The Borrowed Alpha

Borrowed

The first thing I noticed wasn't the wolves kneeling in the hallway outside my door. It was that my hands were wrong.

Longer fingers. A thin white scar across the left knuckle I'd never earned. I flexed them once, twice, watching light catch on skin that wasn't mine, and a maid I'd never met flinched like I'd raised a fist.

"Alpha." She dropped her eyes to the floor so fast her hairpin slipped. "Breakfast is ready whenever you are."

I opened my mouth to tell her I wasn't. Then I stopped.

Because somewhere behind my ribs, a voice that wasn't mine answered for me.

Yes. Thank you. That will be all.

The maid bowed and backed out of the room, and I stood there in a body I didn't recognize, in a house I'd never seen, with a word still warm on my borrowed tongue that I hadn't chosen to say.

I remembered dirt. I remembered that most.

Dirt in my mouth, dirt under fingernails that had been mine, twelve of my own pack standing in a ring around me while my father said the word reject like it tasted better than my name ever had. I remembered the cold coming up through the ground faster than the cold coming down through the air, and thinking, distantly, that I hoped it would be quick.

It hadn't been quick. It had just stopped. And then this.

I made myself move. Three steps to the mirror across the room, and I made myself look.

Dark hair where mine had been lighter. A face leaner than my own, older by a few years, carved with the kind of stillness that comes from people learning young not to let anything show. Familiar, somehow, in a way that made my stomach drop, like a photograph I'd seen once, in passing, of someone I was told mattered.

Wren, the voice in my chest supplied, unbothered, like it was the easiest thing in the world. You are Wren. Alpha of Thorne Pack. You have been for six years.

"I'm not," I said out loud, to the empty room, and my voice came out low and even and completely unafraid, nothing like the girl who'd begged in the dirt eight hours or eight days or eight lifetimes ago. I couldn't tell which.

The door didn't knock so much as it announced itself open.

"You're up early." A man filled the doorway the way water fills a glass, like the room had been shaped around him first and built later. Tall, dark-eyed, a scar through one eyebrow that made him look permanently skeptical of whatever he was looking at. Right now, that was me. "Elders are already asking why the border patrol hasn't reported in. I told them you'd want to handle it yourself."

Every instinct I had told me to lie badly and immediately. Every instinct Wren's body had said something else entirely, because before I'd decided anything, I'd already crossed my arms and said, "Since when do I let the Elders ask me anything before I've had coffee, Ronan?"

He almost smiled. Almost.

And then the air went strange.

It wasn't a sound. It was closer to a chord struck somewhere under my sternum: his eyes on mine a half-second too long, my pulse picking up for no reason I'd have chosen, a pull low in my chest like something had been asleep in there and had just, without permission, opened one eye.

Ronan's jaw tightened like he'd felt it too. Like it had surprised him.

"You're different this morning," he said slowly.

Say you didn't sleep well. Say the border report can wait. Say anything human.

"I'm fine," I said, and the word came out steady, because apparently steady was the only setting this body had. "Tell me about the patrol."

He studied me one second too long, the kind of look that catalogs rather than admires, before he let it go.

"Three wolves went out to check the eastern line before dawn. Only two came back." He said it flatly, the way soldiers report bad news, saving the feeling for later. "The one who's missing was posted nearest the old Ashwood border."

Ashwood.

My own pack's name, out of a stranger's mouth, in a life I hadn't asked to live.

"Do we know what happened to him?" I asked, and I meant it as Mila, the girl who used to belong to that name, but it came out of Wren's mouth, in Wren's house, in front of a man whose entire life apparently orbited a woman who wasn't in this room anymore.

Ronan's eyes didn't leave my face. "No sign of a fight. No blood. Like he just..." He stopped himself, recalibrated. "Like he walked off and decided not to come back."

Or as someone he trusted told him to, I thought, and hated that the thought felt less like a guess and more like a memory that wasn't mine to have.

"Find him," I said. "Quietly. I don't want the Elders hearing about this before I do."

It was the right order. I knew it was the right order the way you know a word in a language you were never taught: instantly, with no idea where the knowledge came from. Ronan nodded once, turned to go, and stopped in the doorway with his back to me.

"Wren." My name. Her name. The only name anyone in this house would ever call me. "You called me by my name back there instead of Beta. You haven't done that since before the summer." A pause, careful, like he was setting something down that might break. "It was good to hear."

He left before I could answer, which was fortunate, because I didn't have one.

I sat down hard on the edge of a bed that had never held my body, in a room built for a woman who was apparently still alive enough to have wolves walking off borders in her name, and pressed both of Wren's too-long hands against my face.

Somewhere out there, the real Alpha of the Thorne Pack was missing a piece of herself, and probably knew exactly where to find it.

I had, at the absolute most, until she came looking.