CLAIMED BY THE ALPHA

THE UNREASONABLE BIOLOGY OF IT

In the courtyard, the lanterns held their light very still. The music continued inside, muffled and warm. The owl did not offer a follow-up opinion.

Damien looked at her with those grey storm eyes that had too much weather in them, and said nothing for three full seconds.

Then: That is also more complicated.

Ada unclasped her hands. She smoothed the front of her dress. She looked at the covered walkway and then at the door back into the hall and then at this tall, dark-haired man who had just delivered the most extraordinary four words she had ever been handed and was now citing complication as if that were an acceptable response.

I'm going back inside, she said. I'm going to find Zara. I'm going to eat something because I haven't eaten since this morning and I make poor decisions when I'm hungry. She met his eyes. And then I am going to need you to explain to me, clearly and in full, what you mean by every single word you just said.

She turned and walked back toward the door.

Behind her: Ada.

She stopped. Did not turn.

I've never said that to anyone, he said. I want you to know that.

She stood in the walkway for a moment with her hand on the door and the cold at her back.

I know, she said. She did not know how she knew. She filed that away too.

Then she pushed the door open and went back inside, back into the warm gold light and the music and the crowd, and found Zara immediately, because Zara was the loudest person in any room she entered.

You were gone for eleven minutes, Zara said. I counted. You were with him.

Get me some food, Ada said. Something substantial.

Zara looked at her face. That bad?

That complicated. Ada took a breath. Get me food and then I'll tell you everything and you are not allowed to say I told you so.

I haven't told you anything yet.

Pre-emptively. You're not allowed.

Zara already had a plate. She had apparently been waiting. She handed it over with the efficiency of someone who had seen the eleven minutes coming.

Start from the beginning, she said.

Ada looked across the room. Damien had come back inside. He was standing near the far wall, Lucas at his shoulder, and he was not looking at anyone or anything except her. He was not being subtle about it. He had apparently decided subtlety was no longer relevant.

Ada looked away.

He said, she began, and then stopped, because saying it out loud made it a different kind of real. He said something very strange to me.

How strange? Ada picked up a piece of food from the plate. Put it down again.

Stranger than I have words for, she said. And I have a lot of words.

Across the room, Damien Black stood very still and watched the girl who had looked at him and said explain yourself like he was a problem she intended to solve, and felt, for the first time in his life, the specific terror of wanting something he was not certain he could have.

He had never felt that before. He found, to his great surprise, that he did not entirely hate it.

Ada did not sleep well. Again.

This was becoming a pattern she refused to accept.

She lay in the dark and stared at the ornate ceiling and conducted, methodically, a rational examination of the previous evening. This was how she handled things she did not understand. She laid them out. She looked at them without emotion. She found the explanation that made the most sense and she accepted it and moved on.

The explanation that made the most sense was: Damien Black was either delusional, or he was running some kind of elaborate social test, or he was the type of person who said dramatic things to girls at parties because it worked, because it had probably always worked, because most people were not Ada and most people did not respond to you are my mate with a request for clarification and a need for food.

This was the rational explanation. She had examined it from every angle. It held.

She stared at the ceiling.

A scent, he had said.

She turned over. The pillow was cold on the other side. She turned back.

The problem and she was willing to admit, to herself and no one else, in the dark at two in the morning was not that the words had been strange. The problem was the way he had said them. She had a very accurate internal instrument for detecting performance. She had grown up around aunties who deployed dramatic statements as social currency and she knew the particular quality of a thing said for effect.

That had not been that.

He had looked at her like the words cost him something to say. Like they were true in a way that surprised even him.

She turned over again.

Fine, she told the ceiling. Fine. Tomorrow she would find him and she would get the full explanation she had been promised and it would be entirely rational and she would feel very sensible about the whole thing.

She fell asleep somewhere around three.

She woke up at seven feeling like she had been through something.

---

Zara was already awake, which was new and slightly alarming.

She was sitting cross-legged on her bed with her laptop open and the expression of someone who had been researching something for hours and had opinions about what she had found.

How long have you been awake? Ada asked.

Since five. Zara turned the laptop around. Look at this.

