The Forbidden Alpha Brother

Imogen's Point of View! The locker hit my back before I even saw her coming. My spine screamed. My knees buckled. I grabbed the cold metal with both hands just to stay upright. "Still standing? That is honestly disappointing." Victoria's voice cut through the crowded hallway like a blade. She was right behind me, her fingers still twisted in the back of my sweatshirt. She yanked once more, hard, and slammed me into the lockers again. The second impact knocked the breath clean out of me. "You would think she would learn by now." That was one of the girls behind her. Soft laughter followed. I pressed my palm flat against the locker and pushed back, trying to turn around, trying to get even an inch of space between us. Victoria did not give me that inch. She stepped in close, close enough that I could smell her perfume, something floral and expensive. Her nails found my hair and she grabbed a fistful of it near the root. My jaw clenched hard. Do not cry. Not here. Not in front of her. Not ever. "You are nothing," she said, her voice low and smooth like she was commenting on the weather. "You have always been nothing. You will graduate nothing and you will die nothing. And every single person in this hallway knows it." I looked at the faces around us. She was not wrong about that part. Nobody moved. Nobody stepped forward. A few people looked away. A few pulled out their phones. One girl at the far end of the hall met my eyes for exactly one second before she turned and walked in the opposite direction. Victoria leaned in until her face was inches from mine. Then she spat. I felt it hit my cheek. Warm. Deliberate. The hallway went quiet for one awful second. Then her group started laughing, and she walked away without looking back, her ponytail swinging, her heels clicking sharp against the floor. She glanced over her shoulder once, just once, and the look she gave me was not even angry. It was bored. Like I was not even worth the full effort of her hatred. I wiped my face with the back of my hand. I slid down against the locker until I was sitting on the cold floor, my knees pulled up to my chest. No one stopped. No one asked if I was okay. They never did. Victoria Stanson. The name sat in my chest like a hot coal. One day. I swore it quietly to myself, right there on that floor. One day that girl would understand exactly what she had done to me. I just had to survive long enough to make that happen. The bell rang and I forced myself up off the floor. One more class. Just math and then I was done for the day. I could breathe again once I was outside those doors. I checked the hallway both ways before I moved. No Victoria. Good. I kept my head down, my bag pulled close, and made it three quarters of the way to the math room before I heard it. "Imogen." Her voice. That laugh underneath it, like everything in the world was a private joke only she was smart enough to get. I did not turn around. I did not slow down. I shifted my bag higher on my shoulder and picked up my pace. "Imogen, I know you hear me." Her footsteps got louder behind me. I pushed through the side door instead of turning down her hallway and I did not stop until I hit the cold outside air. My feet found the pavement and I ran. Not because I was scared, I told myself that firmly, but because I already knew how that conversation ended and I did not have the energy for round four. I ran the whole way home. I burst through the front door and took the stairs two at a time. My mother called out something from the kitchen. I did not answer. I hit my bedroom door hard, pushed it shut behind me, and pressed my forehead against the wood. Then I let out the breath I had been holding since the lockers. The tears came fast. I did not even try to stop them. I face-planted into my pillow and let them soak through the fabric, hot and ugly and full of everything I could not say out loud in that hallway. A knock came a few minutes later. Soft. Patient. I turned my head. The door was open a c***k and my father filled the frame, his broad shoulders slightly hunched the way they always got when he was trying to seem smaller than he was. He ran one hand through his greying hair and looked at me the way he always did when something was clearly wrong and he was not sure he had the right words for it. "Hey Kiddo. Bad day?" I sat up. I dragged my sleeve across my face. "It is fine, Dad. It will blow over." He looked at me for a long moment. His mouth opened. Then it closed again. He nodded once and stepped back, pulling the door gently shut as he went. I stared at the closed door. How was I supposed to tell him? How was I supposed to explain that it had never once blown over, that it happened every single day, that his daughter sat on cold hallway floors while strangers watched and no one ever said a single word? I could not. So I did not. "Imogen, dinner." My mother's voice floated up the stairs a little while later. I dragged myself downstairs. My father's chair was already empty. "Where is Dad?" My mother, Kelly, set a bowl down without turning around. "You know he cannot always be here, sweetheart. He has a kingdom to manage. The war is coming and he has preparations to see to." I sat down. I stared at my food. Being a secret had never sat comfortably on my skin. I was almost eighteen and the Alpha blood running through me was getting louder every single month. It was harder to hide. Harder to pretend. "Do you think I will ever get to meet my brother?" My mother went still. Just for a second, but I caught it. "We have talked about this." "I know what we said. I am asking what you think." "The answer has not changed, Imogen. If anyone finds out your father has another child, especially now, it will destroy him. It will destroy everything he has built." "So I just stay invisible forever?" She finally turned around. Her expression was not angry. It was tired in a way that went deeper than one long day. "Yes. For now. Yes." I stabbed at my food. "Then