Free The Alpha’s Fated Mate by C.J. Colton

 
    PROLOGUE
     
     
    Wyatt
     
    “I can’t put this off any longer. It needs to happen. Even with the merger of our packs our numbers are dwindling.” My words were weary and resigned. The mood in the room was somber. I tried not to react to the five looks of understanding as I felt the hope I’d held for the better part of a century crumble into dust under the necessity of survival. My wolf howled. It hated what we had to do as much as I did.
    “ We can’t put this off any longer. We understand the necessity, Wyatt. We will all have to do our duty to ensure the continued survival of the Clear Ridge pack,” Ryland said. The grim swirling of his gray eyes was the only indication that the decision we’d all come to was affecting him as much as it was me.
    We weren’t the only ones though. Everyone in this room had just made the decision to put aside their own chance of happiness and it was a heavy one.
    For longer than I could remember I’d dreamt of meeting my fated one, my destined mate. To finally know that I had the other half of my heart and soul in my arms, and that the next several centuries I had left wouldn’t be spent in in this long yawning moment of perpetual waiting. I’d had eleven decades of searching and my chance had finally run out. Now there was no more time.
    The alphas of six separate packs, before our merger two years ago we’d each suffered the fear of dwindling numbers and the very real possibility of our packs dying out, and now once again we were dealing with the prospect of our fears coming true.
    Mortality rates were rising with our older pack members reaching the end of the long life spans of our kind but our birth rates weren’t high enough to replenish our diminishing numbers. A decade down the track and we would be back to where we started before we merged into the Clear Ridge pack.
    We all knew what had to happen. Each of us alphas would have to do our duty and breed. Unlike the pack members we led, alphas were able to reproduce in litters. It was our job to replenish our numbers and the time had come to shoulder our responsibility, regardless of our other primal instinct—to find our respective mates. Once we started producing offspring the chance to find our mate died. Our bodies would automatically claim the mother as our intended mate and bind them as such. We wouldn’t be able to reproduce with anyone else, but the emptiness in our hearts would remain. We would remain incomplete.
    This wasn’t such a big issue to some wolves, sexual compatibility and genuine love and fondness went a long ways in keeping that emptiness at bay, at disguising what it really was, but I’d come to know it all too well and having witnessed the depth of love and trust between true mates—my parents—I craved it for myself. I wanted someone who was made for me, not because I was an alpha and had all the status that came with leading, but because they knew I was made for them too.
    I knew one or two of the other alphas probably didn’t fully comprehend the extent of what we were giving up by agreeing to do this—they were still young, barely half a century old—but in time they would know, and by then it would be too late.
    I knew what I had to do. I was the eldest in our group and as such had had the most time to find the other half of my soul. It wouldn’t be much or all that sufficient, but the least I could do was be the first to do what was necessary and give the other alphas more time in their own search. I hoped that they would have more luck than me before their time was up.
    “Do you have your candidates picked out?” Hayden asked. He was probably the one with the most to lose out of all six of us. He knew who his mate was, knew they were out there, but his mate had been taken before Hayden had been able to make the claim. He’d spent years looking for the clues to his mate’s whereabouts but all leads had turned up empty and now he was going to have to stop.
    My heart clenched