The Alpha I Shouldn't Want

Chapter Seven — Achilles Heel

° AUTHOR'S POV °

Kieran looks at her, that particular gaze in his eyes but he didn't push further, but he didn't look away either, and that was almost worse — the patient, waiting quality of it, like he genuinely believed if he just gave her enough silence she'd hand him the answer he wanted.

"I don't know why," she said again, quieter this time. "I've tried. You both know I've tried. I used to sneak out here at fourteen and just — wait. For hours. Try to force it. Nothing happened. I stopped trying eventually. It stopped feeling like something was going to happen."

"Does it bother you?" Kaiden asked, and for once there wasn't a joke hiding behind the question.

"Not really," she admitted. "I used to think it would. I used to lie awake convinced something was wrong with me, that I was broken somehow. But I've had eleven years to get used to being the only wolf in this pack who can't shift, and mostly I've just… accepted it. It's just how I am. Whatever the reason is." She pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them.

"I try not to let it bother me. There's not much point being upset about something I can't control."

"The pack talks about it," Kieran said. "You know that, right?"

She did know. She'd always known, in the way you know things people are careful never to say directly in front of you. Whispers that stopped when she entered rooms. Sympathetic glances quickly hidden.

The particular gentleness certain pack members used when they spoke to her, like she was something that might shatter.

"They talk about it," Kieran continued, "but nobody ever asks you about it. Have you noticed that?"

"I've noticed."

"Nobody wants to be the one who upsets Father's—" He stopped himself.

Sera looked at him. "His what?"

Kieran hesitated, and Kaiden shifted uncomfortably beside her, and for a moment neither twin seemed to want to finish the sentence.

"His Achilles heel," Kieran finally said, quiet.

"That's what the older pack members call it. Not to your face. Never to your face. But everyone knows Father would burn this entire estate to the ground before he let anyone make you sad about something you can't control. So nobody brings it up. Nobody asks. Everyone just... pretends not to notice, because noticing means someone eventually has to say something, and nobody wants to be the one who does that in front of him."

Sera sat with that for a long moment, the water rushing cold and constant beside them, sunlight warm against her shoulders.

She'd known, somewhere beneath the surface, that the silence around her shifting wasn't kindness exactly — or not only kindness. She just hadn't put words to the shape of it before. The idea that an entire pack organized its behavior around not upsetting their Alpha on her behalf sat strangely in her chest, somewhere between touched and unsettled.

"I didn't know it had a name," she said finally.

"Now you do." Kieran's voice gentled. "For what it's worth, I don't think there's anything wrong with you. I've read every text on delayed shifting this pack owns, and half of them from neighboring territories too. There are cases. Rare ones. Wolves who shift late, wolves who never fully present until something specific triggers it. You're not broken, Sera. You're just... waiting on something. We just don't know what yet."

She managed a small smile. "That's oddly comforting, coming from you."

"I have my moments."

Kaiden, apparently deciding the conversation had gotten too serious for his taste, flopped backward again with a dramatic sigh. "Well, at least you don't have to deal with heat cycles like the other she-wolves. Small mercies."

"Kaiden."

"What? It's true. Half the female warriors disappear for a week every few months. You've never had to deal with that."

"That's an incredibly inappropriate thing to say."

"I'm an incredibly inappropriate person. Ask anyone."

She threw a handful of grass at him, and he yelped, and Kieran laughed — actually laughed, rare and warm — and just like that the heaviness in her chest eased, chased off by the easy, familiar rhythm of the two of them bickering like they had every day of her childhood.

She dipped her feet into the cold water and let the sound of the stream fill the silence beneath their voices, and for a little while, at least, she let herself simply exist here — no gloves, no distance, no unanswered questions.

Just the water, and the sun, and the two boys who had never once, in eleven years, made her feel like the thing that didn't fit.