The Alpha Faked Depression to Win My Love Chapter 01
LYRA
I was an Omega in the art program at Blackthorn Academy.
My boyfriend had depression.
His medication and specialist appointments cost thousands of dollars every month.
To make him better, I took art commissions all night and delivered food whenever I was not in class. My friends said I was going to work myself to death.
Then one afternoon, I grabbed a delivery order in the richest gated neighborhood in Los Angeles.
I carried eighteen hundred dollars’ worth of premium Japanese food to the customer’s door with both hands.
When I looked up, I found the boyfriend who was supposed to be in a two hundred dollar an hour therapy session staring back at me.
He looked stunned.
…
“Aren’t you supposed to be at the hospital, Kieran?”
My left hand tightened painfully around the bags as I stared at the elegant mansion behind him.
It was 104 degrees outside.
I still felt as though I had fallen into ice water.
I had only ever seen places like this on television.
A black wolf was carved into the stone gatepost.
The crest of the Blackwood Pack.
Everyone in Los Angeles knew the Blackwoods controlled the wealthiest pack in the city. They had simply never released a photograph of their heir.
For the past year, Kieran had told me his last name was Reed.
He said his family had abandoned him.
He said he was an ordinary Beta with almost no scent.
Now a butler stood behind him and lowered his head.
“Mr. Blackwood.”
Kieran Reed had never existed.
The man in front of me was Kieran Blackwood.
The Blackwood family’s only Alpha heir.
“Lyra, I’m sorry. Let me explain. Dr. Collins had an emergency this afternoon…”
He reached for my sleeve.
“I only came here to visit a friend.”
That was how Kieran always apologized.
A careful tug on my sleeve. A soft voice. A wounded look.
It had never failed before.
It failed now.
I slapped his hand away.
I did not recognize the label on his tailored shirt. Somehow, that only made the sight more bitter. It fit the heir to an Alpha family far better than the cheap basics he wore in our apartment.
The pills he claimed were for depression had obviously included scent suppressants.
He had not taken them today.
An unfamiliar, powerful scent pressed over me.
Black tea.
Crushed fig leaves.
Wet stone in the air before a storm.
Only then did my wolf finally recognize what he was.
An Alpha.
I lowered my eyes and opened the appointment page for Los Angeles Medical Center.
Dr. Collins still had several open slots in the psychiatric department.
I no longer had the energy to expose Kieran’s first lie about the emergency.
I took a slow breath and forced my voice to remain calm.
“Was it fun, Kieran?”
“Pretending to be a poor, depressed boy who couldn’t even afford a cup of coffee while you were really an Alpha heir who spent eighteen hundred dollars on one meal?”
My lips trembled.
I stared at him through the tears gathering in my eyes.
“You really treated me like an idiot.”
“Eighteen hundred dollars. I would have to make hundreds of deliveries for that. I would have to work for two months.”
The cruelest part was the only screen still open behind my delivery app.
A message I had sent Kieran thirty minutes earlier.
I told him I was making extra food tonight.
Pumpkin soup.
His favorite.
I could afford it because the customer in the rich neighborhood had left me a fifty dollar tip.
I had never imagined Kieran himself was the man who had tipped me.
At night, Kieran often held me and said my love was the only thing in the world he never doubted.
He said the scent of ripe pears and sun warmed linen on my skin could calm his wolf.
He said even his parents had never loved him as purely as I did.
Those whispers had once made me feel lucky.
True love was rare.
I thought I had found it.
Looking back, perhaps he only meant that no one else would be stupid enough to risk heatstroke for a five dollar delivery bonus just to pay his medical bills sooner.
“I haven’t slept five hours in a night for months,” I said. “I dreamed about the day you would finally get better.”
“You knew that better than anyone, didn’t you?”
My accusation broke into a sob.
Something cracked in Kieran’s expression.
His eyes turned red.
He nodded.
We had lived in a cramped, aging studio half an hour’s walk from the nearest train station.
He watched me work.
He watched me count every dollar twice.
He watched me humiliate myself to pay for the depression he had invented.
Whenever he claimed to be having an episode, he pulled me close and made my scent soothe the wolf that had never been out of control.
He had watched all of it like a god observing a private experiment.
“I’ll transfer money to your account,” he said quietly. “Compensation.”
“What I did was wrong.”
Kieran lowered his head.
There was guilt in his eyes, and something that looked almost like helplessness.
He knew there was no lie left to tell.
I pulled the crumpled receipt from my pocket.
It was almost two feet long, filled with the most expensive cuts on the menu.
I crushed it into a ball and threw it at his face with all my strength.
Kieran did not move.
Grief and regret crossed his face.
Cold air drifted out through the open door.
Cicadas screamed in the heat.
Then footsteps approached from somewhere inside the house.
A young woman called in a spoiled, playful voice.
“Kieran, where is the food? I’m starving!”