Not His First Choice

CHAPTER 5: Too Close

Mira pov

The locker room was empty, thank the moon, giving me exactly the privacy I needed to fall apart quietly instead of in front of an entire training yard.

I braced both hands against the sink and stared at my reflection — flushed cheeks, wild eyes, a girl who had clearly lost her mind somewhere between grief and homesickness and one year of teaching herself not to back down from anything.

You hit an Alpha, I told myself. You hit the Alpha. In front of his entire pack.

I splashed cold water on my face, trying to figure out what punishment was coming and how bad it was going to be. Banishment, probably. Maybe worse. I thought about my father, still healing in that small room, and my mother's tired eyes, and I felt sick knowing I might have just made both their lives harder because I couldn't control my own temper.

The door opened behind me.

I didn't need to turn around to know who it was. Something about the air in the room changed, went tighter, more aware, the second he stepped inside.

"You've got quite an arm," Kade said, his voice even, unreadable.

I turned around slowly, bracing myself for whatever came next. Up close, in the quieter light of the locker room, I could see the faint red mark already forming along his jaw where I'd hit him. Some small, petty part of me was almost proud of that mark.

"I'm sorry," I said, even though the words felt stiff and unfamiliar in my mouth. "That was out of line. I've had a hard few days and I took it out on the wrong person."

"You didn't hit the wrong person," he said. "You hit exactly who you meant to hit. I just happened to be standing where your anger landed."

I frowned. "Are you going to punish me or not?"

He studied me for a long moment, arms crossed, leaning one shoulder against the row of lockers like he had all the time in the world. "Do you want me to?"

"That's not really how this works," I said. "You're the Alpha. I hit you. There's supposed to be a consequence."

"There is a consequence," he said. "You're going to keep training with me directly instead of with the rest of the group. Anger like that doesn't need to be punished out of someone. It needs somewhere useful to go."

That wasn't the answer I expected. I'd braced myself for shouting, for threats, for the kind of harsh discipline my father had warned me about. Instead I was getting something that felt almost like being taken seriously.

"That's it?" I asked. "You're not going to make an example out of me?"

"Making an example out of you would mean I have something to prove," Kade said. "I don't."

I didn't know what to do with a man who didn't need to prove anything. Every powerful person I'd known growing up — Alpha Voss included — had spent a fair amount of energy making sure everyone knew exactly how powerful they were. Kade didn't seem interested in that at all, and it threw me more than any amount of shouting would have.

"You're not what I expected," I admitted, before I could stop myself.

"Neither are you," he said. "Most people who lose their family's territory don't come back swinging at the person who took it. They come back quiet. Careful. You didn't."

"Should I have?"

"No," he said, and something in the way he said it settled low and warm in my chest, which confused me even more than the conversation itself. "I like that you didn't."

The air between us felt too close all of a sudden, charged in a way I didn't have a name for yet. I could smell him now that he was standing this near — pine and something like the cold air right before a storm, sharp and clean and unfamiliar in a way that made every instinct in my body sit up and pay attention. My wolf, quiet since Deacon's birthday party, since the night my whole identity fell apart in front of two hundred witnesses, stirred awake for the first time in a year.

I stepped back before I could examine that feeling too closely.

"I should go check on my father," I said quickly.

Kade didn't stop me, didn't reach for me, didn't do anything to close the distance I'd just put between us. He just watched me with that same unreadable, interested expression.

"Training starts at dawn," he said. "Don't be late. And Mira—"

I stopped in the doorway, surprised he knew my name at all.

"That anger you're carrying," he said. "It's not weak. Don't let anyone tell you it is. Just learn to aim it."

I walked out of that locker room with my knuckles still aching and my chest full of something I didn't have words for yet — something that felt dangerously close to the same certainty I used to feel about Deacon, except this time I had no idea what it meant, and for the first time in a year, that uncertainty didn't scare me nearly as much as it should have.

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Old Ghosts:

I didn't sleep much that night, and it had nothing to do with my father's injuries or the ache still sitting in my knuckles.