Ada sat up. On the screen was a website old, badly designed, the kind that looked like it had not been updated since 2009 with the header: Blackthorn University: A History of the Black Family Legacy.

Ada looked at Zara.

I googled him, Zara said, unapologetically. Obviously. And then I went down a very deep hole and I need you to hear what I found before you dismiss it.

I haven't said anything.

You have a pre-dismissal face. I can see it from here. Zara pulled the laptop back and scrolled. The Black family have been connected to Blackthorn for over four centuries. Not just connected they basically built it. The university was originally a private estate. Their private estate. She looked up. Did you know that?

The welcome pack didn't mention it.

Forty-two pages and they left out the part where the most powerful family in Scotland has owned this place since the sixteen hundreds. Zara turned the laptop around again. This page had a photograph old, sepia, a formal portrait of a man in Victorian clothing who had dark hair and grey eyes and a jaw that was architecturally significant. Tell me that doesn't look like him.

Ada looked at the photograph for longer than she intended to.

Ancestor, she said.

Obviously. But look at the eyes, Ada.

Ada looked at the eyes.

Genetics, she said.

Zara closed the laptop with the patience of someone who had prepared for resistance. I found three separate local history blogs, one academic paper from the University of Edinburgh folklore department, and one absolutely unhinged Reddit thread, all of which say variations of the same thing about the Black family.

Ada waited.

That they are not, Zara said carefully, entirely human.

The room was quiet for a moment.

Zara, Ada said.

I know.

You're describing

I know what I'm describing. I am aware of how it sounds. Zara held up a hand. I'm not saying I believe it. I'm saying that the boy pulled you aside at a party and told you that you were his mate and used the word in the specific technical sense and you came back looking like someone had reorganised your entire internal filing system, and I think before we file this under this boy is unwell we should at least consider the alternative.

Ada looked at her.

Zara looked back.

The alternative, Ada said, being.

That he meant it literally.

Silence.

Ada got out of bed. She went to the window. The courtyard below was still mostly empty, the morning fog doing its dramatic Scottish things across the old stones. An oak tree stood near the far wall, enormous and certain of itself, the kind of tree that had watched centuries happen and found them unremarkable.

He said he would explain, Ada said, to the window.

Then get the explanation. Zara was quiet for a moment. Are you scared?

Ada considered the question with the honesty it deserved. No, she said. I'm annoyed.

Those are often the same thing.

I'm annoyed because I came here for a specific purpose and I have a list and I am not interested in distractions

He's not really a distraction energy, is he. He's more of a

Don't.

I was going to say complication.

That's his word. I don't want to use his word.

Zara smiled, slow and knowing. Ada could see the reflection of it in the window glass.

Get dressed, Zara said. I'll make tea.

---

She found Lucas first.

This was not the plan. The plan had been to locate Damien, extract the promised explanation, file it appropriately, and continue with her week. But it was Lucas she almost walked into coming around the corner of the east corridor after her nine o'clock lecture on comparative literature, Lucas with his easy face and his warm eyes and the way he immediately looked at her like she was precisely the person he had been hoping to run into.

Ada. He said her name with the same quality as yesterday like he was checking it and finding it good. How was your morning?

Educational, she said. In multiple respects.

He fell into step beside her with the ease of someone who had decided they were friends and was simply waiting for her to catch up. She noted this. She did not object to it.

He told me, Lucas said. What he said to you last night.

Ada kept walking. Did he.

He tells me most things. A pause. He's never told me anything like that before. In twenty-four years. He said it carefully, like he understood the weight he was placing on the sentence.

What, exactly, did he tell you?

That he found his mate. Lucas was quiet for a step or two. Ada, I need you to understand that's not something that happens often. For our kind. Some wolves go their whole lives without He stopped. Seemed to recalibrate. Some people never find it. It's not common.

Ada stopped walking.

She turned and looked at him directly. Lucas Reid had the face of someone who did not lie easily the kind of face that would show it.

Our kind, she said.

He met her eyes without flinching. Yes.

You're telling me it's real.

I'm telling you it's real.

The corridor was quiet around them. Somewhere distant a door opened and closed. The stone walls held the particular silence of old buildings, the kind that had absorbed centuries of things being said and knew how to keep them.

