The Alpha Regrets: She's Now the Lycan Queen

The grease stain wouldn't come out. Sera scrubbed at the champagne flute with her thumbnail, going at the smudge like it had personally wronged her. Around her, the Pack house kitchen was a war zone of dirty platters and half-empty trays, steam curling off the industrial sink. Through the swinging doors, she could hear them. All of them. Laughing, cheering, clinking glasses. The ceremony had started twenty minutes ago, and she was elbow-deep in dishwater. "Sera! More wine for table seven! Now!" Harriet, the head cook, shoved past her with a serving tray balanced on one meaty palm. The woman didn't even look at her. Nobody did. She dried her hands on her apron, grabbed two bottles of red from the cellar rack, and pushed through the swinging doors into the Great Hall. The noise hit her like a wall. Silver Moon Pack had pulled out every stop tonight. The Great Hall was drowning in candles—hundreds of them, climbing up iron candelabras and dripping wax onto the stone floor. Banners with the Pack crest hung from the vaulted ceiling, silver wolves howling on midnight blue silk. Every Alpha family from five neighboring Packs had sent representatives, and they were all here, dressed in their finest, trading power plays disguised as small talk. At the far end, on the raised dais, the old Alpha—Damon's father, Marcus Thorne—was saying something about duty and blood and legacy. His voice boomed through the hall, amplified by whatever ancient wolf magic was baked into these stones. The crowd listened in respectful silence. Some of them even meant it. Sera kept her head down. That was the rule. Don't look up. Don't make eye contact. Don't remind anyone you exist. She moved along the wall, refilling glasses without being asked. The trick was to be invisible, and she'd had nineteen years to practice. Slip between conversations, pour, retreat. Like a ghost who happened to carry a wine bottle. "Watch it, Omega." A woman she didn't recognize—some visiting Beta's wife—jerked her elbow away as Sera leaned in to pour. The woman's lip curled. "You almost touched me." "Sorry, ma'am." The words came out flat. Automatic. She'd said them so many times they'd lost all flavor, like gum chewed too long. She moved on. Another glass. Another table. Her reflection caught in the polished surface of a serving tray as she passed: brown hair pulled back tight, brown contact lenses, secondhand black dress that had been washed so many times it was more gray than black. Nothing to see. That was the point. On the dais, Marcus Thorne stepped aside. The hall erupted. Damon walked forward. Sera didn't mean to look. She'd made it through eighteen years of living in the same Pack without ever really looking at Damon Thorne, because looking at people who lived in a different universe from yours was a waste of time. She knew the basics—everyone did. Youngest Alpha in Silver Moon's history. Fought in the border wars at sixteen. Killed a rogue Alpha with his bare hands at nineteen. They called him the Blood Alpha, and they didn't say it like a joke. But she looked now. Something made her look. He stood at the front of the dais in a black suit that might as well have been armor. Six-foot-four, built like something that could run through a wall and keep going. Black hair pushed back from his face, jaw tight, gray eyes scanning the crowd like he was cataloging threats. There was a stillness to him that wasn't calm—it was coiled, the way a predator goes still right before the strike. He didn't smile. From what Sera had observed over the years, he never smiled. Marcus placed the ceremonial blade across his son's palms. Damon gripped it without flinching. "I, Marcus Thorne, Alpha of Silver Moon Pack, pass my title, my duty, and my blood oath to my son, Damon Thorne. Let the moon witness." The crowd repeated it: "Let the moon witness." Damon raised the blade and drew it across his left palm. Blood pooled dark and quick, and he pressed his hand to the stone pillar beside the dais—the same pillar every Silver Moon Alpha had bled on for three hundred years. The stone seemed to pulse beneath his touch. Or maybe Sera imagined that. The crowd roared. Wolves howled—some in human form, some shifted right there in the hall, unable to contain themselves. The sound shook the candelabras and made the candle flames dance. Sera stood frozen by table twelve, a wine bottle in each hand, watching. And then he turned his head. It shouldn't have mattered. He was scanning the hall, the way he always scanned rooms—quick, efficient, nothing personal. His gaze swept across tables, faces, bodies. Moving on. Moving on. Until it hit her. Later, she would try to pinpoint exactly what happened in that half-second. His eyes met hers, gray finding brown across sixty feet of crowded hall. Just two people looking at each other. It happened all the time, everywhere, every day, and it meant nothing. Except something cracked open in her chest. It started low, almost below the threshold of feeling—a warmth that didn't belong there, spreading outward from behind her ribs like spilled water. Then the warmth sharpened into something else. Not pain. Not exactly. A pull. Like someone had hooked a line behind her sternum and tugged. And then the smell hit. Pine. Not the chemical pine of air fresheners, but real pine—cold bark in winter, sap warming in summer sun, the sharp green bite of a forest after