I kept replaying the locker room, the way Kade had looked at me like my anger was something worth understanding instead of something to be crushed. I told myself it meant nothing. He was probably like that with everyone. Some Alphas built their whole reputation on being unpredictable, and maybe that's all this was — a tactic, a way of keeping his newly conquered pack members off balance.

I almost believed myself.

The next morning, dawn training arrived faster than I wanted it to. I showed up at the training yard with my hair pulled back tight and my jaw set, determined to prove yesterday had been an exception, not a pattern. What I hadn't prepared myself for was who else would be standing in that yard.

Deacon.

I hadn't seen him since the night he turned toward Brielle instead of me. A year had changed him too — he stood taller, his shoulders broader, but the moment his eyes landed on me across the training yard, I watched every bit of that confidence falter.

"Mira," he said, like my name was something fragile. "I heard you were back. I didn't know if—"

"If I'd come find you?" I finished, keeping my voice level even though my stomach had turned to ice. "I didn't come back for you, Deacon. My father was hurt."

"Right." He rubbed the back of his neck, a habit I remembered too well. "I'm glad he's okay. I'm glad you're okay."

Brielle appeared a moment later, carrying a stack of training mats, and the sight of the two of them together — easy, familiar, clearly a real couple now instead of a birthday party accident — hit harder than I expected it to. Not because I still wanted him. A year and a broken heart had cured me of that particular fever. It hit hard because it was proof, undeniable and standing right in front of me, that an entire life I'd once been certain of had simply continued on without me in it.

Brielle offered me a small, careful smile. "It's good to see you back safe," she said, and I could tell she meant it, which somehow made the whole moment worse and easier at the same time.

"Thanks," I managed.

I didn't get the chance to say anything else, because Kade's voice cut across the training yard, calling drills to order, and I felt his eyes find me across the crowd the same way they had the day before — direct, aware, like he'd noticed exactly who I was standing near and exactly how stiff my shoulders had gone.

"Hale," he called. "You're with me today."

A few Ironwood wolves exchanged glances. I heard Grant mutter something under his breath, still nursing his bruised pride from the day before. Deacon's eyebrows went up, surprised, watching me walk toward the Alpha instead of falling in line with the rest of the group.

Training with Kade directly turned out to mean drills that pushed me harder than anything I'd done all year — faster footwork, sharper strikes, no room for the sloppy anger that had gotten me in trouble the day before. He corrected my stance with two fingers against my shoulder, adjusted my grip without ever grabbing my hand outright, kept a careful, deliberate distance even while he pushed me past what I thought I could do.

"You're better than yesterday," he said, near the end of the session, both of us breathing hard, sweat cooling in the morning air.

"I had a good teacher," I said, before I could stop myself.

Something flickered across his face — not quite a smile, but close to one. "Careful," he said. "Compliments like that will get you extra drills."

"Is that a threat or a promise?"

"Depends on how well you behave the rest of the week."

I felt my face go warm and told myself it was just from the training. I didn't fully believe it.

Across the yard, I caught Deacon watching the two of us, his expression unreadable, and for one strange moment I realized I felt nothing when I looked at him. No ache. No old certainty trying to claw its way back. Just a quiet, distant kind of sadness for the girl I used to be, the one who built her whole future around a boy who turned toward someone else the second his instincts had the chance.

Whatever this thing was with Kade — this pull I didn't understand yet, this awareness that hummed under my skin every time he stood close — it didn't feel anything like what I'd had with Deacon. It felt sharper. More honest. A little bit dangerous, in a way that made me want to lean in instead of run.

I wasn't ready to trust it yet. A year alone had taught me not to hand my certainty to anyone so easily again.

But walking off that training field, knuckles sore, heart unexpectedly steady, I understood one thing clearly for the first time since Deacon's birthday party: I was not the same girl who left Ashwood territory in a flower crown, certain of a future that was never really mine to begin with.

Whatever came next, I was going to walk into it with my eyes open.