Taming The Alpha Beast

My father didn't look at me when he said it. That was how I knew it was bad. He stood at the far end of our pack's war room, a generous title for a room that was little more than cracked stone walls, a splintered table, and a map so old the ink had faded to ghost with his back to me and his hands clasped behind him like a man already in the middle of a prayer. Or a confession. "It's already done, Aurora." Three words. Four if you counted my name. And somehow they rearranged the entire shape of my life. I didn't scream. I didn't cry. I had learned long ago that both were wasted currency in this room. Instead I set my hands flat on the splintered table and kept my voice very, very calm. "Explain it to me, Father. From the beginning." He did. It took less time than it should have, which was perhaps the most damning part. The Wolfe Pack had been running a deficit for two years raids from the northern rogue factions, a failed harvest season, a sickness that swept through our warriors last winter and took eleven good fighters with it. We had borrowed from the Stormborn Empire twice. We had defaulted twice. And Alpha Alexander Stormborn, whose patience was apparently as legendary as his cruelty, had finally run out of it. He wanted collateral. He wanted me. "You're strong," my father said, and I noticed he still hadn't turned around. "Capable. You can handle yourself in any environment. Out of everyone in this pack, you're the one who...." "Don't." My voice came out quiet and sharp as a blade. "Don't tell me you chose me because I'm strong. Tell me the truth. Tell me you chose me because I'm unmated, because I have no rank worth protecting, and because you knew I wouldn't fall apart on the journey there." The silence that followed was its own answer. I straightened. Pulled my hands off the table. Rolled my shoulders back the way my mother taught me before she died spine like iron, Aurora, they can take everything else but not that and looked at the back of my father's greying head with something that was not quite hatred and not quite love and lived somewhere painful in between. "How long?" "Until the debt is cleared. Six months. Perhaps a year." "And if it isn't cleared in a year?" He didn't answer. I picked up my coat from the chair by the door. "I'll leave at dawn." "Aurora...." "Tell Lena I'll write." My younger sister. Seventeen and soft hearted and the only reason I hadn't already walked out of this pack on my own terms. "And Father?" I paused in the doorway without turning back. I owed him that much the same courtesy he had shown me. "Don't make me regret surviving this." I left him standing in his war room with his hands clasped and his head bowed and I didn't look back once. I had heard stories about Alexander Stormborn the way you hear stories about bad weather everyone had one, nobody wanted to be caught in one. He was the Alpha who had unified six fractured packs under a single banner through a combination of strategic brilliance and the kind of cold blooded ruthlessness that made other Alphas reconsider their career choices. He didn't negotiate from a position of strength. He negotiated from a position of your pack is already surrounded and you haven't realised it yet. No mate. No mercy. No exceptions. I heard all of this and packed a single bag and arrived at the Stormborn border at dawn the following morning with my head up and my heartbeat steady, which was either courage or a very convincing performance of it. Even I wasn't sure which. The border guards were expecting me. That was somehow worse the efficiency of it, the absence of surprise. They looked me over with the particular blankness of men who had been told a girl was coming and didn't know what to do with the fact that the girl looked like she was evaluating them. The taller one cleared his throat. "Aurora Wolfe?" "Unless someone else walked through your border in the last thirty seconds." He didn't smile. Neither did I. He jerked his head toward the treeline. "The Alpha is waiting." I followed them through forest so dense the morning light came through in thin silver slats, across a bridge over a river that ran black and fast, and through the outer gates of the most formidable pack territory I had ever seen. Stormborn land didn't just exist, it loomed. The kind of place that knew exactly how powerful it was and felt no need to prove it. The kind of place that swallowed people whole. The great hall doors opened before I reached them. And there at the far end of the room, standing with his back to a wall of iron framed windows, arms folded, expression carved from something colder than stone was Alexander Stormborn. He looked at me the way you look at a problem you haven't decided how to solve yet. I looked back at him the way you look at a problem that has absolutely no idea what it has just invited through its front door. Neither of us spoke. The doors closed behind me with a sound like a verdict.