The Alpha's Secret Heart

Previously

…It was a tiny seed, vulnerable to the slightest frost, but it was there. A flicker of hope in the vast wilderness of my fear. He saw my guardedness, my wariness, and he didn’t turn away. He saw the walls, and he offered to stand guard outside them. It wasn’t acceptance, not yet. But it was a beginning. A terrifying, exhilarating, and utterly uncertain beginning. The darkness still lingered, the secret still coiled within me, but for the first time since I’d arrived, I felt a faint warmth, a sliver of safety in the Alpha’s shadowed gaze. And that, I knew, was a dangerous, precious thing indeed.