The Alpha I Shouldn't Want

Chapter Twelve — The Guard

° VALERIAN'S POV °

I woke before dawn, as I always did, and dressed with the same deliberate care I had practiced for eleven years.

Gloves first. Always gloves, supple black leather worked soft with age, pulled snug over palms scarred with the marks of a wolf who had spent over a decade clawing at the inside of my control. Then the training clothes — long sleeves despite the season, high collar, nothing that would leave skin exposed to eyes sharp enough to notice what I had spent so long hiding. It was a ritual now, this armoring of myself against discovery, so practiced I barely thought about it anymore.

I thought about little else, most mornings, except her.

By the time I reached the training yard, the sky had only just begun to pale toward gold, mist still clinging low across the grass. I welcomed the emptiness. A handful of guards were already there, running drills in pairs, but the yard was otherwise quiet enough that I could lose myself in the rhythm of combat without an audience.

I selected Bran, one of the younger guards, competent enough to pose a reasonable challenge without requiring the kind of restraint I'd need against someone truly skilled. We began slow — testing, circling, the familiar cadence of blade against blade settling something in my chest that little else managed to settle these days.

I felt her before I saw her.

I always did. Some instinct older than reason, tied irrevocably to the bond I refused to name, alerted me to her presence the moment she stepped into the yard, long before my nose caught her scent on the morning air. I did not turn. I had learned, over the past weeks, that turning only made it worse — made the ache in my chest sharper, made the leash on my wolf strain thinner.

I kept my eyes on Bran instead, kept my footing precise, kept my mind as empty as I could force it to be.

It did not stay empty for long.

She had settled on the fence, the same spot she'd claimed a hundred times as a girl, legs swinging loosely, sunlight beginning to catch in that impossible red hair. I felt her attention on me the way I felt sunlight on skin — warm, constant, impossible to ignore no matter how hard I tried. My wolf noticed too, rising just beneath the surface, restless and pleased in equal measure, the way he always was whenever she watched me train.

I held my focus. Bran was decent enough that a moment's inattention would have cost me a blade to the ribs, and vanity aside, I had no intention of bleeding in front of her twice in one week.

Then I heard him.

Marcus's youngest cousin — Elias, I recalled, barely past twenty, recently promoted into the guard rotation, all easy charm and untested confidence. He'd approached the fence where she sat, said something I couldn't quite make out over the clash of steel, and she laughed.

Not politely. Not the careful, distant laugh she gave strangers at feasts. Genuinely. Head tipping back, hair catching the light, the sound of it carrying clear across the yard like something designed specifically to unravel whatever thread of control I'd managed to hold onto since the moment she'd walked out on me the night before.

I told myself it meant nothing.

I told myself a young guard's clumsy flirtation deserved no reaction whatsoever from an Alpha well past his reign, that jealousy was beneath me, that I had no claim to feel anything at all watching her smile at a boy barely older than my own sons.

Then Elias offered his hand, said something else I couldn't hear, and she took it — sliding off the fence, still laughing, letting him lead her away from the training yard toward the gardens beyond, close enough that his shoulder brushed hers with every other step.

Something in me went very quiet.

Very quiet, and very cold, and entirely unreasonable.

I did not decide to throw Bran. I want to be honest about that, in whatever accounting I eventually give myself for this morning's failures — I did not think, did not calculate, did not weigh the consequences of losing control in front of a yard full of witnesses. My wolf simply surged, sudden and total, funneling eleven years of restraint into a single movement, and Bran's next strike met not the measured parry I'd been offering all morning but something considerably closer to the full weight of an Alpha who had briefly stopped pretending to be anything less than what he was.

He went down hard.

Not injured, I registered distantly, some functioning corner of my mind still capable of assessment even as the rest of me burned with something ugly and possessive I had no right to feel. Thrown clear across the ring, rolling once through the grass before catching himself, staring up at me with wide, startled eyes that I recognized, belatedly, as fear.

The yard had gone silent.

Every guard within earshot had stopped to stare — at Bran, sprawled and stunned in the grass, and then at me, breathing hard, hands curled into fists inside gloves that had, I noticed only now, begun to creak dangerously at the seams.

"Alpha." Bran pushed himself upright slowly, wisely making no sudden movements. "Are you—"

"That's enough for today." My voice came out rougher than I intended, barely recognizable even to my own ears. "All of you. Dismissed."

Nobody argued. Nobody ever argued with me, which was, I supposed, precisely the problem — years of a pack too well-trained in deference to ever ask the question I most needed someone to ask me. *What is wrong with you, Valerian. Why does watching her smile at another man make you forget yourself entirely.*

I didn't wait to see them disperse.

I crossed the yard toward the house with my jaw locked and my hands still curled tight enough to ache, refusing to look toward the gardens where she'd disappeared with that boy's hand still loosely wrapped around hers, refusing to acknowledge the low, furious growl still rumbling somewhere beneath my ribs that had nothing rational left to say for itself.

My office door slammed harder than I intended when I reached it.

I stood alone in the sudden silence afterward, palms braced flat against my desk, breathing hard, staring down at gloved hands that had just thrown one of my own guards across a training yard over nothing more than a girl's laughter and an innocent walk through the garden.

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

Standing there, chest heaving, wolf still snarling beneath my skin over a jealousy I had no right to claim, I understood — more clearly than I wanted to — exactly how much longer I had left before those distances collapsed entirely.