can you at least tell me his name? My brother. Do I get to know that much?" The colour that rushed up my mother's neck and into her face happened fast. "Dominic," she said. And then she pressed her lips together like she could push the word back in. I looked up. "Dominic," I repeated quietly. "Forget I said that." "Mom." "Imogen. Drop it." I dropped it. But I filed it away carefully, turning the name over in my mind like a coin. Dominic. My brother. The boy who was being groomed to take my father's place after the war. The heir everyone knew about while I sat here in secret, eating dinner at a small table in a border house, pretending I did not exist. At least now I had a name. I helped clear the table without being asked and then made my excuses. My mother watched me go but did not push. She had always known when I was done talking. It was one of the things I loved about her even when it made me feel more alone than usual. I went upstairs and stood at my window. The forest beyond the border was still. Too still for a territory on the edge of a war. The usual sounds were there, small animals, wind through the upper branches, but underneath all of it was a silence that felt held, like the trees themselves were waiting. I pressed my palm flat against the glass. I had seen the wounded wolves coming out of that tree line over the past few weeks. I had seen the way my father's jaw had gotten tighter every time he visited. The way he stood closer to the windows now, scanning, always scanning. The war was not coming anymore. It was already here. I heard the front door and made it to the top of the stairs in time to see my father step inside. He moved quickly through the small room, his boots still muddy from whatever he had been doing in the dark. He crossed to my mother and pulled her in close, pressing his lips to her hair for a long moment. Then he looked up at me. "You both stay inside. Do you hear me? No matter what sounds you hear tonight, you do not open that door." "Dad." "Promise me, Imogen." "I promise." He pressed his lips to my forehead and held them there for two full seconds before he pulled back, gripped my shoulder once, and then he was gone. Out the door. The shift happened fast, a shudder of muscle and bone, and then a large grey wolf was moving across the yard and into the dark of the forest. I stood at the window until he disappeared. "Off to bed," my mother said softly from behind me. "It is late." I nodded. I went. I lay in the dark and listened to the sounds coming from the trees. Distant and muffled, but present. Howls. The c***k of something heavy through the underbrush. A sound that could have been a shout and then went quiet too quickly. Somehow all of it pulled me under and I slept. I woke to silence. And then to the memory of the dream, Victoria's face, the hallway, the spit hitting my cheek, and I pushed myself out of bed before the feeling could fully land. The bathroom light was harsh. I ran cold water over my face and stood there dripping, staring at my own reflection until I felt less like crying. That was when I noticed it. My mother's door. Wide open. Light off. I crossed the landing in four steps and pushed the door wider. The bed was untouched. Sheets still neat. Pillow undented. She had never come to bed. I went through every room in the house. Fast. Quiet. Checking behind every door, in every corner. Nothing. No note. No message. No sign of a struggle, which almost made it worse because at least a struggle would have given me a reason. I sat down on the bottom stair and stared at the front door. She would walk through it. Any second. She had just stepped out for air. She had gone to check the yard. She was fine. She had to be fine. My finger hovered over my father's name in my mind, ready to reach out through the pack link, ready to pull him back from wherever the war had taken him. But he had told me to stay put. He had asked me to promise. And if I pulled him away from the fight over nothing, if she was just outside and I had panicked over nothing. The front door flew open. Cold air rushed in and with it came a scent I had never smelled before in my life. Something sharp and deep and completely unknown to me, something that made every part of me go still. A man stepped through the doorway. Dark hair. Green eyes, deep green, the kind that caught the light even in the dim entrance of our small house. His jaw was tight. His shoulders were broad. He was carrying my mother in both arms, her body limp, her face pale, her shirt soaked dark red from a wound I could not yet see. I could not move. I could not speak. I stood at the bottom of those stairs with my mouth open and no words anywhere inside me. "She is alive," he said. His voice was low. Controlled. Like he had said this to panicking people before and knew exactly how to keep them upright. "But we need to move right now." He was already heading for the kitchen. He looked back at me once, sharp and expectant. "Are you going to help me or not?" My legs moved before my brain caught up. I was running for the first aid kit, pulling open cabinets, hands shaking so hard I knocked two bottles off the shelf before I found what I needed. My mother was on the kitchen table. There was so much blood. The man pressed his hand firm against her side and looked up at me across the table. His green eyes were steady and direct and something in them made me feel like I was standing in a wind I had not prepared for. "What is your name?" he asked. "Imogen." "Imogen." He said it once, like he was filing it away. Then he held out his free hand for the cloth I was holding. "I need you to stay calm. Can you do that?" My hands were still shaking. My mother was still bleeding. And this stranger was standing in my kitchen with a scent I could not name and eyes that made the air feel different and a certainty about him that I could not explain and could not look away from. Who was he. And why did some locked, sleeping part of me feel like it already knew.