Alpha japhet pov
The day had started to dim without me realizing it, the soft hues of the evening sky bleeding into my room. My thoughts were a tangled web, and time seemed irrelevant until a sudden mindlink from my mother startled me out of my haze. It had been a while since she'd summoned me—years, maybe. We were never close, not in the way most would expect a mother and son to be.
Not that I was close to either of my parents. At six years old, my life had been stripped of childhood and thrust into the rigorous grind of Alpha training. My father, Alpha Martins, was the kind of man who saw softness as a flaw and weakness as a crime. He didn’t think I had what it took to be an Alpha; I knew that much from his eyes, always sharp and scrutinizing, ready to catch me falter.
But then he cam
