The Alpha's Forsaken mate

Episode 4

Thea's POV

The training field behind Calla's territory was nothing more than packed dirt and a few wooden posts worn down from years of use, but it became the place I spent more hours of my life than anywhere else over the following months.

My trainer was a rogue named Brennick, a wolf nearly twice my size with a scar running down one side of his face and a reputation, Calla told me, for being the best hand-to-hand fighter in three territories before he chose to leave pack life behind entirely. He owed Calla a debt old enough that neither of them ever explained the details, and whatever it was, it was apparently large enough to keep him showing up at dawn every single day to put me through hours of work I had no idea my body was capable of surviving.

"Again," he said, circling me slowly, his arms loose at his sides.

"I just did it four times," I said, breathing hard, my legs aching from the last set of footwork drills.

"Then do it a fifth time."

I gritted my teeth and reset my stance the way he had shown me that first week, weight balanced low, hands up, eyes on him instead of on my own feet. He came at me without warning, testing whether I had actually learned to react.

I blocked the first strike. Missed the second entirely and felt his forearm connect with my shoulder hard enough to spin me half around.

"Better," he said, stepping back. "You're still flinching before you block. Flinching gets you killed before the block even matters."

"I'm working on it."

"Work faster."

I had hated him for the first month. Genuinely, deeply hated the way he never softened his criticism, never told me I was doing well even when I clearly was, never let a single mistake pass without correcting it immediately and without patience. But somewhere around the second month, I started understanding that his refusal to go easy on me was its own kind of respect, the kind nobody in Silvermoon had ever bothered extending to me.

"You're thinking too much again," he said, resetting into position across from me.

"I'm trying to remember the sequence."

"There is no sequence once someone's actually trying to hurt you," he said.

"There's only what your body already knows how to do. If you're still thinking about it at the moment, you haven't learned it yet."

"That's not very encouraging."

"I'm not here to encourage you," he said, the corner of his mouth pulling into something almost like amusement. "I'm here to make sure you survive the next time someone decides you're an easy target."

That landed harder than he probably meant it to, and something in my face must have shown it because he paused, studying me for a moment before continuing.

"Whatever happened to you before you got here," he said, "it doesn't matter to me. What matters is whether you walk out of here able to make sure it doesn't happen again."

"It wasn't a fight," I said quietly. “Most of them were just words.”

"Words can cut deeper than a blade sometimes," he said. "Doesn't mean the cure's any different. Get stronger. Get faster. Make sure the next time anyone underestimates you, it's the last mistake they make."

I nodded and reset my stance.

This time when he came at me, I didn't flinch.

The physical training was only half of what I spent those months doing.

The other half happened in Calla's cottage, late at night, going through the boxes of evidence she had kept hidden since the year my mother died, evidence she said she had been waiting for someone with the right name and the right reason to finally come collect.

There were letters, copies my mother had made secretly before she was killed, documenting irregularities in the pack's healing records that nobody else had thought to question. There were vial samples, carefully preserved, that Calla said still carried traces of the substance Aldric had been using on the people. There were testimonies, names of wolves who had grown unexplainably weak or sick over the years, patterns my mother had started connecting before her death cut the investigation short.

"She was careful," Calla told me one night, watching me go through the files carefully.

"She knew the moment she started asking questions that she might not survive finding the answers. She made sure the evidence would survive even if she didn't."

"Why didn't she go to someone? The pack council, another Alpha, anyone?"

"Who would she go to?" Calla asked. "Your uncle controlled the council by the time she found what she found. And no other pack would risk war with Silvermoon over the word of one healer without proof solid enough to survive a direct challenge."

"So she waited?”

"She waited," Calla said. "And she protected what she found, and she protected you, and she ran out of time before she could do anything more than that."

I sat with the files spread across the table in front of me, my mother's careful, deliberate handwriting filling page after page, and felt something harden inside my chest that had nothing to do with grief anymore.

"I'm not going to run out of time," I said.

Calla studied me for a long moment, the same intense study she'd given me the first day I walked through her door.

"No," she said quietly. "I don't think you will."

By the time the final months of training came to an end, I barely recognized myself in the small mirror hanging in the corner of Calla's cottage.

The girl who had walked out of that summit with an empty tray in her hands had been soft in places life had never given her permission to be soft, scared in ways she had learned to hide but never learned to stop feeling. The woman looking back at me now stood differently, moved differently, carried herself with the kind of stillness Brennick had spent months drilling into every motion I made.

I packed the evidence carefully, wrapped and protected the way Calla showed me, along with everything else I would need for the journey back.

Brennick walked me to the edge of the territory the morning I left, saying very little, which had become its own kind of language between us over the months we'd spent together.

"You're ready," he said finally, when we reached the border.

"You sound surprised."

"I'm not," he said. "I just don't say it often. Don't waste what you've built getting yourself killed out of impatience."

"I'll try not to."

He nodded once, and that was the entire goodbye, and I turned and walked toward Silvermoon territory with three years of training and a folder of evidence that was about to change everything.