The Alpha's Tutor: His Forbidden Luna

Chapter Two

Fifteen years later

Alex

The reports on my desk didn't care that I was Alpha.

Numbers never do. That was half of why I liked them — no wolf in the room bowing their head, no weight of two hundred lives pressing down on every decision, just clean columns that either balanced or didn't. Alpha by blood, head of Kane Holdings by choice; the second title, I'd built myself, brick by brick, acquisition by acquisition, until what my father started as a handful of local contracts had grown into something with its name on buildings in three states and a boardroom full of people who stood a little straighter when I walked in. It was the only thing in my life that ever felt entirely earned instead of simply inherited.

A knock cracked against the study door — two short, one long. Kian's knock. I knew it the way I knew my own heartbeat.

"Come."

He didn't come. He was already moving before the word left my mouth, which told me everything before he said a single syllable. Kian did not rush. Kian had walked beside my father for a decade, and beside me for three years, and in all that time I had never once seen him move faster than a purposeful stride — until now.

"Alpha." His voice came out rough, stripped of its usual ease. "It's Doc Halloway."

I set the pen down. Carefully. The kind of care that comes from knowing your hands might not stay steady if you don't force them to. "Tell me."

"Gone. This morning. His heart, from what we can tell — nothing anyone did to him, nothing anyone could've stopped." Kian's jaw worked, grief and duty warring across a face that had learned, same as mine, to keep both in check in front of the pack. "Sarah found him. He didn't wake up."

The room went very quiet. Somewhere behind my ribs, something old and complicated cracked without making a sound.

Doc Halloway had set my collarbone when I was twelve and stupid enough to challenge a boy twice my age. He'd sat with my father in his last hour, hands steady on a wound none of us could speak of even now. He was supposed to be permanent. Packs bury Alphas. Packs are not supposed to bury the one person standing between them and every death that follows.

"How much does that leave us?" I said. Not a question. A demand for the shape of the problem, because grief could wait — it would have to wait, it always did — and the pack could not.

"None," Kian said it flat, no cushioning, because he knew better than to soften numbers for me. "No trained healer. Beth knows herbs, stitching, the basics. Nothing past that. Anything serious, we're running to Ashford's pack two counties over and hoping their doctor's in a generous mood."

I stood. The chair scraped back harder than I meant it to, and for one unguarded second I let my hands press flat against the desk and my head drop, just to breathe, just to feel the full weight of it before I had to be Alpha again instead of a man who'd just lost the closest thing he had left to a second father.

"Alex." Kian rarely used the name instead of the title. When he did, I listened. "Look at me."

I looked at him.

"You've wanted this since you were a kid dragging half-dead birds into your mother's kitchen," he said. "Everyone in this pack knows it. Your father knew it. He used to joke that you'd have made a worse Alpha and a better doctor, and he only half meant it as a joke."

"I can't leave a pack with no healer to go build myself into one."

"You can't leave a pack with no healer forever, no. But right now?" Kian stepped closer, and for the first time since he'd walked in, something like fire lit behind his exhaustion. "Right now this pack has a business owner who already knows how to move through the human world without blinking. It has an Alpha young enough to still be enrolled in a university without a single question asked. And it has exactly one dead doctor's worth of reason to stop waiting for the right time, because the right time just ran out."

"And in the meantime?"

"In the meantime, we borrow. Ashford owes your father a debt older than either of us — I'll ride out myself, arrange terms, make sure nothing serious goes unattended while you're gone." He said it like it was already decided, like he'd been turning the plan over on the ride here, grief and strategy moving in him at the same terrible speed. "Your mother's been saying for years you were wasting yourself keeping the books balanced instead of chasing what you actually wanted. Maybe now you let her be right."

I looked past him, out the study window, to the tree line that marked the edge of pack land — the same tree line, though I didn't say it aloud, that had swallowed a small human girl fifteen years ago and given me back nothing but a debt I'd never collected on.

Doc Halloway was dead. My pack had a hole in it that wouldn't close on its own. And for the first time since the crown had landed on my head far too early, wanting something for myself didn't feel like betrayal.

It felt like the only decision I'd ever made that didn't cost anyone else a single thing.

"Set up a meeting with Ashford," I said. "And get me everything I need to apply. Transcripts, records, whatever fiction we need built to make a wolf look like an orphaned human with excellent grades and nowhere else to be."

For the first time since he'd walked through that door, Kian almost smiled. "Already started drafting the paperwork on the ride over, Alpha."

Of course he had.

Sometimes I wonder what I would do without him; he wasn't just a friend; he was my brother, ready to carry every weight I had on me.

I sat back down at the ledgers that no longer felt like enough, and for the first time in three years, I let myself want something bigger than balanced numbers.