Mark of Sin: Bound to the Cruel Alpha

The creak of the rose garden door had started up again, pulling him straight back to that dark day.

It was that exact same metallic screech with which the door to the visiting room had opened—the last place he had ever seen her alive and whole.

Ever since that very moment, time had moved in painfully endless circles for him. A mindless, empty passing of days, each one indistinguishable from the last, bleached gray and hollow, stripped of any promise of change.

Magnus walked down the winding path, sinking deeper into the crimson sea of blooming roses. Reaching a small raised pavilion, he came to a halt in front of a stone effigy of a young woman resting atop a marble tomb. Crafted in the exact likeness of his true mate.

Beautiful.

His fragile, beautiful girl.

He sank down onto the earth, resting his back against the cold stone of the monument. Striking a lighter, he lit a cigarette and exhaled a thin, lazy stream of smoke into the quiet air.

He had nowhere to rush; all the time in the world belonged to him now. Yet it held zero value. It weighed nothing at all. He had endless affairs demanding his attention, but he hadn’t been here all week, and he missed her. His heart ached for her every waking minute.

Once, he had never understood what love was. He couldn’t begin to imagine how a faint scent caught on a girl’s neck could rip away a man’s control and tear his soul to shreds.

He had been content with Karina. He thought he knew her; he thought he was lucky. He had cared so little for her that her very presence sometimes made him sick, while other males ran mad for their true mates, raving about how touching them was like touching heaven.

He hadn’t cared. He could go days without seeing her, never feeling the slightest tug of a mate-bond in his chest. There was only empty space where a bond should have been.

Even when she supposedly died, he had felt nothing more than a mild pang of regret that he wouldn’t have a child, paired with a faint nostalgia for their childhood friendship when he first arrived here.

But it hadn’t broken him.

If he had known back then that she had simply defied her family and run off with her lover—if he had known what she would pull years later—he would have snapped her neck with his bare hands.

Hers, and her entire family’s.

When he first learned of Lang’s existence, he had been convinced he would tear the little brat apart himself. He thought he’d snap the bitch’s neck for putting him through that hell.

Magnus looked down at the shattered mark on his skin and let out a dark, bitter chuckle.

He had gotten that tattoo in memory of his mother. Rose—that was her name.

And when that very tattoo unexpectedly flared into a mate-bond mark on Karina’s arm, he had felt nothing but cold fury and nausea.

Long before he ever discovered how rotten that bitch truly was, his inner wolf had already recoiled in disgust. At the time, he never could have imagined that right after stepping out to get the ink touched up, he would receive a notification declaring that his true mate had been found. It was an absolute mind-fuck. An impossibility.

He refused to let that report reach Hugo’s hands. He decided to find her himself—to see who had the nerve and sheer audacity to try and pull a fast one on him.

Yet the moment he set eyes on her, his wolf went entirely off the leash. She was... fragile. So tiny. It felt as though tightening his grip even a fraction too much would shatter her into delicate crystal dust.

Jane...

A little, unawakened breeder from the slummy Lower District, yet she smelled... insanely, forbiddenly fucking incredible.

Pure fucking heaven.

She smelled like a sin wrapped in the face of an innocent angel. On the drive back to the research institute, he had cranked the air conditioning to maximum... desperately trying to cool down his feverish body and mind. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have kept her innocence past the first hour of their meeting.

His girl...

Magnus took a deep, dragging pull from his cigarette, feeling the heat burn his lungs before meeting the cold, carved face of the marble statue. The sculptor had captured her features with terrifying perfection—mostly because Magnus had threatened to murder him if a single line was out of place.

High cheekbones. A delicate nose. Lips whose taste was permanently branded into his memory. Her eyes were carved shut, her long lashes lowered, making her look as though she were merely resting. Sleeping, and bound to wake up any second.

He had taken a photo of her the morning after they survived his first rut together. A sappy, sentimental gesture. He had wanted to remember her exactly like that: soft, sleepy, completely exhausted from his touch.

That was the exact moment frozen in the stone. Except she wasn’t sleeping.

She was dead. And her body wasn’t even here.

He would never leave her in that pathetic, disgraceful public cemetery. Her place was here. Right beside him.

And Pharean was going to give him the rights to her remains, whether he liked it or not. If pushed, Magnus was ready to defy the government restriction order and march straight into the Lower District himself.

Did that bastard really want to reignite a blood feud that had already dragged on for years?

Pharean had maneuvered a posthumous guardianship over Jane while Magnus was locked down in the hospital, pumped full of heavy suppressants... They had even buried her without him. He had been out of his mind for three straight days—his wolf raging so violently that they had to chain him to a reinforced wall just to keep him from tearing the facility apart. That was how he earned his first violation tattoo.

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