Before the Alpha Claimed Me

Chapter Two

I ran for three days.

I know that sounds impossible. For a human, it would be. But Nova was grief-mad and furious, and a furious wolf doesn't tire the way a sad girl does. She pushed us through forests I'd never crossed, past rivers I couldn't name, until the anger burned down to something quieter and more dangerous.

Resolve.

On the fourth day I shifted back and sat naked in a frost-covered meadow, staring at a sky that didn't care about my problems, and thought:

What now?

I had no bag. No phone. No shoes. I'd run in an evening gown and shifted it straight off my body somewhere in the second night. I had two hundred miles of wilderness between me and every person I knew.

Nova, to her credit, had already hunted. My stomach wasn't the problem.

My life was the problem.

I picked a direction based on nothing but gut instinct, north, and started walking.

It took me six hours of walking through farmland before I found a small town with a gas station and a woman named Doris who took one look at my bare feet and split lip, I'd caught a branch mid-shift, and handed me a pair of her dead husband's boots without asking a single question.

Doris was the first kind thing that happened to me after Kaiden.

I thought about her often in the months that followed.

I ended up in the mountain region of Caldwell Ridge, a stretch of elevated wilderness with a sparse human population and, I discovered on day nine, a small community of lone wolves who'd left their packs for various reasons and built something quieter in the gaps.

They weren't a pack. Didn't want to be.

Their unofficial leader was a woman named Petra — mid-fifties, silver-streaked hair, forearms like carved wood, and the kind of eyes that had seen everything and forgiven most of it.

She found me attempting to build a shelter out of pine branches and failing spectacularly.

"You're Silver Ridge." It wasn't a question.

I stiffened. "Not anymore."

She studied me for a long moment. "Can you cook?"

"Passably."

"Can you follow instruction without arguing every five seconds?"

Nova snorted inside me. I kept my face straight. "...Mostly."

Petra smiled for the first time. "Close enough. Come eat."

That was how I found a home in the wreckage.

Petra's community had eleven people. Some were healers. Some were trackers. Some were just tired. What they all shared was an absence of hierarchy, which meant nobody expected me to perform obedience or smile through pain or be anyone's beautiful accessory.

God, I hadn't realized how exhausted I was from all that performing.

Petra began training me within the first week. Not gently.

She watched me attempt a defensive sequence against one of her trackers, a lean, quiet man named Gus, and then she pulled me aside and said, "You fight like someone who's never been allowed to actually hurt anyone."

She wasn't wrong.

Under Kaiden's orbit, I'd trained decoratively. Light sparring. Controlled circuits. Nothing that might result in bruises that would be inconvenient to explain at pack events.

Petra didn't care about bruises.

She cared about survival.

For eleven months I bled and burned and rebuilt. My body changed. My reflexes sharpened. Nova stopped being restless and started being ready. I stopped thinking about Kaiden almost entirely by month four — the operative word being almost.

Month seven brought a phone call from my younger sister Bex that cracked something open.

"Sera." Her voice was small and wrecked in a way I hadn't heard since we were kids.

"What happened?" My stomach dropped before she even spoke.

"It's Dad. He's—" She broke. "He had a heart attack, Sera. Three days ago. He's alive but he's asking for you. He won't stop asking for you."

The mountains outside Petra's window blurred.

"I'm coming home," I said.

I didn't tell Bex it felt like stepping back into a burning building.

Petra drove me to the edge of Caldwell Ridge territory the next morning. She didn't make a speech. She handed me a worn leather jacket that smelled like cedar and pine and pressed two fingers briefly against my cheek.

"Don't fold," she said. "Whatever you find there — don't fold."

I thought about saying something meaningful. Instead I hugged her, hard, and got in the car Bex had sent.

The five-hour drive back to Silver Ridge was the longest of my life.

The landscape I'd grown up in slid past the window like a memory I hadn't asked to have. Pine forests. Rolling fields. The long road through Westmarket that always meant you were twenty minutes from home.

Nova sat rigid inside me. Coiled.

"You feel that?" she murmured.

I frowned. "Feel what?"

"Something's different."

I leaned toward the window. The perimeter markers were new — darker, more deliberate carvings on the boundary stones. And when we were stopped at the territorial edge by three wolves I'd never seen in my life — massive, scarred, radiating controlled aggression — I understood that different wasn't a strong enough word.

"State your name and purpose," the largest one said. His eyes were flat and professional.

"Sera Vane. My father is Callum Vane, he's a senior pack member. I'm here to see him."

The wolves exchanged a look I couldn't read.

"We'll need to contact the Alpha."

The Alpha. Not Alpha Darek — Kaiden's father. The phrasing was wrong.

"Which Alpha?" I asked carefully.

The wolf's expression didn't change. "The only one that matters now."

The back of my neck prickled.

Nova pressed forward just enough to sharpen my senses, and that's when I caught it on the wind — faint, distant, but unmistakable.

Something massive had happened to my pack.

And whoever was in charge now?

He was already watching the car.