Too Late, Alpha: My Pups Will Never Know Your Name

Chapter 1: The Shattering The moon-mark burned before the Alpha ever looked at me. I was standing at the back of the Great Hall with the other omegas, holding a tray of wine glasses I wasn't allowed to drink from, when the crescent on my inner wrist lit up silver beneath my sleeve. Every wolf in Blackthorne felt it. The music died mid-note. "Goddess," someone whispered. "It's blazing." Across the hall, on the raised dais beneath the Blood Moon window, Alpha Rhys Blackthorne went still. His own mark had ignited at his throat, a matching silver crescent that pulsed in time with mine. Three weeks ago, at the Moon Festival, I had stood in the dark behind a paper mask and let a stranger dance with me. The festival incense dulled every scent, so neither of us knew whose hands we were holding. He had a low voice and a careful touch. I told myself it was a dream I would never have again. Now I watched that same dream turn his golden eyes on me. My tray hit the floor. Rhys came down the steps and the crowd parted for him like water. Nobody stood in the Alpha's way. He stopped so close I could feel the heat coming off him, and when he breathed in, his whole body shuddered. "Mate," he said. It wasn't a word. It was the sound of a wolf finding home. Something inside me, something I had thought was dead for eighteen years, cracked open and hoped. "You," Rhys said hoarsely. His hand lifted toward my cheek. "Liora Vance?" "Alpha, wait." The voice was sweet as honey. It was also the voice of someone who had rehearsed. Vivienne Cross swept across the hall in her white Luna-candidate gown, her father, Beta Cross, one step behind her. She wasn't smiling. She looked wounded, like a woman who had just watched her whole future be stolen. "Before you bind yourself to her," Vivienne said, her voice trembling perfectly, "you need to see what we found." Beta Cross held out a folded letter, stained rust-brown at the edges, and a small black object that made the entire hall gasp. An iron claw. The Rogue King's mark. "It was hidden in the omega quarters," Beta Cross announced. "Under this girl's cot. We meant to bring it to you after the ceremony, Alpha. We didn't expect the Goddess to be so cruel." Rhys took the letter. I saw his eyes move across the page, and I saw the color leave his face. "That's not mine," I said. Nobody answered. "Rhys, that's not mine. Look at it. I've never seen that token in my life." He read out loud, slowly, in a voice that got colder with every line. "The Alpha patrols the north ridge every third night. Do this, and the Blackthorne throne falls." He lifted his head. "It's signed L." "Anyone can sign an L!" "It's your handwriting." His jaw flexed. "Your exact hand. I've read your name on every supply ledger for six years." I stared at the page. The loop on the L was mine, down to the little tail I'd been teased for since childhood. But I had never written a word of it. Someone had studied me. Someone had practiced. My eyes found Vivienne's. For half a heartbeat the tears vanished from her face, and something sharp and satisfied looked back at me. Then it was gone. "My father died to that letter's owner," Rhys said. The room could barely hear him. "He rode out on the north ridge three years ago and never rode back." "I didn't do this," I said. My voice shook. "Ask your wolf. He knows me. I felt it when you looked at me, he knows me." "Your mother had the same token in her pocket when she hanged." The words landed like a slap. "My mother was innocent," I whispered. "She was a seamstress. She was framed, and you never let anyone look." "Enough." The Alpha's command rolled through the hall, and half the pack dropped their eyes. Something deep in my chest bent under it. Rhys stood there with the crescent still glowing at his throat, breathing like he'd been struck. For one moment, I saw it: the war behind his eyes. His wolf wanted me. I could feel that through the bond as clearly as my own pulse. But grief had been eating Rhys Blackthorne alive for three years, and grief needs someone to blame. "The Goddess has made a mistake," he said quietly. "Or she's testing me. Either way, I will not take the daughter of a traitor as my Luna." "Rhys, please—" "I, Alpha Rhys Blackthorne of the Blackthorne Pack," he said, and the whole hall held its breath, "reject you, Liora Vance, as my mate and my Luna." The words hit me like a blade between the ribs. I didn't even