The Alpha Who Rejected Me Is Begging at My Door

Chapter 7 – Night Watch

By the time the last pup stopped whimpering and the last scraped knee was wrapped, the festival fire had burned down to ash.

The packhouse hummed with low voices, the kind people used in sickrooms and after funerals. No one said the word attack. It hadn’t been, not really. A few burns, one deeper wound, wards singed.

A warning, my wolf whispered. A promise.

“Go lie down,” Selune ordered, planting herself in front of me with a blanket draped over her arm like a weapon. Her hair had fallen out of its knot, a streak of flour still on her cheek. “You’ve been on your feet since yesterday.”

“So have you,” I said, nodding at the baby strapped to her chest.

“Yes, but I’m fueled by rage and carbs. You’re fueled by caffeine and poor decisions.” She shoved the blanket at me. “Couch. Now.”

I opened my mouth to argue, then caught my reflection in the dark window across the room. Eyes shadowed, shoulders hunched, dress spattered with other people’s blood.

“Fine,” I muttered, taking the blanket. “You’re bossy when you’re right. I hate it.”

She smiled, soft and grateful and worn to the bone. “Get some rest, Lyris.”

Easy for her to say.

I tugged the blanket around my shoulders and sank into the corner of the big, battered couch in the main room. Most of the pack had retreated to their rooms by now. A few diehards lingered—Dargan at the far end with a book he clearly wasn’t reading; Jarek leaning against the wall near the door, arms crossed, eyes half-lidded but sharp; Maelis at the table with a bowl of herbs, hands moving even as her gaze seemed far away.

The house felt like it was holding its breath.

The bond hummed quietly. Coren was moving—fast, then slower, then fast again. The flashes were indistinct: the way it always was when he was shifted and deep in alpha-mode, mind half-wolf. I picked up impressions rather than words: wet leaves under paws, the metallic tang of foreign wolves just beyond the edge of our scent-line, the hot thread of his anger.

I wanted to lean into that connection, to see what he saw. Instead I sat on my hands and forced myself to breathe.

“Stop pacing in your head,” Jarek said without looking at me.

“I’m sitting,” I said.

“Your aura isn’t.” He finally turned, one brow raised. “He’s fine.”

“How comforting,” I muttered. “Our beta says so.”

Jarek snorted. “If he were hurt, half this house would be on the floor from the backlash. Trust me, sweetheart. We’d know.”

I grimaced at the endearment but couldn’t deny the truth. Bonds like ours didn’t crack without noise.

The front door creaked. Every head lifted.

Soren slipped inside first, human, bare-chested and mud-smeared, hair dripping from the quick shift. A few scrapes, nothing serious. Relief loosened a knot between my shoulder blades.

Then Coren stepped over the threshold.

He was still in patrol pants, shirtless, skin streaked with dirt and a few shallow cuts. His hair was damp from mist and sweat, falling into his eyes. The wolf rode close to the surface—pupils blown, canines just a little too long. He carried the wild with him in the way he moved, in the crackle of energy under his skin.

He also carried no extra wounds.

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

Conversations stuttered, then died. The room watched him the way it always watched him in moments like this: with trust, with hunger for answers, with a flicker of fear that even the strongest could come back broken.

“Well?” Dargan asked.

Coren shook his head once. “They didn’t cross. Small group. Tested two more points on the northern and western lines, then vanished. Left enough scent to make sure we knew they were there.”

“Same stink as on the boy?” Maelis asked.

“Worse.” His jaw flexed. “Whatever they threw at Tomas wasn’t just for fun. It chews at the wards and it likes wolf flesh.”

I could still smell it on him, clinging to his skin where the rain hadn’t washed it away. Underneath, his usual scent struggled through—earth, smoke, the faint trace of pine sap he’d picked up helping with the firewood earlier.

Our gazes met over the room.

The bond snapped tight, then settled, the way a rope does when both ends are finally still. His concern for the pack, for me, hummed along its length.

“I told everyone to rest in shifts,” he said, breaking eye contact to look around. “No one goes out alone. We treat this like the opening moves of a longer game.”

“Varik?” Jarek asked plainly.

Coren’s eyes darkened. “It smells like him.”

Ice slid down my spine. The name had hung unspoken in the back of my mind for days. Hearing it out loud felt like inviting something in.

“Could be someone copying him,” Dargan said. “Plenty of bastards would like to scare a pack like ours.”

“Maybe,” Coren said. “But if it is Varik, I won’t have us caught flat-footed. Not again.”

His gaze brushed me on the last words. My chest tightened. Memories I didn’t want, images I didn’t yet have, stirred like ghosts at the edge of thought.

I shoved them down.

“Go,” Maelis said gently, rising. “Sleep. All of you. We’ve done what we can for tonight. Tomorrow we ward again. We plan. We don’t feed the shadows by staring at them until dawn.”

Grumbles, nods, shuffling feet. People peeled away in twos and threes, murmuring goodnights. The packhouse slowly emptied until it was just me, Maelis, Jarek, and Coren by the door.

“I’ll take first watch,” Jarek said. “Wake Soren in three hours.”

Coren nodded. “If anything shifts—”

“I’ll howl,” Jarek said dryly. “Go, boss. You look like hell.”

Coren’s mouth twitched. “Honesty from my beta. Refreshing.”

He turned toward the stairs, then paused when he saw me still curled in the corner of the couch. For a heartbeat he just looked, like he was checking each limb, each piece, confirming I was solid.

“How’s Tomas?” he asked quietly.

“Stupid,” I said. “Brave. Stable. Maelis’s salve is holding the poison back, but I want to see what it does over the next day.”

He nodded slowly. Tired lines bracketed his mouth. The alpha edge softened when he stepped closer, close enough that I could see the flecks of lighter brown in his irises, smell the damp wool of his pants, the forest on his skin.

“You should sleep,” he said.

I huffed. “You sound like Selune.”

“She’s right.”

“So I’ve been told. Repeatedly.”

He reached down and plucked the blanket from my clenched fingers, then draped it back over me more evenly, tucking it around my knees like I was one of the pups who’d fallen asleep on the floor earlier.

“Hey,” I protested weakly.

“Let me do this much,” he said, voice barely above a whisper. “The rest of it, I can’t fix yet.”

The bond shivered with all the things he wasn’t saying: the fear, the frustration, the old guilt that still coiled in him like barbed wire. Things I didn’t fully understand yet and wasn’t ready to unpack.

“Coren,” I said softly, catching his wrist before he could straighten. His pulse beat strong under my fingers. “Don’t go out there alone again tonight. Promise me.”

His brows pulled together. “I wasn’t alone. Soren—”

“You know what I mean.” I tightened my grip. “No heroics. No ‘I’ll just slip out for a quick look.’ You come back here, and you stay.”

Something in his face eased, some unspoken tension answering mine. Through the bond, the promise landed before he even voiced it.

“I’ll stay,” he said. “I swear.”

I let go. He brushed his knuckles lightly over my hairline, more a ghost of a touch than a real one, then stepped back.

“Sleep, Lyris,” he murmured.

“For once,” I said, trying for lightness, “I’ll do what my alpha says.”

His smile flickered and, for a rare, fragile moment, reached all the way to his eyes.

When he finally went up the stairs, the house settled a little more. Jarek took up his position by the door, Maelis disappeared into her small room.

I let my head sink back against the couch, heartbeat slowly syncing to the quiet thrum of Coren’s steady presence above me.

Outside, beyond the wards, the forest shifted and whispered.

Inside, for tonight at least, we held.