Alpha's Discarded Mate: Reborn Under The Dark Moon

Chapter 3: Two Wolves Watching Her Rise

Sienna's POV

The pain from that night faded by morning, but something else stayed behind, coiled low in my chest like a held breath that refused to let go.

Dominic had not left me alone once, not even when I told him he did not need to babysit a stray wolf from a rival pack.

"You're not a stray," he said, tossing me a rabbit he had caught before sunrise. "You're a mystery, and I don't like unsolved things sitting on my border."

We were three days into whatever this was, not quite training, not quite hiding, somewhere out past the Ashford territory line where nobody from either pack would think to look.

Dominic had built a rough camp against a rock face, and every morning he pushed me to test whatever had woken inside me the night the moon went dark.

"Run to the ridge and back," he said, nodding toward a slope that would have taken me twenty minutes on my best day at home. I did it in four.

I stood there afterward, my chest heaving, staring at my own paws as if they belonged to someone else.

Dominic did not look surprised the way I expected. He looked satisfied, in a quiet way, like a man watching a theory prove itself correct.

"Again," he said.

"I just ran the fastest lap of my life, and your only reaction is again?"

"You flinched at the top of the ridge," he said. "Something held you back before you let go. I want to know what it was."

I hated that he was right, because I had felt it too, that half second of hesitation where some old voice in my head still expected to fail.

I ran it again, and this time I let the strange pull in my chest take over sooner, and I shaved another full minute off the second attempt.

"Better," Dominic said, and something about the way he said it, genuinely pleased, made warmth spread through my chest that had nothing to do with the running at all.

That afternoon one of Dominic's scouts came through the trees, a young wolf named Carl who reported to him quietly before glancing my way like he already knew who I was.

Dominic listened without a word and then thanked him and sent him off, and when I asked what it was about, he did not try to hide it from me.

"Word's moving through Ridgemont territory," he said. "Talk of a wolf outrunning trained warriors near our border. Your old pack is asking questions."

My stomach tightened. "What kind of questions?"

"The kind that means your Alpha is not sleeping well," Dominic said, and there was no cruelty in the way he said it, only fact. "Carl says your name came up more than once."

I turned away from him and stared out at the ridge, the place I had just run in four minutes instead of twenty, and I felt something complicated twist in my chest at the thought of Jaxon lying awake because of me. I hated that some part of me was glad.

"Does it bother you," Dominic asked, "that they're talking about you?"

"I don't know," I said honestly. "For six years all I wanted was for them to see me. Now that they finally might, I don't know if I want it anymore."

"You don't owe them anything," Dominic said.

"Not your speed, not your strength, not an explanation for either one."

"You don't know my old Alpha."

"No," he agreed, "but I know what he did to you, and I know it was not because you were weak. Weak wolves don't rattle an entire pack by disappearing for ten days."

I looked back at him and found his gold eyes already on me, in a way that made it hard to look away first.

"You keep saying things like that," I said. "Like you already know who I am underneath everything."

"Maybe I do," he said. "I've watched you run four minutes faster than you had any business running. I've watched you fight without a single wasted step. That tells me more about a wolf than a title ever could."

In the evenings, when the testing stopped, we sat by a small fire he built out of dry brush, and he did not push me about Jaxon again, and I did not offer more than I already had.

Instead, he told me about his own pack, about his father who ruled through calculation instead of pride, about a brother who had once been groomed for something Dominic would not name yet.

I listened more than I spoke, but somewhere in those quiet hours I noticed the way his eyes stayed on me a bit too long when he thought I was not looking, and the way my own gaze kept finding his without my permission.

"You never talk about what happens after this," I said, watching the fire instead of him. "After I've learned to control whatever this is. What then?"

"I hadn't thought that far," Dominic said, though something in his voice told me that was not quite true.

"Liar."

He laughed, low and short, and it changed his whole face for a second, softening it. "Fine. I've thought about it. I just haven't decided if I'm allowed to say it out loud yet."

"Why not?"

"Because you're still wearing another pack's mark on your shoulder," he said, quieter now, "and I don't know if that means something is finished or if it means I'm about to make a mistake I can't take back."

The fire cracked between us, and neither of us moved to fill the silence that followed.

I could feel the pull of him from across the small distance, not the strange power humming under my skin but something older and simpler, the kind of pull that had nothing to do with fate and everything to do with choice.

"You're staring," I said one night, not looking up from the fire.

"So are you," he said, and neither of us moved to stop.