THE ALPHA’S WET NURSE

Chapter One

"Umm." He groaned between his teeth, greedily drinking every drop of milk her breast could produce.

"Easy." Mara muttered between her hitched breath, her free hand bracing against the cold earth to steady herself.The woods were dark and the ground beneath her knees was wet and unforgiving.

She had been sitting like this long enough that she had stopped feeling her legs. The man's head rested in her lap, heavy and warm, his breathing coming in shallow uneven pulls that told her he was still here — barely, but still here.

She had found him face down in the leaves with three deep gashes running from his left shoulder blade down across his ribs. She had pressed both hands flat against the wounds and felt blood push through her fingers warm and fast and she had made a decision without thinking about it.Wolf milk healed.

Every pack child knew that before they knew anything else.Her body had milk. Her son was not here to take it.So she stayed.His hands had found her waist somewhere in the last few minutes — loose, barely conscious, not asking for anything. Just holding on. She let him.

She kept her eyes on the treeline and listened to his breathing slowly even out with each pull and told herself this was simply what anyone would do.She didn't look at his face. Some instinct she didn't examine kept her from it.

His wounds had slowed. The bleeding that had soaked through her dress had reduced to something less catastrophic. His chest rose and fell with more intention now, like his body had remembered it had somewhere to be.Then she heard it.Voices. Still distant but organised — the particular sound of people moving through trees with purpose.

A search party

."Someone is coming." She said quietly, more to herself than to him. He stirred at the sound of her voice, his fingers tightening briefly at her waist.She pulled back slowly, lowering his head to the ground with both hands before straightening. He made a sound at the loss — low and involuntary — and his arm reached without direction before falling back against the leaves.

She stood and looked at him for the first time.Just the shape of him in the dark. Broad shoulders. The kind of stillness that didn't feel like weakness even now. He occupied space the way certain people did — like the world arranged itself around them without being asked.The voices were getting closer.She turned and walked into the trees in the opposite direction and she didn't look back once.

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The house sat at the edge of the pack residential quarter, small and dark against the night sky. Mara had been walking for twenty minutes and her knees had finally started working properly again when she saw it.

The fire torch first.

Then the figure holding it. Edna— her mother inlaw stood at the front gate with the torch raised and her mouth already set in the particular way it set when she had been waiting long enough to work herself into something.

Mara slowed but didn't stop walking.

"Where have you been?" Edna's voice cut across the yard before Mara had reached the gate. Sharp and certain of itself the way it always was.

Mara said nothing. She reached for the gate latch.

“ I asked you a question." Edna stepped forward, the torchlight swinging. Her eyes moved down Mara's dress — the bloodstained hem, the damp knees, the state of her in general — and something moved across her face that sharpened into something uglier.

"You were out there with someone."

“I was in the woods." Mara said.

"At this hour." Edna's voice dropped. "In that state."

“I needed air."

"Air." The word came out like something bitten. "My son is six months in the ground and you needed air in the middle of the night dressed like —" She stopped. Looked again at the dress.

"Whose blood is that?"Mara's hand found the gate latch."Answer me." Edna's voice cracked at the edges. "You were out there meeting someone. Don't stand there with that face and tell me you weren't. I know what I know.”

Mara looked at her then — directly, quietly, without flinching. She had nothing left to defend herself with and no energy to spend defending it anyway. Whatever Edna needed to believe she would believe.

That had always been true.She said nothing.That was the thing that broke it. Edna's free hand came up fast and landed hard across Mara's left cheek — a sharp flat sound in the quiet night that sent Mara's head sideways and put heat blooming immediately across her face.The silence that followed was very loud.

“You will not disrespect his memory." Edna's voice was low now. Controlled in a way that was worse than shouting.

"You will not drag his name through whatever you think you are doing out there at night. Do you understand me?"Mara's hand had come up to her cheek without her telling it to.

"I am still his mother." Edna said. "And as long as you live in this house you will conduct yourself accordingly." She turned and walked back toward the front door. "Get inside and clean yourself up. You look like something the woods spat out."The door closed behind her.

Mara stood at the gate and didn't move.The burning in her cheek spread slowly outward, a dull insistent heat that had nowhere to go.

She pressed her fingers against it gently and felt the warmth under her palm and said nothing because there was nobody to say anything to. Her eyes lifted on their own.

The moon sat full and low in the sky directly above the roofline of the house, round and pale and enormous, looking down at her with the particular patience of something that had watched a great many things and expected nothing to surprise it anymore.

Mara stared at it for a long time.The tears came quietly. They usually did. She didn't wipe them.

“Why?" She whispered.

The moon said nothing.

It never did.