The Alpha's Hidden Obsession

The Road Out

The drover's path was worse than I remembered.

And I remembered it as bad.

Mud pulled at my boots with every step, thick and cold. More than once, I went down on one knee in the dark and had to talk myself into getting back up.

I kept telling myself the same thing, the way you talk to a scared child when there is a strange noise outside.

Hollowmere is safe if I am gone.

Milo is safe if I am gone.

My legs did not care about the story.

They just kept moving because stopping was worse.

By the time the sun came up, I was far enough from anyone who knew my face that I could breathe without checking over my shoulder every few steps.

I stood at the edge of a market town I had never seen before, mud reaching my knees and a coin purse that felt thinner every time I touched it.

I bought bread I didn't need and asked, in a voice I hoped sounded bored instead of desperate, if anyone knew the road to Duskmoor.

The baker's wife looked at me like I'd asked her for directions to the moon.

“Cadet road,” she said. “Runs past the old mill. Why? You got someone testing this year?”

I said something that was not quite a lie.

I said I was looking for someone who did.

Duskmoor Academy.

I had heard of it the way everyone in Ashgrove had heard of it. A school on neutral ground where every pack sent its strongest cadets to train, protected by a treaty older than any Alpha currently breathing.

No pack could touch its own inside those walls.

Not even a pack chasing a runaway bride with a debt attached to her name.

It was, I realized somewhere around midday, the only place in Ashgrove that Kestrel could not simply walk into and take me out of.

It was also, obviously, a school for cadets who were not me.

I did not let myself think too hard about that problem.

Some problems only get smaller once you're standing right on top of them, and this felt like one of those.

So I walked.

I took the cadet road instead of thinking, past the old mill, into thinning grass and thickening pine.

Around the middle of the afternoon, I found the horse.

It was riderless, cropping grass at the edge of the road, still saddled. A satchel was strapped behind the seat, with a seal on it I did not recognize.

Twenty feet further on, in the ditch, I found the rider.

He was young. My age, or close to it.

And alive.

He was breathing in short, uneven pulls, one leg bent wrong underneath him. There was a lump on his head the size of an egg.

His horse had thrown him.

From the mud and the hoofprints, it looked like it had happened hours ago.

I have spent my whole life fixing things nobody else wanted to touch.

It took me less than a minute to check him for injuries worse than the leg, and another two to drag him into the shade and prop his head up with my rolled coat.

The whole time, my mind was working somewhere apart from my hands.

Cold.

Fast.

On the satchel still strapped behind his saddle.

His name was Wesley Calder.

It said so on the enrollment papers inside, along with a wax seal from Duskmoor Academy and today's date.

I sat back on my heels and stared at him for a long moment.

Then I looked at the road behind me.

The road that eventually led all the way back to a wedding that was probably already being rescheduled for whenever they found me.

I am not proud of what I did next.

I have decided I am not going to apologize for it either.

I found the nearest farmhouse and told them a boy had fallen from his horse on the cadet road and needed a healer fast.

I did not give my name.

I did not wait to see if they believed me.

I ran.

Because if I stayed, I would watch him being carried away and have to decide all over again whether I could live with what I'd already decided in that ditch.

I put his coat on over mine.

Then I cut my hair with the same kitchen knife I'd packed for protection.

Handful by handful, until it barely brushed my collar.

I told myself the uneven ends didn't matter because cadets were not judged on their hair.

I bound my chest as tightly as I could stand with a strip torn from my own shirt.

Then I practiced.

Out loud.

Alone on a road with nobody around to hear me.

I said a stranger's name until it stopped feeling like a stranger's name in my mouth.

“Wes Calder,” I said to the trees, to the horse, to nobody.

“Wes Calder, reporting.”

Somewhere in that hour, cutting my own hair on the side of a strange road, I made myself a second promise.

Quieter than the first.

Whatever this cost me, Draven Kestrel would learn exactly what he'd pushed me into becoming.

By the time Duskmoor's outer wall came into view, black stone against a sky turning orange at the edges, I almost believed my own name.

The gate ahead of me was already closing.

A line of cadets, maybe a dozen, stood being checked off against a list by a guard who looked like checking names was the last thing standing between him and the end of a very long day.

I ran the last hundred yards.

My satchel banged against my hip as I went.

I skidded to a stop in front of him, trying to look like an ordinary late cadet and not a girl who had walked three territories and cut her own hair with a kitchen knife along the way.

He looked me over.

Then he looked at the papers I shoved into his hands.

He checked the seal.

The date.

Then he looked at my face for a beat too long.

“Calder,” he said slowly, like he was tasting the name.

“You're smaller than your intake record says.”