The Borrowed Alpha

The Records

I didn't take long to sit with it.

A knock, three sharp raps, cut through my spiraling, and a voice I recognized as the maid's came muffled through the door. "Alpha, the Elders are assembling in the east hall. They asked me to remind you it starts in ten minutes."

Ten minutes to become someone I'd known for less than an hour.

I stood, and the body did most of the work without asking me. My hands found a robe hanging by the door and settled it over my shoulders in a motion I so practiced. I didn't register, deciding to do it until it was already done, the fabric heavier and finer than anything I'd owned in my life before this one. My spine straightened on its own. My shoulders found a set for them that felt rehearsed a thousand times, though I'd never rehearsed anything in my life except how to disappear.

I caught myself in the mirror again on the way out and didn't recognize the woman walking toward the door, even though I knew, technically, she was walking in my shoes. For a moment, I let myself wonder how many mornings Wren had stood in this exact spot, settling this exact robe over those exact shoulders, never once imagining that someone else would be wearing her forward one day.

Ronan was waiting at the end of the corridor, arms crossed, his expression unreadable in the specific way people make their faces unreadable on purpose.

"You don't have to do this today," he said, low, before I'd even reached him. "Not after last night."

Last night. Something had happened last night, something he assumed I remembered, and the ground under the conversation went thin and dangerous in a single heartbeat.

"I'm fine," I said, which was becoming the only sentence this body seemed to know how to say with any conviction.

He reached out, not quite touching, his hand pausing an inch from my wrist like he'd caught himself mid-habit. "You keep saying that."

"It keeps being true."

He studied me the way he had that morning, weighing something, then let his hand drop and fell into step beside me instead of pushing further. That was its own kind of information. Whatever last night was, he'd decided it wasn't his place to make me talk about it. I filed that away and hated how grateful I was for it, and hated more that some part of this borrowed chest had wanted him to finish reaching.

The east hall held six elders around a table long enough to seat twice that many, dark wood worn pale at the edges from decades of hands resting exactly where mine were about to. Every one of them looked up when I walked in like they were checking something against a memory. An older woman near the far end, gray hair pinned back hard enough to look painful, gave me a nod I couldn't read at all. I made myself walk the way Wren's body wanted to walk, unhurried, chin level, and took the seat at the head of the table before anyone could see me hesitate over which one was mine.

"Alpha." The man to my right, silver at his temples, a scar running from ear to collarbone, his head inclined, and something in my chest, something that wasn't fully mine, supplied his name before I asked for it. Corwin. Pack Elder. Wren's oldest ally in this room, and by the look he was giving me, possibly the one person here sharp enough to notice something was wrong before anyone said a word.

"Corwin," I said, and watched his eyes flicker, just slightly, at the sound of his own name in my mouth.

"You look tired," he said. Not a question. An opening.

"Long night," Ronan answered before I had to, easy and unbothered, and I understood, sitting there, that he'd just lied to me without knowing he was doing it, covering a gap I hadn't even shown him existed. I didn't know whether to be relieved or sick.

Corwin let it go, but slowly, the way a man lets go of a rope he still isn't sure has been properly tied off.

The meeting moved through pack business first. Grain stores are running low before the next harvest. A trade offer from a neighboring pack that I agreed to only because everyone at the table nodded expectantly and Wren's instincts didn't object to the shape of the words leaving my mouth. Then a woman and a man stood at the same time from opposite ends of the table, and the room's whole temperature changed.

"The Hartley boundary line has moved twice this season," the woman said, before the man could open his mouth. "Twice, Alpha. My family's grazing rights are written into the founding charter of this pack, and the Voss family keeps their herds three fields further west than they're owed."

The man started to object, and I had exactly no idea whose side Wren would have taken, or whether she'd taken a side at all before, or if this argument was new or a hundred years old and worn smooth from repetition.

I opened my mouth with nothing prepared, and the body answered anyway.

"Bring me the founding charter and the current grazing map by tomorrow evening," I heard myself say, calm and final in a way that closed the argument before it had really opened. "Whatever the charter says, that's what we honor. If the maps don't match the charter, the maps are wrong, not the charter. I'll rule on it in front of both families, not just the two of you."

The woman sat back down looking faintly stunned, like she'd expected to fight harder for that answer than she'd had to. The man looked considerably less pleased. Corwin, beside me, didn't say anything at all, but I felt him watching me with the particular stillness of someone revising something he thought he already knew.

Then he cleared his throat and set down the paper he'd been holding, and the room's temperature changed again, worse this time.

"Before we close. I wanted you to know I haven't forgotten what you asked me." He said it carefully, like he expected the topic to matter more than the words did. "The records on Ashwood. I know it's been three weeks. I'm still pulling the older files, the ones from before the last Alpha, but I wanted you to hear it from me before you thought I'd let them drop."

The room didn't go quiet. Nobody else even looked up.

I went very, very still.

"Ashwood," I repeated, and my voice came out steady only because Wren's body didn't know any other way to sound.

"Whatever you're building a case for," Corwin said, watching me now with the full weight of that sharp, careful attention, "I hope it's worth what it's cost you to keep it this quiet. You haven't even told Ronan, have you?"

Ronan's head turned toward me, slowly, and for the first time since I'd woken up in this borrowed skin, I watched the mate bond in his eyes go still and calculating instead of warm.

"No," he said. "She hasn't."

Three weeks ago, before I had ever set foot in this body, the woman I was wearing had already been asking questions about my pack.

I hadn't fallen into this life by accident. Someone had been looking for a door into Ashwood long before I ever got the key.