My Alpha Rejected Me… Then Begged Me to Save His Pack

Chapter 5 – A Message from the Past

The message waits on my pillow when I come back to our room.

Our. The word still catches in my head, a snag in fabric. The bond between us hums low under my skin, muted and sore from the way the day has rubbed it raw.

The door shuts behind me with a soft click. The room is dark except for the strip of moonlight cutting across the bed. Corin isn’t here; his scent is old, from hours ago. He’s probably on the ridge or in another meeting, wearing his alpha mask until his bones ache.

I almost miss the envelope at first. It’s the wrong color for this room—off-white instead of deep wood and grey. No pack crest. No official seal. Just my name, scratched in quick, slanting handwriting that doesn’t belong to anyone in Duskvale.

Lysa.

My heart stops, then slams into motion again, too fast.

Nobody in this pack calls me that on paper. They use titles or full names. Contracts, schedules, reports. I’m Luna or Varrow or, if Vesha’s being particularly accurate, “asset.”

But this—

I shut the curtains before I touch it, instincts snapping into place. Lamp on low. Window latched. Door locked. My wolf paces under my skin, unsettled.

I pick the envelope up by a corner. It smells like cheap paper, outside air…and underneath, faintly, a ghost of something I haven’t let myself name in three years.

Smoke from a different forest. Iron from a different battlefield. A note of sharp, dark cider we used to steal as teenagers and drink on the old dam.

Maelin.

I slit the envelope carefully with a nail and slide the paper out.

Lysa,

Your new family is leaking like a cracked barrel.

You always did like a mess.

If you want to know where the blood really goes, meet me where we burned our first car, one hour after moonrise. Alone.

—M.

P.S. Bring that new nose of yours. You’ll need it.

My fingers crumple the page before I can stop them. My palms are suddenly slick with sweat, bandages scratching.

Maelin. Varrow’s favorite little crow, always picking at shiny things better left alone. My almost-sister once, in the way that wolves who survive raids together become family, whether they want to or not.

She shouldn’t be anywhere near Duskvale ground. And yet she was close enough to my bed to leave this without waking any of us.

Or she had help.

I swallow hard.

Every logical part of me knows what I should do: march this straight to Corin, lay it on his neat desk, watch his jaw tighten as he orders patrols and traps and surveillance on every old meeting spot I ever had.

But I can already hear the unspoken chorus in the war room: Of course she’s getting notes from Varrow. Of course they know where she sleeps.

I press the paper flat again, reading between the lines.

Your new family is leaking. That’s not gloating. That’s…warning.

You always did like a mess. That’s Maelin being Maelin.

If you want to know where the blood really goes—

My heart thuds harder.

If this is real, she has information. If it’s a setup, someone wants me to walk into the dark without witnesses.

“Alone,” I mutter. “Of course.”

My reflection in the window looks tired, soot-smudged, eyes too bright. Wolf and woman both are pulled taut between instinct and experience.

Trust no one from Varrow, Corin would say. Trust no one from Duskvale, my mother would.

Trust yourself, something softer whispers. You’re the one who walked out of both.

The clock on the wall ticks past the hour. Moonrise can’t be far.

I stuff the note into my pocket and slip out the door.

The house is quieter now. Downstairs, I can hear faint voices in the kitchen, the clatter of someone cleaning up late. No heavy alpha stride in the hall. Good.

I move like a shadow, barefoot, familiar with every creak in these floors. Years of sneaking out for midnight runs with Corin have left muscle memory in the boards.

At the back entrance, I pause. My hand hovers over the latch.

I could wake him. Tell him everything. Prove, once more, that I’m on his side even when my past claws at the door.

But there’s a voice in my head that sounds exactly like Vesha: If I were the enemy, I’d choose the wolf with one paw in each world.

If I show him this and it goes wrong, I hand them another arrow with my name on it.

If I don’t, and it goes wrong…

I open the door.

Cold night air washes over me, thick with pine and damp earth. Above the trees, the moon is just clearing the ridge, pale and watchful.

The old car lot is outside the official border, in the no-man’s strip where teenagers from three packs used to dare each other to drink, race, and make out in rusted skeletons of human machines. It’s neutral by old, unspoken rules.

Neutral doesn’t mean safe.

I shift halfway—eyes, claws, sense of smell sharpening as I slip through the trees. Every crackle of leaves, every shift of wind paints a picture in my mind: fox to the left, owl overhead, distant patrols along the main ridge. No one close enough to see me unless they’re looking.

Good. Or bad. Or both.

The wrecked car is still there when I emerge into the clearing. Its frame is nothing but twisted metal and memories, hood peeled back like a split lip. We torched it when we were sixteen, laughing as the flames licked the night, feeling invincible and very, very stupid.

Someone sits on the hood now, legs swinging, cigarette ember a tiny, glowing eye in the dark.

“Took you long enough,” Maelin says, voice sliding through the shadows like it never left. “Thought your precious alpha had you on a shorter leash these days.”

Her scent hits me full-force then—smoke, cheap perfume, the familiar Varrow bite. Underneath it all, something new and dangerous.

She smells like trouble.

And like the only person who might be able to tell me why my new home is bleeding from wounds I can’t see.