Her Four Alphas

The Curse Deepens

The first sign was the honey jar.

Luna was in the pack kitchens, helping Elara the healer sort dried herbs for the winter stores, when the bond flared. It wasn’t the usual warm hum of Knox’s presence, the steady pulse that had been fading for weeks like a candle burning down to the wick. This was a spike—sharp, blinding, like a hot needle driven straight through her sternum. She gasped, her hands flying to her chest, and the ceramic honey jar she’d been holding slipped from her fingers, shattering on the stone floor. Golden liquid splashed across her boots, sticky and sweet, but she didn’t care. The pain was rising, a wave of weakness so strong it buckled her knees, sending her crashing to the floor beside the broken jar.

“Luna!” Elara was at her side in an instant, cool hands pressing to her forehead. “What’s wrong? Is it the fever?”

Luna couldn’t answer. The bond was screaming now. Knox. It was Knox. She could feel his wolf—usually a roaring, golden presence in the back of her mind, a constant warmth even when he was angry or distant—fading. Flickering. Like a light bulb shorting out. She scrambled to her feet, ignoring Elara’s protests, ignoring the sticky honey gluing her socks to her boots, and ran.

She didn’t remember the sprint from the kitchens to the training yard. Later, she’d be told she’d knocked over a young wolf carrying a stack of wooden swords, that she’d sprinted through the pack house with her skirt hiked up to her knees, bare feet slapping against the cold stone floors. She only remembered the bond: the thread connecting her to Knox, once silver and bright, now gray and fraying, unspooling at the edges.

When she burst into the training yard, the sun was high overhead, beating down on the packed dirt. Knox was on the ground, surrounded by a circle of young wolves, their faces pale and tear-streaked. He’d been sparring with them an hour earlier, laughing as he demonstrated a defensive maneuver, his dark hair messy, his golden eyes bright. Now he was gray. His skin was the color of old parchment, his lips tinged blue, his wolf ears flattened tight against his skull. Claws, dull and unsharpened, had extended from his fingertips, digging into the dirt.

“Knox!”

Luna dropped to her knees beside him, heedless of the dust coating her skirt. His eyes were unfocused, rolling back in his head, his chest heaving with shallow, rattling breaths. She grabbed his face, her fingers smearing dirt across his cheeks, forcing him to look at her.

“Stay with me,” she hissed, her voice breaking. “Don’t you dare give up. You promised—you promised you’d teach me to spar next week. You said we’d go to the lake. Remember? The lake, Knox.”

His lips moved. No sound came out, but through the bond, faint as a dying echo, she heard him: *I can’t… hold on… much longer.*

“You don’t have to hold on alone.” Luna pressed her forehead to his, her eyes squeezing shut. The bond thread was fraying faster now, the gray spreading up the silver length of it. “Let me help. Please.”

She didn’t know what she was doing. She’d never trained for this, never read about how to manipulate the Soul Pack bonds beyond her mother’s vague journal entries. But instinct took over—pure, animal instinct, buried deep in the blood that had cursed her from birth. She reached for the bond, that fraying silver thread, and *pulled*. She poured everything she had into it: the strength from her morning runs, the will that had kept her alive through years of fever spikes, the desperate, clawing need to keep this man—this wolf—alive. He’d been the first to welcome her to the pack. The first to stand between her and the elders who wanted to banish her. The first to make her feel like she wasn’t a monster.

Something shifted inside her.

The fever that had plagued her since childhood, the one that left her bones aching and her skin burning for days on end, flared to life. But this time, it didn’t hurt. It burned, yes, but it was a clean burn, like stepping into a bonfire’s warmth after hours in the snow. She felt two presences stir in the back of her mind—two wolves, waking at the same time. One was white, so bright it made her eyes water, its fur shimmering like moonlight on snow. The other was black, a void of a creature, its eyes glowing like embers in a dark hearth.

*White and black.*

*Salvation and destruction.*

The white wolf surged forward before she could hesitate, filling her with light. It smelled like rain and old parchment, like her mother’s journals stacked high in the pack library. Power flooded through the bond, golden and warm, rushing into Knox’s limp body. His back arched off the ground, a choked howl tearing from his throat—wolf vocal cords straining, even though he couldn’t form words. His color returned in a rush: pink flooding back into his cheeks, his lips losing their blue tinge. And his wolf—oh, his wolf came back. Weak, yes, a small, shivering thing pressed against the inside of his skin, but *there*. The bond thread flared silver again, bright and whole.

“Luna…” His hand found hers, his grip weak but sure. His golden eyes focused on her, wide with shock. “What did you do?”

“I don’t know.” She pulled back, her hands trembling. The white wolf was receding now, fading back into the shadows of her mind, leaving a faint, golden afterglow in her fingertips. She stared at her hands, watching the glow fade. “I just… I couldn’t let you go.”

The healers arrived then, Elara leading a group of three younger healers with a stretcher. They pushed Luna aside, their faces stern, as they checked Knox’s pulse, his breathing, his wolf’s heartbeat via the bond. Elara frowned, her fingers pressing to Knox’s wrist.

“His vitals are stabilizing,” she muttered, more to herself than anyone else. “But his wolf… it’s weak. Too weak. I don’t understand. There’s no wolfsbane in his system, no physical trauma. What happened here?”

Luna stood in the dust, her boots still sticky with honey, and said nothing. She didn’t know how to explain what she’d done. She didn’t even understand it herself.