scream. I couldn't. The silver mark on my wrist split open and bled, and the bond, that bright, brand-new, aching thread, snapped so violently that I folded in half and hit the marble on my knees. Fire. Ice. My lungs forgot how to work. Somewhere above me, through the roaring, I heard Rhys make a small, broken sound, like something in him had just been torn out too. But he didn't turn back. "By midnight," he said, and his voice was stone, "you will be beyond our borders. If you return, you will be treated as a rogue." "Take her out," Beta Cross said. Two guards hauled me up by the arms. My legs wouldn't hold. The omegas I'd shared a room with for six years looked at the floor. Nobody said a word. As they dragged me past the dais, Vivienne stepped in, all soft and sorrowful, and whispered so only I could hear. "Goodbye, little omega. He was always going to be mine." The rain had started by the time they threw me out. They gave me one worn satchel and my mother's silver comb, which I hadn't been allowed to keep in my quarters for fear of "contraband." I'd spent six years hiding it in a wall. The guards had found it and returned it with a laugh. The border stones glowed faintly behind me. Ahead was nothing but black forest and rain. "Don't come back," one guard said, and shut the gate. I walked until the lights of Blackthorne vanished. Then I walked farther, until my knees gave out beside a fallen pine, and I sat in the mud with my rejected wrist bleeding through my sleeve and finally, finally, let myself break. I cried until nothing was left. I cried for my mother, and for the girl who had believed the Goddess might give her one kind thing. The nausea hit me a moment later. It wasn't heartbreak this time. It was low, deep, and dizzying, and I gagged against the pine trunk until my stomach emptied. I had felt sick for days and blamed nerves. I had blamed the ceremony. I wiped my mouth with a shaking hand and pressed my palm to my stomach to steady myself. And I felt it. Faint. Impossibly small. A flutter beneath my own pulse that no omega without a wolf should have been able to sense. Then another, right beside it. Two. I froze. Two tiny heartbeats, quick as moth wings, beating in the dark beneath my hand. The Moon Festival. The stranger behind the paper mask. The night I'd been so sure was only a dream. It had been him. Rhys Blackthorne had just thrown away his fated mate and his heirs in the same breath, and he didn't even know it. I laughed once, low and broken, and then my hand curled protectively over my stomach. "Okay," I whispered into the rain. "Okay. It's just us now." Far behind me, back in the dark where Blackthorne lay, a single wolf's howl tore through the storm, wild and grieving. It was the Alpha's. I didn't turn around. And in that moment, I made my first vow. He will never know your names. Chapter 2: The Fallout The fever found me before dawn. I remember the cold first, then the shaking, then the strange feeling of the forest tilting sideways as I tried to stand. My wrist had stopped bleeding but the wound felt alive, like something was still trying to crawl out of it. I made it three steps before the mud rose up to meet me. The last thing I saw was a swinging lantern and a pair of crooked boots. "Well, well," a cracked voice said. "Another one thrown to the wolves." I woke to the smell of dried herbs and woodsmoke. A low ceiling. A quilt patched from a hundred different fabrics. A small, crackling fire. "Don't sit up. You'll pass out again." The woman sitting beside the bed looked about a hundred years old. She had a face like a walnut, a cloudy left eye, and hands that moved with the calm of someone who had pulled a thousand wolves back from the edge. "I'm Maren," she said. "Hedge-healer. You're in the Neutral Wood, girl, three miles past the Blackthorne stones. You were lying in a puddle with a broken bond and a fever hot enough to boil water." The memory hit like a fist. The hall. The letter. His voice saying reject. I curled around my stomach and shut my eyes. "Aye," Maren said gently. "That's about what I expected." "Why am I alive?" I whispered. "An omega with no wolf, rejected by an Alpha..." I'd heard the stories. Wolfless girls didn't survive a broken bond. They simply faded. "That's exactly what I was wondering." She lifted the quilt, laid a dry palm on my belly, and her cloudy eye widened. "Ah. I see." My heart stopped. "Two of them," Maren murmured. "Strong. Fast-growing. Three