CLAIMED BY THE RUTHLESS ALPHA KING

chapter Three

Chapter Three: What I Left Behind

I didn't let myself think. Thinking would've stopped me.

I eased his arm off my waist an inch at a time, holding my breath every time he shifted, until I could slide out from under it without waking him. He made a low sound in his sleep and turned his face into the blanket, and for one terrible second I almost climbed back in beside him just to keep hearing it.

I didn't. I made myself stand up instead.

The fire had burned down to gray coals. Outside the overhang the sky had gone the color of a bruise healing, not quite morning yet but close enough that I could see the shape of the trees again. My dress was ruined, torn at the hem, grass-stained at the knees, and I pulled it back on anyway because it was all I had.

He looked different asleep. Younger, maybe, or just less braced for something to come at him out of the dark. The scar through his eyebrow was still there, and the hard line of his jaw hadn't softened much even in sleep, but his hands were open at his sides instead of curled into fists, and that undid me a little more than I wanted it to.

I almost woke him up to ask his name one last time. I stood there with my hand halfway to his shoulder and pulled it back.

What would I even do with a name. Carry it home to Silver Hollow and explain to my family that I'd spent the night after my own claiming ceremony with a nameless rogue covered in someone else's blood? Explain to my mother, whose face I could still picture folding in on itself with disappointment, that my wolf had picked a stranger from the wrong side of the mountain over the boy the whole pack had already started planning a wedding around?

There wasn't a version of this that ended well. I'd known that from the second he stepped out of the trees. I'd stayed anyway.

I reached up and unclasped the necklace at my throat, the thin silver chain my grandmother had given me the day I turned sixteen, small moon pendant worn smooth from years of me running my thumb over it when I was nervous. I didn't decide to leave it. My hand just did it, working the clasp loose, and before I could talk myself out of it I knelt down and set it in his open palm, careful, like it might wake him if I moved too fast.

It felt stupid the second I'd done it. Some part of me wanted him to have something that proved last night had actually happened, in case I spent the rest of my life convincing myself I'd imagined it. Some other part of me, quieter and harder to admit to, just didn't want to be the only one left holding proof.

I looked at him one more time. Committed it to memory the way you memorize something you already know you're going to lose. Then I turned and walked out from under the overhang before I could change my mind, before my wolf could drag me back by force, because she was already fighting me on this, already howling somewhere behind my ribs that we were making a mistake we wouldn't get to take back.

I told her to be quiet. She didn't listen. She never really stopped.

The walk down the mountain took longer than the run up it had. My legs were shaking, not from exhaustion, or not only from that. Every step away from him felt like tearing something loose that had only just finished sewing itself into place, and by the time Silver Hollow's boundary markers came into view through the trees I'd stopped pretending the ache in my chest was going to fade on its own.

The pack territory was quiet in the gray early light, most of the fires from last night's celebration burned down to nothing, the clearing where I'd watched Caleb kneel for my cousin now just trampled grass and a few forgotten cups. I stood at the edge of it for a second, looking at the place where my whole life had rearranged itself twice in one night, and felt strangely far away from both versions of the girl who'd stood there. The one who'd believed she'd be Luna. The one who'd run.

I didn't go to my parents' house. I couldn't, not yet, not with my dress torn and my scent probably telling any wolf with a working nose exactly what I'd spent the night doing. Instead I went around the back way to the training grounds and sat under the old oak, the one with our initials still carved into the bark, and I put my head down on my knees and let myself feel it. All of it. Caleb kneeling for Brynn. The stranger's hands. The necklace sitting in his open palm while he slept, not knowing yet that I was already gone.

I told myself it was over. One night, one mistake born out of heartbreak and a heat I hadn't asked for, and now it would fade the way the older women always said the bond faded if you didn't act on it soon enough after it surfaced.

I didn't fully believe that even as I thought it. But I needed to believe it enough to stand up, wipe my face, and walk home to face whatever was waiting for me there.

I had no idea yet how wrong I was about the fading. I had no idea that somewhere back up that mountain, a man with no name and blood on his shirt was waking up to an empty blanket and a silver chain closed in his fist, already deciding he wasn't going to let this be the end of it either.

I just knew that when I finally walked through my parents' front door, my mother took one look at my face and started crying before I'd even said a word.

"Where have you been," she said. Not really a question. More like she already knew the answer was going to be bad, and just needed to hear how bad.

I didn't have an answer that wouldn't make things worse. So I gave her the only one I had.

"I needed air."

She didn't believe me. I could see it in the way her eyes moved over the state of my dress, the state of my face, the way I couldn't quite meet her eyes when I said it. But she didn't push, not that morning, and I climbed the stairs to my room and shut the door and sat on the edge of my bed in the growing daylight, one hand pressed flat against my stomach the same way it had been pressed the night before, except now for a different reason entirely, one I wouldn't understand for another few weeks.

I told myself it was over.

It wasn't.