The Borrowed Alpha

The Trail

I let go.

That was all it took, in the end. Not courage, not the four wasted hours I'd spent searching a dead woman's study for answers that weren't there. Just letting go of the two white-knuckled hands I'd had wrapped around whatever lived beneath my ribs since the moment I woke up in this body, and stepping back to let it drive.

It didn't hurt the way I'd braced for. It felt like falling asleep standing up, my human shape peeling away in one long, dizzying drop, and then the world came back online in pieces that didn't match. Colors drained to something colder and sharper. Sound arrived in layers I had no names for, a hundred separate heartbeats around me instead of one crowd. And under all of it, scent, so much scent, moonlight and pine sap and the particular warm smell of every single wolf in that clearing, hitting me all at once like a hand around the throat. I understood, in that first overwhelming second, why nobody had warned me how much there was to feel. There was no way to describe it to someone who hadn't already lived it, the way the whole world stopped being something I looked at and became something I was standing inside instead.

I was on four legs before I understood I'd moved. My body knew exactly how to do this even though I never had, and that should have terrified me more than it did, except there wasn't room left for terror. There was only the ground under my paws and the moon overhead and a want so large and simple it swallowed everything else.

Run.

The pack moved like water finding its level, wolves peeling off the tree line in twos and threes until the whole clearing emptied into the dark, and I ran with them because my body ran before I decided to, because whatever Wren's wolf had been for six years apparently didn't need permission from whoever was steering tonight.

A gray shape fell in beside me before I'd gone twenty strides. Ronan. I knew him the way I'd known Corwin's name that morning, not from memory but from something deeper and stupider that lived in scent and instinct instead of thought, and the wolf beside me pressed close enough that our shoulders brushed with every other stride, warm and solid and asking nothing.

You're doing well, his voice said, somewhere behind my eyes rather than in my ears, and it took me a full three strides to understand that wolves apparently spoke to each other this way, thought to thought, and that nobody had warned me because nobody had thought they'd need to warn their own Alpha how to talk.

Just running, I went back, carefully, testing the shape of the thing before I trusted it with anything real. It felt like handing someone a knife made of my own thoughts and hoping they didn't already know how to use it against me.

You always say that. You're always doing more than just running.

For one clean stretch of forest, moving faster than I'd ever moved in my life, held up by four legs that had never once failed me the way two legs occasionally had, I forgot to be afraid. I understood, distantly, why Wren had done this every month for six years. There was nothing else in the world that felt like this.

For six years, apparently, this had been the one hour a month when Wren stopped being an Alpha making decisions for four hundred people and simply became an animal outrunning the moon. I understood, suddenly and completely, why she might have guarded that hour so fiercely. It was the only thing in this entire borrowed life that hadn't been complicated yet.

It didn't last.

The pack slowed near the eastern tree line, noses dropping, ears swiveling toward something the humbler part of my senses hadn't caught yet. Then it hit me too. Blood, old enough to have gone dark and dry, and under it a second scent, wrong in a way I felt before I understood, sharp and unfamiliar and threaded through with something that made every wolf around me go rigid at once.

Not Thorne, Corwin's voice cut through the link, flat and controlled in a way that was somehow worse than if he'd sounded afraid. That scent isn't Thorne, and it isn't Callum's either.

A younger wolf near the back of the group let out a low, uncertain whine, and I felt the whole pack's attention ripple toward the sound and then back to me, waiting to see how their Alpha would respond to fear before they allowed themselves to feel any.

We found the blood first, dark on pale stone at the base of an old boundary marker, more of it than a nosebleed and less than a killing. Enough that whoever had bled here had likely walked away from it, angry or frightened rather than dying, though nothing about that made the discovery feel any less like the start of something none of us could take back. Then, a few yards further, caught on a bramble where something had torn free in a hurry, a strip of gray cloth, rough spun, dyed with a specific bitter-smelling plant I recognized in my bones before my mind caught up to why.

Ashwood dyed its cloth with that plant. Had for as long as I'd been alive.

I stood over that scrap of fabric in a body that wasn't mine, in a forest I hadn't grown up in, and felt something in my own chest, my actual chest, the one buried in the dirt eight hours or eight days or eight lifetimes ago, recognize the smell of home. This was the same tree line I used to watch from the wrong side, the one that marked the exact edge of everything I used to belong to. I had never once imagined standing on this side of it, in this shape, hunting for evidence against the people who'd buried me.

Ronan's wolf circled the bramble twice, hackled up, a low sound building in his throat that had nothing gentle left in it. Ashwood, he sent, and even through the link I could feel how carefully he was keeping his voice level for my benefit. Someone from Ashwood was on our land, and Callum bled for it.

Around us, the rest of the pack fanned out, noses down, and I understood, without anyone saying a word, that this was no longer a run. This was a hunt that had just found its first real scent.

Alpha. Corwin again, closer now, his wolf, a pale shape, moving through underbrush toward the trail the others had already picked up. Give the word, and we follow it tonight, while it's fresh. Give the word, and we'll have this settled by morning, one way or another. Behind him, I felt more than heard the rest of the Elders' wolves shifting their weight, waiting for an answer the way the whole pack had been waiting for me since the moment I woke up in skin that wasn't mine.

Somewhere out there, a wolf named Callum had bled on this exact stretch of ground and then either walked toward Ashwood territory or been dragged there, and every instinct in this borrowed body was screaming at me to follow that trail and finish whatever had started. Wren's instincts wanted blood. I understood that now the way I understood everything else that didn't belong to me, instantly, and with no idea what to do with the knowledge.

I didn't move.

Because if this pack found what I suspected they'd find at the end of that trail, and if it led back to my own people, my own pack, the ones who'd been left for dead in a ring of dirt not so different from this one, then I was about to become the only creature in these woods who understood both sides of a war that hadn't started yet. I knew things about Ashwood that Thorne Pack didn't. I knew, better than any of them, exactly how easily that pack could be provoked into a fight. It would tell itself it never started. I knew my father's temper, the specific way he turned public accusation into a rallying cry rather than a question. I knew how fast a rumor could travel through Ashwood's ranks once it had a villain attached to it, and how little anyone there would care whether the villain turned out to be innocent, so long as the story felt satisfying.

Ronan's wolf turned back to look at me, waiting, the whole pack waiting behind him for their Alpha to give the order.

Wren. His voice again, quieter this time, meant only for me. Whatever's slowing you down tonight. I need you to tell me it isn't about them.

I had no idea which direction I was actually supposed to be loyal to anymore, and even less idea how to answer a question from a man who still believed, completely, that the woman he was asking had nothing left to hide from him.