The Alpha of All Alphas Wants Me

Bianca had been dressed for twenty minutes before she started practicing. The gown was on, the jewels in place, her hair pinned into something that had taken the stylist ninety minutes and looked effortless by design. What remained, apparently, was impact, the exact angle of entry, the precise management of the pause, the way the silk moved when she turned. She was crossing her bedroom for what I counted as the twelfth time in the same measured walk, and I had been on the chaise since half past four watching the clock on her vanity because it happened to be directly in my eye line. I was finishing the note cards. Seventeen of them. One per significant attendee at tonight's Alpha Summit Banquet, preferred form of address, current alliance position, any territorial sensitivities that might make a compliment land badly. Bianca had never asked me to start making them. She had simply noticed, one evening, that I had them, and after that the expectation settled into place the way most things did between us, without discussion, as a fact of the arrangement. I had also packed two honey cardamom rolls in the emergency kit. Formal political events ran long, the food was decorative rather than filling, and I had watched a border negotiation nearly collapse three years ago over a dessert course that arrived forty minutes late. I was not going to be responsible for anything like that. Also, I had been hungry since noon and nobody in this household was going to notice that, so. "The Aldric heir," Bianca said, without stopping. "Eastern boundary. Where does he stand?" "Publicly, the council position. Privately, he's been seen twice with Harkon representatives since autumn. Don't raise the eastern boundary." "If someone else raises it?" "Say the situation is nuanced, and you appreciate complexity in territorial matters. Then ask about his youngest's naming ceremony. He'll talk for ten minutes and feel warmly toward you for the rest of the evening." Bianca stopped. Looked at me with the expression she used when confirming I was still working correctly. Not gratitude. Assessment. "Veylan," she said. "Elder Veylan, northern mid-range council seat. Seventy-one. Hard of hearing on the left, stand slightly right of center. His mate died last spring. Don't avoid the subject, he finds it dismissive. Brief and sincere. He respects directness." A pause. "Don't over-smile." She adjusted her expression in the mirror from warm to composed. I didn't say: I wrote that note because last year you over-smiled at him for four minutes, and he spent the rest of the evening telling Councilman Dresh that the Harrow family produced decorative women. Some information landed better without its history attached. She turned from the mirror. "How do I look?" "Expensive," I said. Something in her shoulders settled. She trusted honest assessments more than compliments ever offered to her. "Good," she said, and went back to her walk. I went back to the cards. The Harrow kitchen smelled like cardamom and warm butter, which meant Sera was baking. Sera was the only person in this household who baked without occasion. She did it naturally, the way some people hummed, usually in the late afternoon when the house was occupied elsewhere and the kitchen was briefly hers. She was sixty-one, had been with the Harrow family longer than I had been alive, and made honey cardamom rolls that were, genuinely, the best thing I had eaten in any year of my life. I had come down for tea and stayed for the smell. "Summit tonight," she said, without turning from the counter. "Summit tonight," I confirmed. She set a roll in front of me without asking. I ate it standing at the counter because sitting would have made it a conversation, and I wasn't certain I had the capacity for one. "You're going?" she said. "I'm not invited." She made a sound that was not agreement. "You never are," she said. "And yet." This was the entirety of what Sera and I said about the arrangement, always. She had never offered more, and I had never asked for it. But she kept making the rolls, and she always set one in front of me without asking, and that had been its own kind of language for eleven years. The closest thing I had to a home inside a house I had lived in for most of my life. My mother used to make tea before anything else in the morning. Not from habit, from intention. She would fill the kettle and stand at the window watching the tree line while the water heated, her hands wrapped around nothing yet. She said the forest always looked different in those minutes. More itself, she said. Before the day asked anything of it. She smelled of rain and green growing things. My father smelled of cedar and warm earth. I know this the way you know things you learned before you understood you were learning them. I was nine when the border violence came to our district. Not a war, officially. Officially it was a territorial incursion by a rival pack testing the boundaries of a poorly-negotiated agreement. What it meant on the ground was three families in the outer settlements who didn't come home. One of them was mine. I don't think about it often. I have an efficient system for not thinking about it, which involves note cards and the careful management of what I allow to sit still long enough to become a feeling. The smell of cardamom occasionally bypassed it. I filed that, and went back upstairs. I was halfway up when Bianca's voice reached me from the landing. "Lira. The Cassin family, current position on the river settlement?" "Supporting the northern median boundary publicly," I called back. "Privately managing a secondary water access dispute with the Orvane family. Don't raise the river settlement unless you want to be trapped in a conversation that goes nowhere useful." A pause. Then: "Good." I continued up. The note cards were in order. The rolls were packed. The pins were in the kit. Ready, which was apparently the expected condition for a person who was not even meant to be there. After my parents died I was folded into the Harrow