The Alpha Prisoners Obsession

Chp 13

Zyra POV

The moment I step inside the girls’ dorm building, the air feels different, lighter, quieter but not enough to reach me. Nothing reaches me. I close my door behind me. The lock clicks.

My body collapses.

I sink straight down, knees folding against my chest as my back hits the cold wood of the door. The entire hallway outside disappears, but his voice, his eyes, his presence… They cling to me like smoke.

I press my forehead to my knees. The tears come before I can stop them.

Hot.

Fast.

Unreasonable.

I grit my teeth, swallowing the sob clawing up my throat. I hate crying. I swore I wouldn’t cry again. But the moment the first tear drops onto my jeans, something inside me breaks open, quietly, painfully.

“What is wrong with me?” I whisper, my voice shaking. It sounds pathetic in the small room. Too small. Like the walls are listening. Like the shadows are holding their breath.

I wipe my eyes with the heel of my hand, but it doesn’t matter; new tears replace the old ones instantly.

I can feel him again.

Dael.

His anger.

His heat.

His voice in my ear, deep enough to bruise.

His presence is like a storm ready to rip the sky apart.

Why did he come close?

Why did he look at me like that?

Why did my body forget to breathe when his shadow fell over mine? I hate him.

I hate him so much.

Then why does he scare me differently?. My fingers tremble as I reach up and pull a loose strand of my hair forward. The dye at the roots has faded with the sweat and the stress of today. The silver glints in the soft lamp light.

Bright.

Unforgiving.

Cursed.

I clench it between my fingers until my knuckles go white.

“Why you?” I whisper to the strand. It feels insane, but it’s the only thing I can talk to without being judged. “Why do you have to be here? Why did I have to be born like this?” Another tear falls, sliding down my wrist.

“I didn’t ask for any of this…”, The words tremble out of me, barely forming.

I tug the silver strand harder, as if pulling on it could pull the whole curse out of me. As if yanking it free could erase everything, the burned pack, the screaming, the bodies, the smoke. The maid’s arms around me. Her heartbeat frantic against my ear as she carried me through fire.

She’d whispered, Don’t look, little moon. Don’t look.

But I had.

I saw the bodies.

I saw the flames.

I saw my mother’s hair.

Silver.

Floating in the smoke like a ghost calling my name.

A sob punches out of my chest before I can stop it. I curl up tighter, hugging my knees harder, as if the pressure could hold all the broken pieces of me together.

“It’s always me,” I whisper to the strand, to the empty room, to the wounds that still haven’t healed. “I’m always the unlucky one.”

The orphaned girl.

The cursed wolf.

The outsider.

The one who doesn’t belong anywhere.

Not even in her own skin.

“I didn’t steal his ring…” I breathe, the memory slashing me open again. “I just… needed to know who he is. I needed answers.”

But Dael doesn’t care about the reasons.

He never will.

His eyes were full of murder when he saw my hair.

And still…

Somewhere inside that murderous fury, there was something else.

Something I don’t understand.

Something dangerous in a different way.

But none of that matters now.

Because I can’t leave.

I can’t.

I have nowhere to go.

No one was waiting for me.

No pack.

No home.

No family.

Nothing.

This academy is the only chance I have left to survive.

To build a life.

To prove that I am more than a curse.

Even if everyone here hates me.

Even if he hates me most.

My fingers go slack around the silver strand.

It falls softly against my cheek.

I wipe my face again.

Slower this time.

Calmer.

The tears keep coming, but it feels different, not weakness, but release. The kind you feel when you’ve been holding your breath for years.

When I finally lift my head, my eyes land on the tiny mirror across the room.

A girl stares back at me.

Blue-eyed.

Broken.

Shaking.

Hair streaked with the color of a curse.

But beneath the ruin in her expression, there is something else.

Something hard.

Something stubborn.

Something that refuses to die.

I whisper to the reflection, voice raw: “You’re staying.” My chest hurts, but I say it again.

“You’re staying. No matter what.”

Even if he threatens me.

Even if he tries to break me.

Even if the whole academy turns against me.

This is my last chance.

I will not run again. I lift the strand of silver hair one more time and let it fall.

Then I lean my head back against the door, close my eyes, and breathe shakily, painfully, but still breathing.

For the first time in years, the tears slow.

The curse doesn’t disappear.

The fear doesn’t vanish.

The grief doesn’t fade. But something steadier forms beneath it. Something like… defiance.

—---------

The alarm exploded through my room at five in the morning.