weeks, no more, but wolf-blood doesn't wait." She looked up. "You didn't know." "I felt them last night," I said, and my voice cracked. "I thought I was imagining it." "You weren't. And that's why you're alive. Those little ones are holding you together like two hands around a candle." Tears slid into my hair. I had come to that forest with nothing. Not a name, not a pack, not a future. I had two. "Whose are they?" Maren asked. "The Alpha's?" I nodded. She let out a long breath. "Then you'd better hear this before you decide what to do." She leaned in. "A rejection cuts both ways, girl. It nearly killed you. But it hurts the one who casts it worse, and slower." "Good," I said bitterly. "You mean that?" "Yes." My throat burned. "He looked me in the eye and threw me away." "His wolf didn't." Maren's voice was quiet. "An Alpha whose mate is torn from him loses his wolf a little at a time. Weakens. Sickens. It might take months, or years, depending on the bond. But it always happens. Unless the mate returns." I stared at the ceiling. Somewhere deep in my chest, something small and hurt whimpered. Not mine, I told it. I don't care. The whimper came again, and this time it didn't sound like me. I sat up so fast the room spun. Protect, something said. It wasn't a voice, exactly. More like a feeling shaped into a word, low and old and unimaginably patient. It stretched behind my ribs like something waking from a very long sleep. Ours, it said. Ours. Pups. "Maren," I breathed. "There's something in my head." The old healer went perfectly still. "Look at me, child." I turned. She stared into my eyes, and the color drained from her face. "What is it?" "Your eyes," Maren whispered. "They're silver. There's a crescent inside the pupil." She sat back slowly, like someone seeing a ghost. "I haven't seen that mark in sixty years. Not since the last of the Moonborn were hunted." "The what?" "Where did you say your mother was from?" "She was a seamstress." My throat tightened. "They hanged her for treason." "Was she," Maren murmured. It wasn't a question. It was the sound of a puzzle piece clicking into place. Before I could ask another thing, she took my face in both hands. "Listen to me. Whatever woke inside you last night, don't let anyone see it. Not until you're strong enough to protect what you carry. Blackthorne will send trackers at first light. They won't hunt you for your eyes. They'll hunt you because a rejected omega on their border is an embarrassment." "Where do I go?" "West." She said it as if she'd already decided. "Three days' walk. A neutral pack called Moonveil. They don't ask questions, and they don't turn away girls with silver in their eyes." I looked down at my own wrist, at the raw, cracked crescent where the moon-mark had been. Then at my stomach. "Then I'll go," I said. RHYS I hadn't slept. The Alpha's study was the only place in Blackthorne that still smelled like my father, cedar and old leather and pipe smoke. I'd sat in his chair since midnight with the letter open on the desk in front of me, reading it over and over as if the words would change. The Alpha patrols the north ridge every third night. Signed, L. My chest ached. Not the sharp ache of last night, but a slow, hollow throb that started at the crescent on my throat and crawled outward with every breath. My hands wouldn't stop shaking. Thorn, I said. Talk to me. Nothing. My wolf had been silent since the moment I said the words. Not angry. Not grieving. Just gone, like a door had closed in a house I'd lived in all my life. It was worse than any wound I'd ever taken. "Rhys?" A soft knock, and Vivienne slipped in with a tray of tea. She wore a pale robe with her hair down, and her eyes were red like she'd been crying for me. "You haven't eaten," she said. "Please. You're grey." "I'm fine." "You're not." She set the tea down and laid a cool hand on my shoulder, and I hated how much I wanted the touch to feel like something. "You did what a great Alpha does. You put the pack first. Your father would have done the same." My father. I shut my eyes. "The pack needs a Luna," Vivienne said, very gently. "Announce me at the next moon. It will help everyone heal. Help you heal." Her thumb stroked my collarbone. "And Rhys, the omega quarters. Let Father's men clear them out today. All of it. Her things, her mother's things. We should burn every trace of that woman before the pack starts whispering." Something about the way she said burn