---

She found Rowan three hours later, sitting on the edge of her bed in her small cabin. He’d brought a mug of chamomile tea, steam curling off it, but Luna didn’t touch it. She was sitting on the window seat, staring out at the training yard below, where Knox was being helped back to his cabin by two young wolves.

“You used the white wolf,” Rowan said. His voice was quiet, his dark hair messy, like he’d been running his hands through it for hours. “I felt it through the bond. The entire pack felt it. It was like a bell ringing in the back of our minds.”

“I didn’t mean to.” Luna’s voice was raw. “It just… happened. I felt him fading, and I reached out, and the white wolf was there.”

“That’s not how it works.” Rowan sat beside her, the mattress dipping under his weight. He took her hand, his fingers calloused from years of woodworking. “The white wolf doesn’t appear unless you call it. You made a choice, Luna—even if you didn’t realize it. You chose to save him.”

Luna looked at him, her chest tight. “I saved Knox. Isn’t that a good thing?”

“You did.” Rowan’s eyes searched hers, soft with pity. “But at what cost? The Soul Pack bond is a closed loop, Luna. Energy can’t be created, only transferred. The white wolf’s power doesn’t come from nowhere. It feeds on the bonds—yours, and the others’.”

Luna’s stomach dropped. “You mean—”

“I mean you saved Knox by draining the other bonds.” Rowan’s thumb brushed over her knuckles. “Me, Asher, Talon—we’re all weaker now. I can feel it. My wolf is sluggish, like I’ve run for miles without rest. Asher’s been snapping at the pack members all afternoon. Talon cancelled his patrol, said he felt too tired to shift. The energy you used had to come from somewhere.”

Luna stood abruptly, knocking the tea mug off the bedside table. It shattered, chamomile tea soaking into the rug. “So I can’t win. I save one of them, and the others suffer. I try to help, and I make things worse. What kind of curse is this? What’s the point?”

“That’s the curse.” Rowan’s voice was gentle as he crouched to pick up the broken mug pieces. “There’s no solution that doesn’t cost something. The Soul Pack was never meant to be a blessing—it was always a sacrifice. The goddess who created it wanted to punish the packs that had betrayed her, so she tied four Alphas to one female, made their lives dependent on hers, and hers on theirs. A never-ending cycle of debt.”

“Then why does it exist? What’s the point?” Luna’s voice rose, tears pricking her eyes. “If it’s just a punishment, why keep doing it? Why pass it to me?”

Rowan was quiet for a long moment, stacking the mug shards on the bedside table. When he looked up, his eyes were old—older than his twenty-five years, older than the pack’s hundred-year history.

“Because the alternative is worse.”

Luna froze. “What could be worse than this? Than hurting the people I love every time I try to help them?”

He looked at her, and for a second, she saw the weight of the pack’s history in his gaze. “The black wolf.”

Luna remembered the journal entries. Her mother had written pages about the black wolf—how it was the flip side of the white wolf’s coin. *The black wolf is destruction,* her mother had written in looping, jagged handwriting. *If I choose it, I destroy everything. The pack, the bonds, the world. It’s a hunger that can never be sated.*

“What happens if the black wolf wins?” Luna whispered.

“No one knows for certain.” Rowan stood, brushing dust off his pants. “The last Soul Pack that chose destruction… they wiped out an entire civilization. Thousands of wolves, gone in a single night. The black wolf doesn’t just kill. It *unmakes*. Erases. As if they never existed. No bones, no ghosts, no memories. Just… nothing.”

Luna’s chest tightened until she could barely breathe. “And the white wolf?”

“Consumes the host.” Rowan took her hand again, his grip firm. “You become pure light—no self, no memory, no *you*. Just a vessel for salvation. A beacon that guides the pack, but feels nothing, remembers nothing. Your mother almost chose that path, you know. When her fever got too bad, she almost called the white wolf to take her, to end the pain. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t bear to leave you alone.”

“But she let herself die anyway.” Luna pulled away, wrapping her arms around her waist. “She chose a third path. She let herself die to break the cycle.”

“But the cycle didn’t break.” Rowan’s voice was soft. “It just passed to you. Because the curse can’t be broken. It can only be passed on. The goddess made sure of that. Blood calls to blood, and the Soul Pack’s curse runs too deep to cut.”

Luna walked to the balcony door, sliding it open. The night air was cool, smelling of pine and damp earth. She looked out at the four cabins dotting the edge of the training yard—Knox’s, Rowan’s, Asher’s, Talon’s. Each one dark, each one holding a man she cared about, each one tied to her by a bond that was killing them all.

“So no matter what I do, someone loses. Someone dies. Someone suffers.” She gripped the balcony railing until her knuckles turned white. “There’s no way out.”

“That’s the nature of power.” Rowan stepped up behind her, not touching her, just standing there. “It always comes with a price. The only question is who pays it.”

He left her alone then, the sliding door clicking shut behind him. Luna stayed on the balcony, staring up at the moon. A crow landed on the railing, its feathers glossy black, its eyes glowing a faint, silver light. It tilted its head at her, let out a rough caw, then took flight, disappearing into the shadows of the pine trees.

Luna touched her chest, where the bond threads hummed—four silver lines, each one dimmer than they’d been that morning.

There was no winning.

Only survival.

And she was starting to wonder if even that was possible.