The Mate The Rogue Alpha Was Meant to Kill

Chapter 2—First Shift

Elara's POV

I could not stop thinking about the feeling.

Even after the fire had burned lower and the noise from the main camp had settled into a distant hum, even after Leo had started his third retelling of the time Freya accidentally challenged a senior to a sparring match and lost in under a minute, I could not shake it. That pressure against my ribs. That strange hammering in my chest that had come out of nowhere while I stared at the red moon and had not fully gone away since.

I pressed my fingers against my sternum quietly so none of them would notice and told myself it was nothing. Nerves maybe. The weight of a bad birthday following me into the next day like it always did.

I almost believed it.

"You're not laughing," Nyx said.

I looked up. The three of them were watching me with varying degrees of concern dressed up as casual attention, Leo with his brow slightly furrowed, Freya with her chin resting on her hand, Nyx with that steady unreadable look she used when she was actually worried but did not want to make it obvious.

"I'm listening," I said.

"You have the face," Leo told me.

"What face?"

"The one where you're somewhere else entirely but you don't want us to know."

I pulled my knees closer to my chest and looked back toward the treeline. We had moved further from the main group as the night deepened, settling into a small clearing just beyond where the other students had set up, close enough to hear voices but far enough that nobody was paying us any attention. The trees here were older, thicker, and the dark between them sat heavier than it did near the campfire light.

"I'm fine," I said. "Keep going."

Freya gave me a look that said she did not believe me but was choosing her battles, and Leo launched back into his story with the kind of energy that made it impossible not to eventually smile at least a little. I tried to let it pull me in. I tried to sit inside the warmth of the three of them the way I usually could, easily and without effort, the way being with them always felt like finally exhaling after holding your breath all day.

But something underneath my skin would not settle.

It started as a warmth, low and persistent, the kind that made me shift my position against the ground because I could not get comfortable. I rolled my shoulders and said nothing. Then the warmth spread, moving from my centre outward through my arms and into my hands and I looked down at my fingers half expecting to see something there, something visible to explain what I was feeling.

Nothing. Just my hands.

I pressed them flat against the cool ground and breathed slowly and told myself again that it was nothing, that I was tired and wrung out from yesterday and my body was just reacting to stress the way bodies sometimes did.

Then my heartbeat changed.

It went from fast to loud, each beat suddenly enormous in my ears, drowning out Leo's voice and the distant sounds of the camp and the ordinary nighttime sounds of the forest around us. I blinked. The world felt slightly too bright even in the dark, the shapes of the trees too sharp, the smell of the pine and the earth and the smoke from our fire suddenly overwhelming, like someone had turned every one of my senses up by several degrees all at once.

"Elara." Freya's voice cut through it, sharp with something that was not quite alarm but was close. "Your hands."

I looked down. My fingers had curled into the dirt without me noticing, pressing deep into the ground, and my knuckles had gone white with the pressure I was exerting without meaning to. I tried to loosen my grip and found that I could not do it easily, that my muscles were pulled tight in a way that had nothing to do with my conscious control.

I tried to stand.

My legs buckled on the first attempt and I grabbed the nearest tree trunk before I went down completely, bark scraping against my palm, my shoulder hitting the wood hard enough to hurt. The pain barely registered because there was something else happening now, something building inside my chest and my spine and the backs of my legs, a pressure that was gathering force with every second and had nowhere left to go.

"Something is wrong," I said, and my own voice sounded strange to me, too far away, like I was hearing it from the other side of something thick.

Leo was on his feet immediately, crossing the space between us in two strides, his hands on my shoulders trying to steady me. "What is it, what's happening?"

"I don't know." And that was the terrifying part, I genuinely did not know, I had no framework for what was moving through my body right now, no name for it, no context, and the not knowing made it worse than the physical sensation itself.

Then the pain hit.

It was not like anything I had ever felt before. It came from inside my bones, deep and splitting and completely impossible to breathe through, starting at the base of my spine and radiating outward in waves that knocked the air clean out of my lungs. My knees hit the ground before I decided to kneel, my body making decisions without consulting me, and I pressed both hands into the dirt and tried to hold on to something solid while everything inside me felt like it was coming apart at the seams.

My fingers were changing.

I stared at them through the blur of pain and watched, with a kind of detached disbelief, as my nails darkened and lengthened, pushing slowly and agonisingly through my fingertips like something that had been waiting inside me for a very long time and was finally, furiously done waiting. I dug them into the earth beneath me without thinking and felt the ground give way under the new pressure of them.

"Freya." Leo's voice had gone very quiet and very controlled, the tone he used when he was frightened but did not want to make things worse. "Get someone. Get one of the staff, get anyone, go now."

"Is she," Freya started.

"Go."

I heard them move. Two sets of footsteps, then three, all of them running, their voices fading as they pushed back toward the main camp. I wanted to call after them, wanted to tell them not to go far, wanted to tell them I was scared in a way I had never been scared before, but another wave of pain rolled through me before I could form the words and all that came out was a sound I did not fully recognise as my own.

My mother's voice came back to me then, threading through the pain like something I had stored away years ago and forgotten until this exact moment. She had told me once, sitting on the edge of my bed when I was maybe twelve and asking questions about shifting for the first time, that the first transformation would hurt. That it was the only one that ever did. That the body fought the change the first time because it did not yet know what it was becoming, and the pain was simply the cost of waking up to something new. After that, she had promised, it would be effortless. Natural. Like breathing.

I held onto that promise now with everything I had.

My spine curved sharply, pulling me forward against my will, my back arching as something deep inside it began to shift and reshape with a sound I felt more than heard, a grinding pressure that radiated from my vertebrae outward through every nerve in my body. My arms shook with the effort of holding myself up. The forest around me had gone enormous, every scent and sound magnified to the point of being almost unbearable, the smoke and the pine and the distant voices of my classmates all pressing in at once.

I was not done yet. Not even close.

My back arched again, harder this time, another wave of restructuring moving through me like something unstoppable, and I pressed my claws deeper into the ground and held on and tried to remember what my mother had told me.

It only hurts the first time.

It only hurts the first time.