made my stomach turn. "No," I said. Her hand paused. "No?" "Not yet." I stood, sliding the letter into my coat. "I'll do it myself." "Rhys, that's not your job..." "Leave the tea, Vivienne." I felt her stare on my back all the way to the door. The omega quarters were silent at dawn. Liora's cot was in the far corner, a narrow bed with a thin gray blanket, so clean it looked as though no one lived there. That was the first thing that hurt. Six years, and there was almost nothing of her at all. I knelt and lifted the mattress. Nothing. The floorboards. Nothing. The wall behind the bed had a loose panel, a hiding hole, small and dusty, the kind every servant in Blackthorne knew about. The guards had pulled it open last night to find the silver comb. I'd watched them return it to her with a laugh. I reached inside anyway. My fingers brushed the back of the cavity, and something caught: a scrap wedged deep into a crack in the stone. I pulled it out carefully. It was a torn corner of black wax, hardened around a scrap of parchment. The wax was pressed with a seal I knew as well as my own handwriting. Beta Cross's office seal. It was the seal used for every official Blackthorne dispatch. It could only be pressed in one room, with one signet ring, on one desk, and Liora Vance had never been allowed inside. My hand started to shake for a different reason. I drew the letter from my coat and unfolded it, and I set the torn corner against the torn edge of the page. They fit. Perfectly. This letter wasn't written by a servant. It was torn from a Beta's official dispatch. And then, for the first time since midnight, something stirred at the back of my skull. Wrong, Thorn whispered. His voice was faint and cracked, like a man too hoarse to shout. We were... wrong. My knees hit the floor. "Rhys?" Vivienne's voice, right behind me. I hadn't heard her cross the room. She stood in the doorway, one hand on the frame, her sweet face tilted with concern. "You shouldn't be in here. It's making you ill." Her eyes flicked to my closed fist. "What have you got there?" Every instinct I owned told me to open my hand. To lay it on the floor. To ask her the one question I'd never once thought to ask. Instead, I slid the torn seal into my coat, right against the letter. "Nothing," I said. It was the first time in my life I had ever lied to someone I trusted. Vivienne smiled. And out in the trees beyond the border, a girl with silver in her eyes was already walking west, and I was too proud, too broken, and too afraid to go after her. That would turn out to be the second mistake. Chapter 3: The Departure "You could go back," Maren said. I froze with my satchel half-packed. It was nearly dusk on the day after the ceremony. I'd slept for most of it, eaten what Maren put in front of me, and kept down all of it, which she called a small miracle. The fever had broken. The fire in my wrist had dulled to a steady, throbbing ache. "Back," I repeated. "Blackthorne." The old healer didn't look up from the herbs she was grinding. "Those pups have a father. Some Alphas, when they learn what they've thrown away, come running. A woman with two children in her belly might beg for shelter and be given it." "Beg." "It's not a shameful word, girl. It's a practical one." I set the satchel down slowly. I thought of the Great Hall. Of Rhys's voice, cold as stone. The daughter of a traitor. Of my mother's face, the last time I'd seen it, before they took her to the gallows. I thought of the two little hearts under my hand. "He looked at me in front of two hundred wolves," I said quietly, "and let them think I was a murderer. He gave me a night to leave and a bag to carry it in." "Aye." "If I went back, I'd be begging for the right to be treated like that again." Maren finally looked up. Her cloudy eye was soft. "I would rather sleep in this forest," I said, "than kneel at his door." "Then you'll need to do one more thing before you go." She wiped her hands and pointed to my left shoulder. "That." I didn't have to look. The pack-mark sat just below my collarbone, a small black thorn no bigger than a coin, inked into every Blackthorne wolf at birth. Or, in my case, at six years old, when I was taken in as an orphan's daughter and given a place in the servants' hall. "The rejection broke the mate-bond," Maren said. "It didn't break the pack-bond. That mark is a leash. As long as it's on you, Blackthorne can find you. And I promise you, there are wolves in