A sharp, vibrating trill that drilled straight into my skull.

I jolted awake, heart pounding, breath catching in my throat like I’d been yanked from the bottom of a nightmare. For a few seconds I lay still, listening to the sound echo through the tiny dorm room, a metal bunk, a narrow desk, peeling paint, and a window that barely opened. It wasn’t much.

But it was all I could afford… all I had left.

I slapped the alarm silently and pushed myself upright. My muscles ached, stiff from sleeping curled in a ball near the door last night. My eyes burned from crying. Every breath felt heavy, like the air was weighted.

But the world didn’t care. The coffee shop didn’t care.

The academy didn’t care.

Dael definitely didn’t care.

And if I didn’t get up now, I’d lose everything.

I stood, wrapped my blanket around my shoulders against the morning chill, and grabbed the box of cheap black dye from the drawer. The moment my fingers closed around it, the same familiar dread washed through me.

Silver hair was a curse.

Silver wolves were a curse.

And I was both.

I padded into the tiny shared bathroom and locked the door behind me. The fluorescent lights flickered threateningly overhead, humming with the same tiredness I felt. I set the dye on the counter and wiped the fog from the mirror.

There it was.

A single silver strand gleaming defiantly through the black, almost mocking me. “Why can’t you just stay hidden?” I whispered, voice cracking. “Why do you want the whole world to hate me?”

My reflection didn’t answer, only stared back with the same hollow-eyed exhaustion that had lived in me since I was a child.

I opened the dye box with trembling hands.

I mixed the chemicals mechanically, like a ritual I’d done a hundred times because I had. Then, with slow, careful movements, I drew the dye through my hair, coating every strand from root to tip. I parted my hair in thin sections, checking twice, thrice.

No silver.

No mistakes.

No trace of who I really was.

Only when the dye was soaking into my scalp did I finally turn on the shower and step under the warm water. It washed over my skin in a dark river as the excess dye bled out, swirling down the drain like ink.

I scrubbed until the water ran clear. When I stepped out, my towel wrapped tight around me, I wiped the mirror again.

Black.

My hair was black. My curse was masked for another day.

I dried off, dressed quickly into my worn jeans and the coffee shop’s beige apron uniform, and tied my hair back. My stomach growled faintly, but I ignored it. Breakfast wasn’t in the budget.

I grabbed my backpack, frayed straps, one broken zipper and stepped outside.

The hallway was quiet. Girls are still sleeping behind their doors. Normal girls with normal lives. Girls whose hair didn’t damn them. Girls who didn’t have a target on their backs.

Girls who didn’t have someone like Dael looking at them like they were meant to die.

Just thinking his name made my chest tighten.

Dael.

The alpha born from the bloodline that hunted mine.

The cold-blooded wolf whose instincts screamed to destroy me.

The boy whose rage burned hot enough to swallow me whole.

Yesterday, he’d almost..

I squeezed my eyes shut.

No.

Don’t think about that. He wasn’t here.

He didn’t know where I lived, he wasn’t chasing me now.

But the memory of his burning glare haunted me anyway. The first time he’d seen my silver strand, his eyes had gone feral.

Like he’d waited his whole life to find something to hate that much.

And I had stood there with tears drying on my cheeks, pretending his threat hadn’t carved itself into my bones. You leave this academy in an hour…

Or I’ll make your life here hell.

My throat tightened.

I didn’t leave. I couldn’t.

This academy was the only place where I could earn the future my mother wanted for me, the future the maid who raised me had sacrificed everything to give.

I tightened my grip on my backpack.

I couldn’t run.

I couldn’t break.

I couldn’t hide forever.

But the truth was… I was terrified.

Of Dael.

Of the academy.

Of my own bloodline.

And most of all of being exposed.

I descended the stairs and stepped out of the dorm building into the cold morning air. My breath fogged out in front of me, and I hugged myself tighter as I hurried toward the coffee shop across campus.

A new day.

A new shift.

A new attempt at surviving.

I reached for the door handle of the shop, then paused.

My reflection in the glass stared back.

Black hair. Tired eyes, a girl trying to pretend she wasn’t cursed.

A girl no one wanted.

A girl every wolf despised.

Especially him.

My voice cracked as I whispered into the glass so quiet only I could hear:

“Why does it have to be me? What did I do wrong?”

A single tear slipped down my cheek.

I wiped it away. Then I straightened my shoulders, pushed open the door, and stepped inside to face another day.