The Moon Goddess Gave Me Two Alpha's.

The Boy Who Shouldn't Be Here

Mara would not stop talking about Kael the entire walk to training and I was going to lose my mind.

"He looked at you," she said, for the third time, stepping over a tree root without breaking stride. "Like actually looked at you, not the casual pack sweep he does, I mean he stopped what he was doing and looked."

"You're imagining things," I said.

"I am not imagining things, I have twenty twenty vision and I know what I saw and what I saw was the future Alpha of this pack looking at you like you were the answer to a question he didn't know he was asking."

"Mara."

"I'm just saying."

"Please stop just saying."

She grabbed my arm and squeezed it. "Why are you being weird about this, you have had a thing for Kael since you were fourteen and now he is finally noticing you and you are walking around with that face like someone cancelled your birthday."

I had a thing for Kael at fourteen because I didn't know what he was going to do to me at twenty three.

“I just don't want to get ahead of myself" I said out loud because that was the version of the truth I could give her right now.

She looked at me sideways for a long moment. "You've been weird since Saturday," she said. "Like a different kind of weird, not your normal weird."

"I'm fine."

"Elara."

"Mara I promise, I'm fine, can we just get to training without analysing me for five minutes please."

She let it go but I could feel her still watching me and that was the thing about Mara, she always watched, she noticed everything, and in three years she was going to notice the wrong thing at the wrong moment.

I was not going to let that happen, I was going to figure out how to protect her before any of it got that far.

The training grounds were loud and packed, senior wolves running drills along the far end, the younger ones doing form work near the treeline.

Elder Mira walked the perimeter with her clipboard looking like she was about to fail someone for breathing incorrectly.

I found a spot on the upper ridge and told Mara I needed a minute to stretch and she accepted this and went to find her training partner and I stood there and looked out over the grounds and let myself breathe for a second.

Then I found Kael.

He was at the centre of the grounds running a disarm drill with two senior wolves, easy and confident, that untested version of him that I had fallen so hard for the first time around.

I stood there watching him and waited to feel something.

I felt tired mostly.

A bone deep exhaustion that had nothing to do with sleep and everything to do with knowing exactly how a person operates under pressure and finding them significantly less magnetic as a result.

I was still watching him when he stopped moving.

Just stopped, mid demonstration, his hands dropping, his weight shifting, and then he turned and looked directly up at the ridge and found me with the immediate certainty of someone who hadn't been looking for me but suddenly couldn't look anywhere else.

I watched the bond snap into place across his face in real time, this almost invisible thing, a slight widening of the eyes, a stillness, and then his jaw tightened and he looked away first and went back to his drill like he was annoyed at himself for losing focus.

Four years early, I thought. You have no idea what that means yet.

I turned to go find Mara and the second pull hit me so hard I actually stopped walking.

It came from the treeline to my left, stronger than anything I had felt from Kael, not warm, not familiar, something rawer than that.

My wolf spun toward it so fast I put my hand on my chest to steady myself and I turned and looked at the trees and found a stranger standing at the edge of them watching me.

Tall, dark haired, dressed like someone who had been travelling rough and didn't care who knew it, and he was standing just inside the treeline with his arms loose at his sides looking at me with this expression that stopped me completely because it wasn't the expression of someone seeing me for the first time.

It was the expression of someone who already knew exactly who I was and had come a long way to find me.

My wrist started burning.

He walked toward me and the pack around us went quiet in that particular way packs go quiet when the air changes and nobody can explain why.

He stopped two feet away and up close his eyes were dark and completely steady and full of something I could not name.

Something that sat just underneath the surface of him like deep water, and my wolf pressed so hard against my ribs I actually put my hand on my chest.

I did not know this man.

I was certain of that. Three years of my first life woven into every corner of this pack's world and I had never once seen this face, and yet he was looking at me like the distance between us was a formality he was already done with.

"You're her," he said quietly, like he was confirming something he had already known.

"I don't know you," I said.

"No," he said, "not yet." He looked at my wrist where the mark was burning under my sleeve and then back at my face and something moved through his expression that I couldn't fully read.

Something that lived in the space between relief and grief and was entirely too complicated for a stranger. "But you know what happened to you."

My whole body went still.

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said.

He looked at me for a long moment, patient and completely unconvinced, and I held his gaze and gave him nothing.

"You felt that," he said, and he wasn't asking.

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said.

He looked at my wrist and then back at my face and that almost smile came back, slow and certain.

"Yes you do," he said, and stepped back and walked into the treeline and was gone.

He nodded slowly, that almost smile settling into something quieter and more permanent, and said "okay" like he was filing my lie away somewhere safe for later, and stepped back, and walked back toward the treeline.

I stood there on the training grounds watching him go and my wolf watched him go and neither of us moved.

Mara appeared at my elbow. "Who was that," she said.

"I have no idea," I said, which was almost true.

"He looked at you like he knew you."

"People look at things," I said. "It doesn't mean anything."

Mara looked at me sideways for a long moment and I could feel her deciding whether to push it, and then she let it go.

I turned back to the training grounds and felt the bond burning on my wrist in two separate pulses and thought about the way his face had moved when he looked at me, that thing underneath the surface, that deep water expression, and understood that whatever that man was carrying he had come a very long way to find me and was not going anywhere.