find them and tear them to pieces. He was going to make them suffer as she had. A growl rumbled through his chest and curled up his throat, born of a dark and consuming hunger to avenge her.
    She pulled free of his grip and hid her arms behind her back.
    “Goddammit, Eloise,” he barked and she lowered her head, turning her face away from him.
    The rich brown waves of her long hair fell down to conceal her face but didn’t hide how her shoulders trembled beneath her dirty coat. He reined in his frustration. He could sense her struggle, could smell it in the subtle changes in her scent. It was taking a lot for her to remain silent when she felt compelled to obey the rules of their kind and answer him.
    Why wouldn’t she answer him? He needed to know what had happened to her. It filled him completely, an incessant urge that he couldn’t shake, born of his deep connection to her. He feared he would go mad or lose his temper if she insisted on remaining silent and refused to tell him what had happened to her.
    He would go mad if she refused to look at him or give him the pleasure of hearing her voice too. Couldn’t she see that?
    He clenched his fists at his sides to stop himself from grabbing her slender shoulders and making her look at him, and looked at her instead, seeing how different she was now. He missed the female who had stood up to him countless times and had put him in his place. That woman seemed to have disappeared that fateful night when he had recognised her as his fated female but hadn’t been given a chance to tell her. She had been ripped from his grasp when he had been forced to take his place in the pride upon his father’s death, picking up his mantle.
    As alpha.
    Cavanaugh felt as if he had lost her then and his heart had fractured. She had drifted away from him, always leaving when the