household. That was Aunt Mara's word, folded, as though I were a letter being returned to an envelope it had not originally come from. My mother had been Harrow by blood, a lesser branch. My father was Vale, from outside the major packs entirely, mixed heritage, lightly spoken of, which was the polite version of what people actually meant. When they were gone, the Vale name went with them in any practical social sense, and I was left with the Harrow connection and none of the standing that was supposed to come with it. In wolf society, bloodline is present tense. It affects how rooms receive you, how dominants respond to your scent, how quickly a conversation dies when higher value enters it. I had a bloodline that made people slightly uncomfortable without knowing why, which meant I learned early to be easy to overlook. The girls at pack gatherings had been polite in the way that costs nothing—a smile, a nod, a gradual turn toward better prospects. I did not have many friends. I had books, note cards, Sera’s kitchen, and the freedom that comes when nobody thinks to guard their words around you. Being invisible had educational advantages. I had learned more about territorial politics from standing at the edges of rooms that didn't know I was listening than any formal education would have taught me, which was fortunate, because the Harrow household had no intention of providing one. Mara was not cruel. I wanted to be accurate about that. She had assessed my usefulness early and organized her household around it without malice, like you arrange furniture for function and stop seeing it afterward. I had a roof. I had purpose. It was easier to count practical things than want warmer ones. I knew people considered me striking in the inconvenient way beauty sometimes arrives where no one planned for it. Wild black curls that had opinions about every pin I used. Deep hazel eyes that caught warm light and returned it gold before settling back to brown. A face and figure that had decided, sometime during my late teens, to become difficult to ignore regardless of how carefully I dressed to avoid it. It had never done me any particular good. The women who mattered in rooms like tonight's had bloodlines and alliances and the confident ease of people who had always been meant to be looked at. I had note cards and a safety-pinned dress and the practiced skill of becoming part of the wallpaper. Different assets. Different rooms. I pinned my curls back as well as they would allow and did not look in the mirror longer than necessary. " “The Draven seat,” Bianca said, returning with the focused energy of a woman who had used the walk to think. “He sends a delegate usually.” "Castor, usually. Sometimes Elara from the northern office." "But if he came himself." Something held in her jaw, a wanting she would never name directly. “If Draven attends in person,” I said, “every dynamic in the room reorganizes around him before he sits down. Whatever he appears to favor carries weight with every council house before the first course is finished.” “So visibility matters more than usual.” “Significantly more.” She relaxed by half an inch. Enough. “You’re useful,” she said. “I know,” I said, and gathered the cards. Kael Draven. Alpha of all Alphas. Six territories answered to him. He had ruled since twenty-three, fifteen years, which was the age most wolves were still learning to manage their first shift under pressure, not inheriting governance during a succession crisis and crushing a rebellion before the year was out. I had never seen him. He sent delegates. He did not come personally. Nobody expected him tonight. I finished packing the note cards and did not let myself think too carefully about the empty Draven setting I had noted in the seating charts. The car came at six. Bianca went first. Mara followed in formal grey. I handed the supplementary bag into the car, note cards, spare pins, the emergency kit, the rolls, and stepped back. Mara looked at me. "You're not attending." "I understand." She answered her phone before she reached the door. I heard her side of the call without trying to, the elder Presca family had pulled two seats at the last hour, a gap in the head table's attendant rotation, couldn't be covered without pulling from a secondary position that couldn't go unmanned. A very specific opening had been created. Mara didn’t know that. She ended the call and looked at me with brisk efficiency, as if the obvious solution to an inconvenient problem had just presented itself. "You'll come. Assistance only. You stay near Bianca, remain unobtrusive, and you are not a guest." A pause. "A staffing issue. This was not the plan." "Naturally," I said. She got in. The door closed. The night air was cold against my face, sharper than it had been all week, carrying the particular edge that came off the northern territory roads when the season was turning. The car engine idled low. Somewhere beyond the gate the city moved, wolf-packed and indifferent, full of people going to events they had been invited to. I stood on the step for one moment. Tonight, men who could move borders would pretend to discuss soup. Every politically significant wolf in the northern territories in one room, rank-pressure layering the air until an omega could feel it in their back teeth before anyone spoke. And I was going inside that room. The note cards were not going to be useful to me personally in any scenario I could currently imagine. I packed them anyway. The dress was Bianca's from two seasons ago, too wide in the shoulders, safety-pinned at the lining. Serviceable. I checked the corridor mirror on my way out. Curls already losing their argument with the pins. Hazel eyes catching the low hallway light, flashing briefly gold before settling. I straightened the small framed flower on my desk, pressed white, from a garden I no longer had access to, and went downstairs. I was going into a room built for wolves born to command. I had spent my entire life learning how to be invisible to them. Something old in me finally looked up.