rain. Underneath it, something darker. Wet earth, thunderstorms, the ozone tang before lightning strikes. And underneath that, something she had no name for, something raw and animal that made every hair on her body stand up. Inside her—in the deep, quiet place where her wolf had slept for so long Sera had almost stopped believing she was real—something moved. Nyx stirred. Like a creature rolling over in its den, disturbed by a sound it couldn't ignore. What— Then Nyx's voice, rusty from years of silence, cracked through her skull so loud Sera almost dropped the wine bottles: MATE. He's our mate. The room tilted. Sera's vision blurred and refocused, blurred and refocused, like a camera struggling to lock on. Her heart was hammering so hard she could feel it in her teeth. The wine bottles shook in her grip. She could hear Nyx pacing now, clawing at something inside her, frantic and awake and alive in a way she hadn't been in years—maybe ever. No. Sera's thought came out desperate. No, that's—that can't be right. You've been quiet for— I know what I smell, Nyx snarled. That's him. That's OURS. Sera's gaze was still locked on Damon. She couldn't look away. It was like trying to turn her head underwater—every muscle in her body refused the command. Sixty feet away, on the dais, the new Alpha of Silver Moon Pack had gone completely still. Not the coiled stillness from before. This was different. This was the frozen, absolute stillness of a man who'd just felt the ground disappear beneath his feet. His pupils had blown wide, the gray almost swallowed by black, and she saw his nostrils flare once. Twice. Like he was chasing a scent he couldn't believe. His wolf. She could feel his wolf—Fenris, every Pack member knew the name—surging forward, pressing against Damon's skin from the inside out. The bond between them crackled like a live wire. Sera felt it in her bloodstream, in the roots of her hair, in the soft tissue behind her eyes. Go to him, Nyx breathed. Go. For one insane, vertigo-soaked second, Sera's foot moved. She took a half-step forward. And then she saw his face change. It happened fast. The shock drained out of Damon's expression like water through a sieve, and what replaced it— Sera had been looked at with many things in her life. Pity. Contempt. Indifference. The casual, glancing cruelty of people who'd decided she didn't count. She knew what those looked like. She had a whole catalog. This was new. Damon Thorne looked at her the way someone looks at a stain on their sleeve. An insect on their food. Something that was, by its very existence in his vicinity, an offense. Disgust. Pure, undiluted disgust. His jaw tightened. His eyes went from black back to cold gray. And he looked away. Deliberately. Completely. As if she were a draft coming in through a crack in the wall, mildly annoying and easily dealt with by simply turning to face the other direction. The warmth in Sera's chest went ice-cold. No, Nyx whimpered. The clawing stopped. No, no, no— "Hey. Omega." Someone at table twelve was snapping their fingers at her. "Some of us are waiting for a refill over here." Sera blinked. The room came back into focus—the noise, the candles, the celebratory chaos. She poured the wine. Her hands were shaking, but nobody noticed. Nobody was looking at her hands. Nobody was looking at her at all. On the dais, Damon Thorne accepted the Alpha title from his father, shook hands with the visiting Alphas, and did not look in her direction again. Not once. Sera finished her rounds. She carried the empty bottles back to the kitchen. She stacked them in the recycling crate by the back door, the glass clinking together too loudly in the sudden quiet. Harriet said something to her—an instruction, probably—and Sera nodded without hearing the words. She walked down the corridor to the small closet-turned-bedroom she'd slept in since she was seven years old. She closed the door. She sat on the edge of the thin mattress and pressed both fists against her chest, right over the place where the pull had lived for a few gorgeous, stupid minutes. Inside her, Nyx had gone quiet again. Not sleeping. Waiting. Like an animal that had been kicked and was deciding whether to bare its teeth or crawl under the porch. He felt it too, Nyx said finally. Quiet now. Certain. He knows what we are to him. "Doesn't matter," Sera whispered to her empty room. Her voice cracked on the second word. "You saw his face." I saw. "He'd rather have anyone. Literally anyone in that room." Nyx didn't answer. She didn't need to. Sera bent forward until her forehead touched her knees. She pressed her eyes shut hard enough to see sparks. She would not cry. She had learned at seven years old, when the old Luna died and the new one moved in and the hitting started, that crying didn't fix a single goddamn thing. It just made your face red and your vision blurry when you needed to watch for the next blow. So she didn't cry. She sat in her closet-room and listened to the celebration thunder on above her, all those wolves toasting their new Alpha, and she pressed her fists against the place in her chest where something had bloomed and died in the span of four seconds. Through the floor, muffled by stone and wood and the laughter of people who didn't know she existed, she thought she heard a wolf howl. Just one, low and long, swallowed up by the noise of the party. She couldn't tell if it was Nyx or Fenris. Maybe both.