The Alpha I Shouldn't Want

Chapter Ten — The Black Wolf

° VALERIAN'S POV °

She walked away from me.

I stood in the entrance hall long after the sound of her footsteps had faded up the staircase, my hand still curled around the space where her wrist had been, as though I could hold onto the shape of her if I just closed my fingers tight enough.

I hadn't meant to grab her.

I hadn't meant to say any of it, if I was honest with myself — the pants, the exposure, the fury that had risen in me so fast and so total that I'd barely recognized my own voice by the end of it. I had wanted to ask if she was cold. I had wanted to wrap her in something warm and pull her against me and breathe in the scent of stream water and forest that clung to her skin. Instead I had stood there and lectured her about a shirt, because it was easier to be angry about fabric than to be honest about the animal clawing beneath my ribs every time another man's eyes found her.

*You don't have that right,* she'd said.

She wasn't wrong.

I let go of the memory of her wrist and walked out the front doors into the dark.

°°°

The shift came faster than I intended.

I hadn't meant to run tonight. I had told myself, walking out into the cold, that I only needed air, only needed distance from the house and the argument and the particular ache of watching her walk away from me twice in the same fortnight. But my wolf had other plans, and by the time I reached the tree line my control had already frayed past the point of stopping it.

Bones reshaped. Skin gave way to fur, black as pitch, black as a moonless sky, unlike any wolf that had walked these lands in three generations.

I was the only one.

My father had been silver-gray, like his father before him, like every Alpha of this bloodline stretching back further than the estate's oldest records. Something had shifted when I was born — some quirk of blood, some deviation the pack elders had never fully explained, only whispered about with a mixture of awe and unease that had followed me my entire life. *The black wolf.* Some called it a mark of favor from the Moon Goddess herself. Others, in darker corners of pack history, called it an omen.

I had never cared much either way. It had simply always been mine — this vast, silent, night-colored form that let me disappear into the dark completely, that let me run until the ache in my chest turned into something more manageable, something closer to exhaustion than grief.

Tonight I ran hard.

I ran until the estate's lights were long behind me, until the only sound was my own paws against the forest floor and my own breath tearing through my lungs, until the specific shape of her face — furious, hurt, achingly beautiful in a way that should have been illegal for anyone to be — finally blurred at the edges of my mind.

It didn't disappear.

It never did anymore.

I ran until my legs ached and the moon had climbed high overhead, silver light filtering down through the canopy in broken coins across the forest floor, and only then did I finally slow, chest heaving, standing alone in a clearing three miles from home with no more answers than I'd had when I left.

*Some distances are necessary,* I had told her.

I still believed it. I simply no longer knew how much longer I could survive keeping them.

°°°

By the time I returned to the estate and shifted back, dressing quickly in the spare clothes I kept near the tree line for exactly this purpose, the house had gone dark and quiet, most of the pack long asleep. I should have gone straight to my own room. Every rational part of me insisted on it.

I found myself outside her door instead.

I told myself I only wanted to make sure she'd made it up safely, that the argument hadn't left her too shaken, that she was warm and dry and sleeping peacefully after a day that had started with a swim and ended with both of us shouting things neither of us should have said. I told myself a great many reasonable things, standing there with my hand resting against the wood, and none of them were the whole truth.

The door was unlocked. It always had been, for as long as I could remember — she'd never seen the need for locks inside a house full of people who'd protect her with their lives, and some stubborn, foolish part of me had never corrected that particular assumption, even now, even with everything churning beneath my skin that made me a danger to her in ways she didn't understand.

I opened it slowly. Silently. A lifetime of training kept my footsteps soundless even when every other part of me felt as though it might shake apart.

She was asleep.

Moonlight fell through the window she never bothered to curtain, spilling silver across the bed, across the tangle of blankets she'd kicked half away sometime in the night, across hair the color of autumn fire spread loose across the pillow. Red. Voluminous. Curling in a way that defied every attempt she'd ever made to tame it into something neater. I had watched that hair darken with rain, catch sunlight until it looked like it was burning, fall loose from braids she'd given up finishing halfway through because Kaiden had said something to make her laugh too hard to sit still.

Her eyes were closed, but I didn't need them open to remember the color. Blue. Not the pale, washed-out blue some wolves carried, but something deeper, something that had looked up at me from beneath a twisted ash tree eleven years ago and asked me, in a voice too small for the words it carried, not to let her die.

I had promised her, silently, standing over her small shivering body in the rain, that nothing would ever hurt her again while I drew breath.

I had not promised, back then, that the greatest threat to her peace would eventually be me.

#VOTE#