CLAIMED BY THE ALPHA’S ENEMY

Chapter Five: Assigned

Chapter Five: Assigned

"This is a mistake," Bryn said, the moment they were finally alone at the border cabin that would serve as their shared post, a squat, one-room structure of grey timber that had sat empty and unused since before either of them was born, no Alphas or councils left to perform composure for, just the two of them and a table between them and a silence that felt entirely too loud.

"Which part," Cassius asked, setting his own pack down across the room with a care that felt almost deliberate, as if giving her time to say more before he answered properly, as if he understood, without being told, that she needed the extra moment. "The patrol itself, or the two of us being the ones running it?"

"Both."

He almost smiled, that same flicker from the ridge, gone again before it could settle into anything she could properly call an expression. "For what it's worth, I didn't request this particular arrangement. My own council was fairly vocal about their objections, in fact, in roughly the same tone yours probably used."

"They wanted Rhett to run it alone," Bryn guessed.

"They wanted anyone but me to run it alone, if I'm honest. An Alpha in the field, working daily alongside Emberfall's own enforcer, wasn't the arrangement anyone on my council had in mind when they agreed to joint patrols." He studied her a moment, something careful in it. "I assume yours had similar objections."

"Renner overruled them himself," Bryn said. "Said I tracked better than anyone else he had. I don't think he considered what else might come with the assignment."

"Neither did I," Cassius admitted, "if I'm being honest about it."

"Neither did I." She dropped her pack onto the table between them harder than the moment strictly called for, needing somewhere to put the restless energy that had nowhere else to go. "Your pack killed my parents, Cassius. I don't know how to stand in a room with you and treat that like a footnote to a patrol schedule, like it's just an inconvenient historical detail we're both expected to be professional about."

Something shifted in his face, careful, unreadable, and for a moment she thought he might offer her the kind of hollow sympathy she'd have hated more than his silence, the practiced condolence of someone who'd rehearsed the right words without meaning any of them. He didn't. "Ten years ago," he said instead, quietly, not as a dismissal but as a simple statement of when, as if he understood exactly how much time that was and exactly how little it mattered to the grief itself.

"Ten years is nothing. I still know exactly what my mother's kitchen smelled like the morning I walked in and found it empty, the bread nobody ate, the coffee gone cold in the pot. I could probably still find my way to that morning blind, if you asked me to."

He didn't argue with her, didn't try to talk her out of a grief that had every right to still be sharp after everything it had cost her. "I was seventeen when it happened," he said. "Too young to lead the raid myself, but old enough to understand, even then, that something about how it was justified to us didn't sit right. I've spent every year since trying to make sure my pack never does anything like it again, to anyone, for any reason. That's not an apology, because I don't imagine you want one from me for something I didn't personally do. But it's true, and I'd rather you know it plainly than spend the next weeks wondering whether I'm the kind of man who'd defend what happened."

It wasn't an apology. It wasn't even close to being one. But it was more honest than she'd expected from a man she'd spent a decade being told to despise on sight, without ever once having spoken to him, and Bryn found she didn't quite know what to do with that honesty, so she picked up the patrol map instead and pointed at the ridge where the traps had been found, and let the work carry the two of them somewhere steadier than the conversation had been, the way work had always been the one reliable place to put grief that had nowhere else useful to go.

Interlude: Teaching the Pups

Bryn spent one afternoon each week, when duty allowed it, teaching Emberfall's youngest pups the basics of tracking, a responsibility she'd inherited almost by accident years earlier and had come, over time, to treasure more than she let on to anyone but Sable. She found the work grounding in a way little else in her life managed, a reminder that whatever the border cost the adults of both packs, the next generation deserved better than an inheritance built entirely on grief.

"Why do we hate Nightshade," one of the younger pups, a serious-eyed girl named Wren, asked her that week, apropos of nothing, crouched beside Bryn over a set of fox tracks neither of them had fully identified yet.

The question caught Bryn off guard in a way she wasn't prepared for. "Because of something that happened a long time ago," she said carefully, "before you were born."

"But you don't hate them," Wren said, with the plain, unfiltered observation only a child could manage without meaning any particular cruelty by it. "Not anymore. I heard the older pups talking. They said you like the Nightshade Alpha."

Bryn considered, for a long moment, how to answer a question she hadn't yet found honest words for even with herself. "I'm trying to find out the truth about what happened," she said finally. "Sometimes hating something for a long time doesn't mean you were ever given the whole story about why."

Wren considered this with the grave seriousness only children bring to ideas adults have long since complicated for themselves. "That seems like a good thing to find out," she said, and went back to the tracks, leaving Bryn with the unsettling sense that a nine-year-old had just articulated, more simply than she'd managed in weeks, exactly what she'd been trying to do all along.