CHAPTER 4
1111 Words
Dayo woke me up at four fifty-five in the morning, five minutes before the alarm I had set, which I suspected was intentional.
"Training starts at five," he said through the door. "Not five-oh-one."
I was down in the east yard at four fifty-nine, and he was already there, and so was my father, and they both looked like people who had never once in their lives used a snooze button.
"Stretch," my father said.
I stretched.
We ran for forty minutes through the forest that bordered the pack lands, not shifting, just running, which in the wolf world meant something. Shifting was power. Running human meant building the foundation under the power. My father had always said that wolves who could only fight in their shifted form were half-trained. I believed him more now than I ever had.
After the run, we went to the training room, and Dayo showed me what I didn't know.
It was a lot.
"You have natural instincts," he said, circling me. "Your Alpha blood is strong. But instinct without form is just aggression, and aggression without strategy is a gift to your enemy." He stopped in front of me. "You ended your last life by freezing a room full of people using command authority you didn't know you had. That means the power is there. What it doesn't mean is that you know how to use it before the last second."
"I know."
"Show me your stance."
I showed him. He corrected it four times.
By seven o'clock I was exhausted and sweating and had been corrected so many times I'd stopped counting, and Dayo looked as if he hadn't moved a single unnecessary muscle the entire time.
"Good," he said, which I was coming to understand meant not terrible.
My father handed me a water bottle and sat down on the bench along the wall. "How did you die?" he asked. It wasn't brutal it was clinical. He needed information.
"On the table. Blood loss. The silver was already in my system."
"So you had time."
"Some."
"Enough to use the command."
"Yes."
He nodded slowly. "The command is the clearest expression of Alpha authority in a human body. You should be able to hold it for longer than a moment of crisis. That comes with practice." He looked at Dayo. "Start her there."
Dayo pulled a chair to the center of the room and told me to make him sit in it.
Not physically. Not by touching him. By will.
I stood in front of him and I tried to find the thing I'd felt on the table, that split-second surge of something that had nothing to do with volume or aggression, something that lived deeper. And I couldn't find it.
Because on the table I'd been dying. Here I was fine. It was easier, apparently, to access power when everything else was already gone.
"It's not an emergency switch," Dayo said, watching me strain. "It's not a last resort. It is a language your body knows. Stop looking for the feeling. Start from the decision."
"What does that mean?"
"Make the decision that he is going to sit. Not ask for it. Not want it. Decide it."
I looked at him. I decided he was going to sit.
His left knee bent. He caught himself, and his eyebrows went up slightly surprised. So was I.
"Again," he said.
I called my mother that evening like I'd promised.
She answered on the first ring, which meant she'd been waiting.
"How is it?" she asked.
"Hard," I said honestly. "Good. They're working me. Dayo is…"
"Patient but relentless, yes, I know him." A pause. "Priya has been quiet since you left."
"Good."
"Which means she's thinking."
"Also good." I stretched my legs out on the bed. "Mom. Can I ask you something?"
"When have you ever needed permission?"
"When did Marcus and Priya move into the house?"
Silence. Then: "What do you mean?"
"I mean, whose idea was it? Was it yours? Was it his?"
"Zara." Her voice had shifted. "Why are you asking me this?"
"Because I'm trying to understand some things."
Another long pause. When she spoke again, her voice was slower, more careful. "He asked me. I'd been alone with you for three years and he said, he said he wanted to give you a proper family. I believed him."
"Did you love him?"
The pause was different this time. Heavier. "I cared for him. I was lonely and I cared for him and I thought I could build something."
"You built something for his daughter to burn down," I said. My voice was quiet. Not accusing, just true.
She didn't answer.
"Mom. I think Marcus has been helping Priya in ways you don't know about. I think some of what's happened the positioning, the access she gets, the space she moves in, is because he put her there."
"That's a serious thing to say about someone."
"I know." I waited.
"Where is this coming from?"
"I told you I'm trying to understand things."
She was quiet for so long I checked the phone to see if the call had dropped.
"I will be careful," she said finally. "That's what I can promise you right now."
"That's enough."
"Is it?"
"For now." I paused. "I love you."
"I love you too." A breath. "Go sleep. You sound like you've been put through something."
"I have." I almost smiled. "I'll call you tomorrow."
I hung up and lay back in the dark, looking at the ceiling of the guest room I was staying in. The sheets smelled like cedar and the window was open and somewhere outside the pack lands were quiet and breathing.
I thought about Marcus. I thought about Priya, who was eighteen years old and had already, in another life, spent years building the tools she'd use to destroy me. Nobody starts at that depth alone. Somebody teaches you. Somebody tells you it's acceptable, that the goal is worth the method, that other people's lives are a cost you're allowed to calculate.
He had taught her that. I was more and more sure of it.
And my mother had let him into our home because she was lonely and he offered her something that looked like steadiness.
I closed my eyes.
Tomorrow I would be back on the training field. Tomorrow I would practice the command until it came from decision instead of desperation. Tomorrow I would get stronger.
But tonight I was thinking about my mother's voice when she said I believed him, and how much of her life had quietly been built on someone else's lie.
- Writer