that pack who'd rather you were found." "Vivienne." "I don't know that name, but I'd bet my last tooth." She reached into the hearth and drew out a thin silver blade, glowing at the tip. She dropped a pinch of moon-salt on the metal, and it hissed. "It'll hurt worse than anything you've felt since the ceremony," Maren warned. "Are you sure?" I pulled down my collar. "Do it." I don't remember much of what happened next. I remember the sizzle of skin. I remember biting the corner of Maren's quilt so hard my teeth ached. I remember that somewhere in the middle of the pain, the thing inside me growled, low and satisfied, as though it had been waiting six years for someone to cut the chain. When it was over, I was shaking and drenched in sweat. Where the thorn had been, there was only a raw, angry circle. I looked down at it, at the last mark of everything I'd been, and I said it out loud so the forest could hear. "I, Liora Vance, belong to no Alpha. I owe no debt to Blackthorne. And these children"—I put my hand over my stomach—"will never wear his mark. They will never know his name." Maren watched me silently. "Well," she said at last. "That's one way to start a legend." I left at midnight. Maren pressed a bundle of dried meat, a waterskin, and a small pouch of herbs into my hands. She wouldn't take a thing from me in return. "Follow the river west," she said. "When you see the standing stones, you're in Moonveil territory. Don't stop until you cross them. Blackthorne can't touch you there without starting a war." "Maren." My voice broke. "Why are you helping me?" She patted my cheek, cloudy eye glittering. "Because sixty years ago I failed to help someone with eyes like yours," she said. "I don't intend to fail twice." I walked through the dark, and the thing inside me walked beside me. Do you have a name? I asked it on the second night, when my feet were bleeding and the pups were fluttering and I was so tired I'd started talking to myself. The answer was slow, like water rising in a well. Not yet, she said. Not until you're ready to hear it. It was the first time she'd spoken in a full sentence. I nearly cried from relief. They caught up with me at the river on the third day. I heard them before I saw them, boots on wet stone, the low rasp of wolves changing their breathing to hunt. I dropped into the reeds and pressed my palm to my belly. Quiet, I whispered. Please, quiet. Two men stepped out of the tree line, both in Blackthorne gray. I knew them. Torren, a broad-shouldered warrior who'd once shoved me into a wall for spilling his ale. And Dax, thin and sneering, who'd never missed a chance to call me traitor's brat. "She's close," Dax said, sniffing the air. "I can smell the fever." "Beta's orders were clear," Torren grunted. "Bring her back if she's alive. If she's not—" "Vivienne said not to bother bringing anything back." My blood went cold. Vivienne said. Not the Alpha. Not even the Beta. Rhys hadn't sent them. The Luna-to-be had. "She's not going to make it across the Moonveil line anyway," Dax said with a laugh. "Weak little omega. One good shove and she's fish food." My hands curled into fists in the mud. Ours, said the voice in my head, so sharp it startled me. Protect ours. I know, I whispered. I know. Torren crashed through the reeds. His hand closed around my arm, and I felt him grin. "Found you, little omega." I looked up. "Let go," I said quietly. "Or what?" Dax sneered. Something in my chest snapped like a chain. Heat rolled through my veins, silver and wild, and the world sharpened until I could count every drop of rain on Torren's face. He hauled me up by the arm, and I moved. My fist hit his throat, and he made a sound like a stepped-on dog and staggered back. Dax lunged. I ducked, caught his wrist, and twisted until something cracked. He screamed. They were staring at me. Both of them. "Your eyes," Torren gasped, clutching his neck. "What the hell are your eyes—" I didn't stay to explain. I ran. Not like a girl. Like something that had been born to it. My feet barely touched the ground. Branches whipped past. The river flashed silver on my left, and behind me, the two men were howling in fury, the sound of their shifting bones snapping through the forest. Faster, my wolf urged. Faster, faster. The forest opened into a clearing. Ahead, silhouetted against the moon, stood a ring of tall gray stones, each one carved with a crescent. A line of pale light shimmered between them like