The Alpha's Hidden Debts

Chapter 20: Her Mother's Letter

Sera's Pov

I took the envelope up to my room and closed the door before I opened it.

I sat on the edge of the bed for a long moment first, just holding it, the paper soft and worn under my fingers, my name in handwriting I'd never seen before this week and had already memorized without meaning to. Mara had said I was ready. I didn't feel ready. I doubted anyone ever truly did, faced with words like this, but waiting any longer wasn't going to change that. I broke the seal anyway.

Inside was a single folded sheet, the ink faded in places, dark and certain in others, like it had been written across more than one sitting, more than one mood. I unfolded it carefully and began to read.

My voice came out barely above a whisper, softly, to no one, the words finding shape in the quiet of the room.

‘If you're reading this, then I was right to believe you'd come here. I hope I was right about everything else too, though I won't know, will I. That's the trouble with letters like this. I'm writing to a version of you I'll never meet, hoping she's strong enough to hold what I'm about to give her.’

‘You need to know what you are, Sera. I should have been the one to tell you myself, in person, with my hand in yours. I'm sorry it's coming to you this way instead.’

‘I have been running since before you were born. Not from wolves, exactly. From a faction inside the wolf council, old families, old blood, the ones who carried out something thirty years before you that they have never stopped being afraid of. They survived by being the hand that did it. And a hand that has done something terrible once will do it again to protect the silence around the first time.’

‘They have been watching for bloodlines like ours ever since. Quietly. Patiently. They have all the time in the world and we never do.’

I stopped reading aloud for a moment. My hands had gone unsteady, just slightly, and I waited until they settled before I continued.

‘Your father was not fully a wolf, my love. I won't tell you everything about him here, because some things should be told face to face, and I am holding on to the hope that someday they will be. But you should know this much. What you carry, you carry from both of us.’

‘There is something in your blood that calls to wolves. Not because of beauty, not because of anything you do or say or choose. It is older than choice. Their wolves recognize something in you before their minds did, some pull toward protection and dominance both at once, and it will follow you wherever you go, whether you want it to or not. I have watched it happen more than once, and every time it frightened me less than it should have, because I understood, even then, that it wasn't about what you would become to them. It was about what they would have to become around you.’

‘Do not let that frighten you into hiding. And do not, under any circumstance, let anyone use it to claim you as something they own.’

The next line was underlined, twice, hard enough that the pen had nearly torn through the paper.

‘Do not let anyone claim you as a thing. You are not a thing.’

I read that line three times before I let myself move past it.

‘I think of you constantly, even now, even before I've held you. I think about what kind of woman you'll become, what kind of fight you'll have in you, whether you'll have my stubbornness or something steadier. I hope for steadier. I hope…’

The letter stopped there.

Mid-sentence, mid-thought, the pen simply lifting off the page and never coming back down. No signature. No closing line. Just an unfinished hope hanging in the white space at the bottom of the sheet, like something had interrupted her, called her away before she could finish, and she'd never gotten the chance to come back to it.

I sat with that unfinished sentence for a long time. I didn't cry, not the way I had that first week, not the overflow kind. This was quieter, something that settled into my chest and stayed there instead of moving through and out, a grief with nowhere left to go because there was no one left to give it to.

I folded the letter carefully along its original creases and held it in both hands, and I sat like that, on the edge of the bed, as the room went dark and then slowly, gradually, gray again with the first edge of morning light through the window.

I didn't sleep. I didn't try to. I just sat with her voice, the only version of it I would ever have, until the sky outside told me it was time to stop sitting and start moving again. Whatever came next, I wanted to meet it standing, not curled up around a letter that could never finish its own sentence.

I went downstairs once the light was fully up, the letter folded small and tucked into the pocket of my dress, close against me. I found Dex waiting near the bottom of the stairs, and one look at his face told me whatever he was about to say wasn't going to be gentle.

"There's a problem," he said. "Someone inside the compound. We found a communication device on them this morning, tuned to an Ironmoor frequency."