Not His First Choice

Chapter 1: The Wait

Mira pov

My name is Mira Hale, and for eighteen years, I never once doubted who I was going to end up with.

That probably sounds foolish now. It sounded like the truest thing in the world back then.

I grew up in the Ashwood Pack, in the thick pine woods of Blackridge Territory, where the mountains are so steep the sun takes its time climbing over them each morning. My father, Samuel, was one of our best trackers. My mother ran the pack kitchens, feeding half the territory during festivals. And Deacon Voss, the Alpha's son, was my best friend since we were both six years old and he pushed me into the creek behind the training yard.

I pushed him back in. That's how it started.

By the time we were fourteen, pushing each other into creeks turned into something softer. He carried my books. I saved him a seat. By sixteen, everyone in Ashwood called us "Deacon and Mira" like it was one word, not two names. Nobody blinked when we held hands at pack dinners. Nobody teased us for it, either, because teasing implies there's a chance it might not be true. And with us, everyone already knew.

See, in wolf packs, there's a difference between choosing someone and being matched to someone. Choosing is what humans do — dating, falling in and out of love, deciding day by day if it's still working. Matching is different. It's biological. Old wolves say it goes back to the earliest packs, back before anyone wrote anything down. When a wolf turns eighteen, their body fully wakes up, senses sharpen, and somewhere in that shift, their nose locks onto one specific scent. Not because of magic. Because their body finds the one person their instincts trust the most to survive beside. Some call it fate. My grandmother always said it was just biology being honest before the mind catches up.

Everybody assumed I was Deacon's match. I assumed it too. Why wouldn't I? We already fit like puzzle pieces. He knew I hated the smell of wet cedar. I knew he chewed his nails when he was nervous about patrol reports. We built four years of a life together already. The formal match, when his eighteenth birthday came, felt like a formality. A stamp on something already true.

His birthday was three weeks away, and I had already picked out my dress.

"You're doing that thing again," my mother said one evening, catching me staring at the calendar on the kitchen wall like it owed me something.

"What thing?"

"That thing where you look at that circled date like it's going to jump up and hug you."

I laughed, but she wasn't wrong. I'd circled his birthday in red ink so many times the paper was starting to tear.

"I just want it to be here already," I admitted, leaning my chin on my hands.

My mother wiped her hands on her apron and sat across from me. "You know," she said carefully, "sometimes it helps to want things a little less hard. Just in case life has other plans."

"Life doesn't have other plans for me and Deacon," I said, too quickly, too sure. "We've been together forever. Everyone knows it's going to be us."

She gave me a look I didn't understand back then. I understand it now. It was the look of someone who has lived long enough to know that "everyone knows" has never once stopped anything from falling apart.

I didn't listen. I never even considered listening. I spent those three weeks the way you'd expect a girl drunk on certainty to spend them — picking fabric samples, practicing how I'd stand next to him when the pack Elders made it official, imagining the exact way my name would sound tied to his.

Deacon, for his part, seemed just as sure. He'd grin at me across the training yard, tug on the end of my braid when he walked past, tell his friends — loud enough for me to hear — that he already knew how his birthday was going to end.

"You and me, Hale," he told me two nights before the party, his hands warm around mine as we sat on the fence behind his family's house. "You're not even nervous, are you?"

"Why would I be nervous?" I said. "I already know."

He laughed and knocked his forehead gently against mine. "Yeah. Me too."

I want to tell you I had some kind of warning. Some small itch in my gut that told me to slow down, to hold a little of myself back just in case. But I didn't. I gave every single piece of my certainty to a boy and a birthday party, and I walked toward that night with both eyes wide open and completely blind at the same time.

The morning of Deacon's eighteenth birthday, the whole pack was already buzzing before the sun fully cleared the mountains. Streamers went up outside the pack hall. My mother helped braid flowers into my hair. My father, gruff as always, told me I looked like trouble in a good dress, which was as close as he ever got to saying I looked beautiful.

I remember standing in front of the mirror in my room, smoothing down the front of my dress, and thinking, tonight everyone will finally see what I've always known.

I had no idea how right I was.

Just not in the way I meant it.