Ada looked at Lucas for a long moment. Then she turned and kept walking.

He walked beside her.

Ask me something, he said. Anything. I'll answer honestly.

Does it hurt? she said. The change.

A beat of surprise. She had not asked what she was supposed to ask is it real, are you serious, are you all insane. She had skipped past all of that to something practical. She felt him recalibrate beside her.

Not anymore, he said. When you're young it does. The first few times. Then your body learns it.

Ada filed this away. How many of you are there. On campus.

At Blackthorn specifically? Damien's pack. Twelve, including the two of us.

And other packs?

Several. Europe alone has forty-three recognised packs. Damien's is the

The most powerful. I gathered. She paused. Are there others like me here? Humans who know?

Some. Partners of pack members, mostly. Faculty occasionally. He glanced at her. Not many who found out the way you did.

The mate way.

The mate way, he confirmed, with a diplomatic expression.

Ada stopped again. They had reached the end of the corridor and the beginning of a wide courtyard, the late morning light doing something golden with the old stone, and she turned to face him fully.

Where is he? she said.

Lucas tilted his head toward the far side of the courtyard. Library. East reading room. He's been there since seven.

He has a nine o'clock

He didn't go. Something shifted in Lucas's expression. He's not he's not handling this the way he handles most things. Which is to say, he's not handling it. He's processing it. And for Damien, processing looks like sitting in a library for four hours and staring at nothing.

Ada looked at the far building. Then back at Lucas.

You're his second, she said.

Beta. Yes.

You love him. Not romantically. But the way you'd love a brother.

Lucas was quiet for a moment. Yes.

So everything you're telling me right now

Is both true, he said quietly, and said with the specific hope that you won't destroy him. He held her gaze. I'm not asking you to feel something you don't feel. I'm just asking you to give it the hearing it deserves.

Ada looked at him for a long moment. She thought about a man sitting alone in a library since seven in the morning, staring at nothing.

She thought about the cost of four words and the particular quality of true things.

Thank you, Lucas, she said.

Any time. He meant it.

She turned and crossed the courtyard toward the library.

---

The east reading room was quiet and smelled of old paper and wood polish. Long tables, low lamps, high windows letting in the late morning light in long pale rectangles. It was almost empty at this hour a girl asleep over a textbook near the window, a boy typing with mechanical focus near the door.

Damien was at the far table. Just as Lucas had said sitting, notebook closed in front of him, looking at nothing. He had not heard her come in. Or he had and he was not showing it.

She walked to his table and sat down across from him.

He looked up. The grey eyes, in the library light, were very clear. Whatever he had been carrying for the last twelve hours was visible in them not weakness, exactly, but the texture of something real that he had not smoothed away before she arrived.

You owe me an explanation, Ada said. She folded her hands on the table. Calm. Prepared. The posture of someone who intended to sit here until she received exactly what she had come for.

Damien looked at her. Then he looked at his notebook. Then he looked back at her.

If I tell you everything, he said, it cannot be untold.

I'm aware of how information works.

Ada. He said her name like it had weight. Like he had been practicing the weight of it. Once you know what I am what this is your life changes. The world looks different. I need you to understand that before I

Damien. She said his name the same way. Level. Clear. Precise. I have already been told by your Beta. I have already spent a night examining every rational alternative. I have already crossed a courtyard to sit in front of you at she glanced at the window half ten in the morning, when I have a reading list that is frankly aggressive and a printer location that still remains unsourced.

He stared at her.

Tell me everything, she said. From the beginning. All of it. She unfolded her hands and reached into her bag and pulled out her notebook and opened it to a fresh page.

The corner of his mouth moved. You're going to take notes.

I take notes on things that matter. She uncapped her pen. Start talking.

Damien Black looked at the girl across the table her notebook, her pen, her brown eyes that held the same unbothered patience as someone prepared to sit here all day and longer if required and felt the particular quality of something loosening in his chest. Something that had been wound very tight for a very long time.

He pulled his chair slightly closer to the table.

And for the first time in his life, he began to tell the truth to someone who had not already known it.