a curtain. Moonveil. Behind me, something huge slammed into the trees, snarling. I felt hot breath on my heels. I threw myself forward. I crossed the line. The light rippled over my skin like cool water, and the pounding of paws behind me stopped. I spun around. Two enormous gray wolves stood at the edge of the stones, hackles raised, teeth bared, and neither of them could take another step. The larger one, Torren, changed back into a man, naked and furious, and spat on the ground at my feet. "Enjoy your exile," he snarled. "The Luna will be so pleased to hear you crawled off to die." I didn't answer. The strength drained out of me all at once. My knees buckled. The last thing I felt was the ground rising up and the pups fluttering, frightened and alive, beneath my hand. Voices. A great many voices, low and hushed, and the smell of pine and woodsmoke. Someone lifted my head. A woman's hands, strong and gentle. Silver hair. A carved wooden staff at her side. "Her eyes," a man murmured somewhere above me. "Elder, look at her eyes." I forced my lashes open. An entire ring of wolves stood around me in the dark, dozens of them. Men, women, young and old. Every single one was staring at me as though I were something out of a legend. The silver-haired woman studied my face for a long moment. Her eyes filled. Then she stepped back, planted her staff in the earth, and did something I had never seen an Alpha's wolf do in my whole life. She knelt. One by one, the wolves around us dropped to their knees, until the entire clearing was bowed low before me. "Welcome home," the Elder whispered, her voice shaking. "Welcome home, Your Majesty." Too Late, Alpha: My Pups Will Never Know Your Name Chapter 4: Five Years Later Five years later. "Mama! Mama, Kian did it again!" I looked up from the treaty scrolls just in time to see my daughter storm into the Regent's chamber with her arms crossed and her silver-flecked eyes blazing. Nova was five years old and small for it, with wild dark curls and a stare that could peel paint. Behind her, dragging his feet with the guilty air of a very tall five-year-old, came her brother. "I didn't do anything," Kian said. "He ordered Tobias to give him his wooden sword," Nova announced, "and Tobias did! Tobias is eight!" I set down my quill and pressed two fingers to the bridge of my nose. "Kian." My son looked at his boots. He had his father's jaw and his father's stubborn brows, and when he lifted his face, his eyes flashed gold in the morning light. Just for a second. Just enough to remind me of a hall full of silent wolves and a man who had sounded exactly this certain the night he ended me. "I didn't try to," Kian muttered. "I just said give it. And he did." "That's exactly the problem, sweetheart. Some voices make other people obey whether they want to or not. That's a responsibility, not a toy." "Sorry, Mama." "Apologize to Tobias." "Okay." He hesitated. Then Nova, who could never resist a soft moment, marched over, climbed into my lap, and said very seriously, "Mama, Kian asked me something this morning and I didn't know the answer." "What did he ask?" Kian's ears turned pink. "Nova." "He wanted to know why he's got gold eyes and I've got silver ones," she said, "and why Mila and Arden at lessons both have a papa and we don't." My heart gave a dull, familiar twist. I had known this day was coming. Five years of dreading it hadn't made it any easier. "Come here, both of you." They climbed up beside me on the wide stone window seat, and the morning sun poured across Moonveil's rooftops, over the silver crescent stones of the border wall, over the forest that stretched away to the east. Toward Blackthorne. "You have a father," I said carefully. "He's not a bad person, exactly. But he made a very big mistake, and he didn't listen when he should have." "Is he sorry?" Nova asked. "I don't know." "What's his name?" Kian asked. I looked at my son, at the hopeful, guarded little face that was so much like the man I'd been running from, and I pressed a kiss to his hair. "He doesn't get to be your name," I said. "He gave that up. You have me, and you have all of Moonveil. That's a lot of family." Kian thought about that. "Okay," he said finally. "But if he ever comes, I'm going to order him to give me back everything he took." I laughed. It came out a little wet. Not if, said the voice in my head, low and warm and fierce. When. Sylvara, I said, and the wolf in my chest hummed like a purr.