THE ALPHA PACT: Five Wolves One Obsession

Chapter 5: The First Warning

The roses died first.

Seraphina watched it happen from somewhere very far away. The white petals browned and curled, one bush after another, a slow wave of decay spreading outward from the place where she stood. The pond rippled once. A line of frost crept across its surface in the shape of a paw print.

Seraphina!

Draven's hands closed on her shoulders. His touch should have burned. Instead it anchored her, a rope thrown into black water.

Look at me. Look at me. She tried. His face swam in and out of focus, and behind it, over it, through it, other faces appeared. A forest under a violet moon. A woman running barefoot through snow, a bundle clutched to her chest. Masked wolves, a circle of them, closing in.

Run, a voice whispered inside her skull. Run, little one. They will not stop.

Draven, Seraphina said, and her voice came out strange, deeper, layered, with a second tone sounding beneath the first. There's someone in my head.

He went white. Ronan! Ronan!

Heavy boots hammered across the gravel. A moment later she was in someone's arms, lifted off the ground like she weighed nothing, and the world tilted into a blur of hedges and sky. A rough voice said, I've got her, I've got her, hold on, little wolf, and she realised, distantly, that Ronan Ashcroft was talking to her the way you would talk to a frightened horse.

Then everything went dark. She woke on a sofa in a study full of old books, with a blanket over her and Lucian Voss sitting on the floor beside her, flipping a coin between his fingers.

Ah, he said, without looking up. The sleeping heiress rises. You've been out for ninety minutes, you ruined Draven's roses, and Ronan has threatened three doctors. Good morning.

Her mouth felt like cotton. How bad was it?

On a scale of one to apocalypse? The coin stopped. Six. Possibly six and a half.

That's not reassuring.

I'm not trying to be. And there it was again, the thing she had glimpsed last night: his smile slipped, and for a heartbeat he looked younger and frightened and entirely sincere. You scared the hell out of us, Sera.

She sat up slowly. Her head ached. Her wrist didn't. The mark was perfectly still. What did I do?

Honestly? Nobody's sure. Your eyes went violet. The temperature dropped fifteen degrees. Soren turned up from nowhere and stood by the pond with his hand over his heart, saying nothing. Very eerie. Ronan says you spoke in two voices. He tucked the coin away. Kael wants a word. He's in the archive. I volunteered to sit with you instead, because I'm clearly the emotionally intelligent one.

You flipped a coin for ninety minutes. I flipped it thoughtfully.

She laughed, weakly, and was embarrassed by how much she needed it.

The Wolfe Estate archive occupied a whole level beneath the east wing: cold, silent, lit with amber lamps, and smelling of paper and old secrets. Kael sat at a long table, surrounded by folders, his sleeves pushed up, a laptop open beside a fragile ledger.

He didn't look up when she entered. I assume Lucian told you I wanted to speak to you, he said. He said you had a word.

I have several. Now he looked at her. The usual grey calm was there, but under it was something sharper, a man who had found a thread and couldn't stop pulling. Sit. I'm going to ask for your family's records, and I want your permission before I proceed.

That surprised her. You're asking?

I prefer informed consent to apologies. She sat. What did you find?

Possibly nothing. He turned the ledger toward her. It was an official birth registry, the Veyne family page. Her brother's entry was clean, dated, signed, countersigned. Beneath it, her own.

Except it wasn't, quite. The ink was the right colour, the signatures plausible. But the paper had been slightly thinner at that spot, the way old parchment goes after something has been scraped away and written over.

Someone altered your birth record, Kael said. Not recently. Twenty years, perhaps more. Very skilfully. I would never have noticed without a reason to look.

Seraphina's mouth had gone dry. What did it say before?

I don't know. Yet. He closed the ledger. But your wolfless status is recorded here as a medical finding. I've checked. No physician signed it. No test was performed. The designation simply appears, like a verdict handed down without a trial.

The words sat between them in the amber light. You think I was never wolfless, she whispered.

I think someone needed everyone to believe it. His voice was very even. I'm going to find out who.

For the first time, she looked at Kael Thorne, really looked, and saw what the cool precision cost him. A muscle tight in his jaw. Ink stains on his fingers. He had been in here all night.

Why are you doing this? she asked. He hesitated. Because it's the first time in my life, he said slowly, that a mystery has had a face.

She didn't know what to say to that. So she said nothing at all.

Far across the city, in a room lined with books nobody read, Lord Malrec Duskbane poured himself tea.

He was fifty two, silver at the temples, with the mild, courteous face of a man who had never raised his voice in his life. The royal adviser's office in the Citadel's north tower overlooked the capital like an eye. He enjoyed the view. He enjoyed it more tonight.

Tell me again, he said pleasantly.

The woman standing before his desk did not fidget. She had been trained out of it. The assassin was captured alive, my lord. He has been silenced as instructed. But the Alphas were present within moments. The girl bled. And all five of them...

Knelt. Malrec smiled into his cup. Yes. I heard it from three separate witnesses. How marvellous. We had expected a failure, my lord. We had not expected that.

Nor had I. He set the cup down, precisely, without a sound. For twenty years I have wondered if the old stories were true. Whether the blood remained. Whether anything of the Original had survived the purge. His eyes lifted to the window, to the lights of the distant Wolfe Estate. And tonight, a little girl bleeds on a marble floor, and the five strongest wolves in Veyloria lie down at her feet.

The woman said nothing. She had learned that was wiser. She will be at the estate, Malrec mused. Draven will have her warded, guarded, and thoroughly furious about it. She'll chafe. She always does. A soft, fond laugh. I've been watching her longer than any of them.

My lord?

He turned from the window. The mildness was gone. What remained was patient, cold, and absolutely certain.

Bring her to me, said Malrec Duskbane. Alive. Unharmed. And before she learns what she is.