The Alpha's Forsaken mate

Episode3

Thea's POV

I walked for three days before I found the place written on the paper in my hand.

The address my mother left behind led somewhere far from Silvermoon, far from anything pack territory at all, a stretch of land at the edge of rogue territory where the human world and the supernatural world blurred together.

I kept the paper folded carefully in my pocket the whole way, pulling it out at every crossroad to check the directions scrawled beneath the name, worried that the ink might fade before I found whoever this Calla was supposed to be.

Then I finally found it.

A cottage sitting alone at the end of a narrow dirt path, smoke curling from a chimney that looked older than the rest of the surrounding structure. I stood at the edge of the field for a long moment, suddenly unsure, my exhaustion from three days of walking finally catching up with the nervous energy that had carried me this far.

The door opened before I worked up the courage to knock.

A woman stood in the frame, older than my mother would have been if she had lived, with silver-streaked hair and eyes that studied me with an intensity that made me feel like she was looking at something other than my face.

"You took longer than I expected," she said. "Sera's daughter."

"You knew my mother," I said, my voice coming out rougher than I meant it to after days of barely speaking to anyone.

"I knew her well enough that I've been waiting years for you to find this place," she said, stepping back from the door.

"Come inside, child. You look like you haven't eaten properly in days."

Calla's cottage was warm in a way nothing in my aunt's house had ever been, herbs hanging from the rafters, shelves lined with jars and books that looked older than the building itself. She fed me something hot before she let me ask a single question, and only once I had eaten did she finally sit across from me and start talking.

What she told me unraveled twenty-two years of everything I thought I understood about myself.

She said I had a wolfless. It had been bound, deliberately, by my mother's own hand, using a magic complex and costly enough that Calla said it had likely taken years off Sera's life to perform it properly.

So I wasn't wolfless after all.

The wolf I carried was not an ordinary wolf. It belonged to a bloodline gift that surfaced only rarely, ancient in a way that very few living wolves still carried, powerful enough that my mother knew the moment it showed any sign of emerging, certain people in Silvermoon would have recognized exactly what it was and what it meant.

She told me it would have made me a target the moment my uncle saw it.

She told me my mother had not been a traitor. Sera had discovered evidence that Aldric, my uncle, was slowly poisoning the pack's bloodline, a careful and patient method of weakening or eliminating any wolf who might one day challenge his authority, hidden well enough that nobody else in Silvermoon had noticed what was happening around them for years. Sera found it, and Sera was killed for finding it. The treason charge is nothing but a story built to bury the truth along with her.

I sat very still as Calla spoke, my hands wrapped tightly around the cup in front of me, my entire life had been built up on a lie. I wasn't even wolfless and I had to go through all that pain and humiliation.

"She bound your wolf to protect you from him," Calla said quietly. "It was the only way she knew to keep you alive long enough to grow up and decide what to do with what you carry."

"I want it back," I said, before she had even finished her sentence. "Whatever it takes. I want my wolf back."

Calla studied me for a long moment.

"It won't be gentle," she said. "What your mother found was not a small thing. Unbinding it properly will take time, and it will hurt, more than almost anything you've experienced."

"I've survived worse," I said.

She nodded slowly, like that answer satisfied something in her, and reached for one of the jars on the shelf behind her.

"Then we begin tomorrow."

The months that followed were the hardest of my entire life.

Calla worked the unbinding in careful stages, never rushing it no matter how much I begged her to go faster, explaining each time that forcing it too quickly could destroy what we were trying to free instead of releasing it properly.

There were nights I lay on the floor of her cottage unable to move, my body burning from the inside in ways I had no language for, my mind flooded with fragments of memory that did not belong to me, flashes of things my mother had seen and felt that her binding had apparently taken away alongside the wolf itself.

I trained between the painful sessions, sparring with rogues Calla brought in who owed her favors, learning to fight with my hands and whatever weapon was put in front of me, because I refused to walk back into the world the same defenseless girl who had been rejected in front of two packs.

By the final months, I barely recognized the reflection that looked back at me in Calla's small mirror.

On the night the binding finally broke completely, Calla stood across the field behind her cottage and told me to let go, to stop holding the wolf back the way I had unconsciously done my entire life out of habit and fear.

I closed my eyes and did exactly that.

The shift that followed was unlike anything described in any story I had ever heard about a wolf's first change. It tore through me with a force that should have been unbearable, ancient power flooding every part of my body at once, years of buried strength finally given somewhere to go.

When I opened my eyes again, I was standing on four legs instead of two, larger than any wolf I had ever seen in Silvermoon, power coiled beneath my fur like something that had been waiting its entire existence for exactly this moment.

I let out a howl that shook the trees in the forest.