Entangled with the Alpha Brothers.

~Amanda~ I wasn’t supposed to be there. That’s the first thought I had when the crowd went quiet. It wasn’t the pack settling kind of quiet that came before Elder announcements or after a hunt, but the sharp, particular silence of something about to happen that couldn’t be taken. Back. My wolf felt it before I did. She pressed herself against the inside of my ribs, and I pressed my fingers flat against my dress, smoothing a crease that wasn’t there, nervously needing something to do with my hands. I’d brushed my hair twice that evening. It wasn’t new, the dress. None of my things ever were, but I’d smoothed it carefully against my hips and told myself maybe. Just tonight. Just this once, maybe things would go differently. Long had asked me to come again against my will. Three nights ago, in the warm dark of his room, he’d pressed his mouth to my temple and told me he had something important to say. That he needed me there when he said it. His voice had been soft. I’d turned that softness over in my mind for seventy-two hours, held it like something of significance, told myself I knew the difference between performance and truth. I guess I was wrong. He was already at the centre of the gathering circle when I spotted him, and the first wrong thing I noticed was that he wasn’t looking for me. Long always looked for me. Even when he pretended not to, his eyes would find me across a room—a reflex he’d never quite managed to kill. But tonight his gaze was fixed straight ahead, his expression carved into something I didn’t recognise. Something sealed. My stomach tilted. “I heard he has an announcement,” someone murmured behind me. “About time,” another voice answered, Lowe and satisfied. The fire at the centre of the clearing threw orange light across the gathering and I stood at the edge of it, where I always stood, where my father had taught me to stand—not in words, but in the years I watched him grow smaller and smaller after his disgrace, learning that the margins were safer than the centre. I had learned it perfectly. Nineteen years of practice. “Beta Long.” Elder Soren’s voice carried across the clearing. “You may speak.” Long’s voice rose easily, the way it always did—that particular gravity that made people lean in without realising they were moving. “Brothers and sisters of Ironveil Pack.” A pause. “I have something to confess.” The energy shifted. I felt the crowd’s attention become a longing thing, swinging toward him like something on a hinge. Beside me, someone took a slow step forward. I stood still. “Amanda Wood.” He said my name the way you’d realise a problem. Every head turned. I watched it happen—that wave of movement, the firelight catching eye after eye as they found me at the edge of the circle. My hands trembled and went cold. Don’t give them your face, I thought. Don’t. I gave them my face anyway. I always looked up when I should have looked down. It was the one bad habit I couldn’t fix. Long was watching me from across the fire. He looked like a man who had already made his peace with what he was about to do, and worse, he looked sorry. But not sorry enough to stop. Just sorry enough that I could see it, that I would know he felt something, and that it hadn’t mattered. I was still trying to put it all together. “She and I had a relationship,” he said, and the word landed in my stomach like a drone dropped in still water. “A private one. I kept it from the pack because I was ashamed of it.” Ashamed? I became more confused. Like ASHAMED?? The murmuring started. “She pursued me. She worked her way into my private life, and when I tried to end things, she used what happened between us to keep me there. She is not innocent. She is not the victim; she’ll try to make herself into the moment I stop talking.” “Long,” my voice cracked. I was still confused but trembling visibly from the heat of eyes piercing my skin. “What are you doing?” He didn’t look at me when he answered. “She came to me willingly. Repeatedly.” Another pause. He had always known what silence did to a crowd. “Without an ounce of virtue, this pack would expect from an unmated female.” For a moment, his words didn’t make much sense to me. Then, they meant everything. Tears glistened in my eyes. “No,” I heard myself say. The sound came from somewhere hollow. “No, that’s not—” “She’s been with me for months,” he added, his tone perfectly flat, as if he were reading from something. “She gave her body willingly.” “You said you wouldn’t tell anyone!” My voice cracked straight down the middle. “You said it was ours. You promised—” “I changed my mind,” he snapped. Three words. The cruellest thing he ever said to me, and he said it like it was nothing. Like I was nothing. Like the last year of my life had been a minor inconvenience he was now clearing from his schedule. The laughter started somewhere to my left. Then the whispers, overlapping… “Not pure Omega.” “About time.” “Pathetic.” “Did she really think—” I wrapped my arms around myself and tried to hold the pieces together through sheer force of will because I was not going to fall apart here, not in front of all of them, not where Alicia could watch. I could feel her somewhere in the crowd without looking. I always could. The particular warmth of her satisfaction was its own kind of heat. “I reject you.” The pain detonated in my chest before his voice finished echoing. Not metaphorical—physical. I hadn’t expected it. A tearing sensation behind my sternum, something structural giving way. “I reject you,” he said again, louder.” I didn’t fall. I nearly did, but didn’t. I pressed my feet into the earth and I stayed standing, because the only thing I had left was the ability to stay standing, and I was keeping it. “You don’t mean that.” My voice was shaking now, and I couldn’t stop it. “You can’t—you promised, you said—” “I promised nothing,” he said. Final. Sealed. Done. A tear finally slipped down my face before I could stop it. I wiped it away so fast I probably drew blood. I turned to leave. I put my back to all of them, to the laughter and the whispers and Long’s carved-stone expression, and I focused on the darkness past the tree line, the cold on my face, the simple mechanical action of putting one foot in front of the other— “WAIT.” The word struck the clearing like a physical blow. One word; and the entire pack went still. I knew that voice. Everyone knew that voice. I turned slowly, because some part of my body had already understood what my mind hadn’t caught up to yet, and I saw him crossing the circle towards me—crossing it as it belonged to him, which it did, everything did, moving without hurting in the way of men who have never once needed to hurry in their lives. Alpha Noir. He stopped in front of me. Close. The firelight was behind him and I had to look up to find his face, which I did, because I still had that much dignity left. His eyes were dark and completely unreadable. “She is mine,” he said. The silence that followed was the loudest thing I had ever heard in my life. My lips parted, but nothing came out. “I claim you,” he said again, directly to me this time, his voice low and absolute. “As mine.” Behind him, two shapes stepped forward from the edge of the firelight. Identical. Terrifying in the way that only men who have never been afraid of anything can be. One of them looked furious, I couldn’t tell which one he was but I had the feeling he was the second one. The third one was watching me with an expression I couldn’t read, his dark eyes moving over my face with something in them that felt dangerously close to recognition. Coir. His gaze held mine for exactly one second. Then he looked away. I looked back at Noir. At his certainty. In the way he’d crossed the circle towards a girl the pack had just finished destroying, his pack, without hesitation, without performance, like he had calculated and waited for exactly this moment. “No,” I said