The Alpha Who Chose Me

Wren's POV "Get up. You're not done until I say you're done." Garrick's voice hit me before the water did. I flinched anyway, even after eleven years of hearing it every single morning. I pushed myself off the cold stone floor of the kitchen, my knees aching from three hours of scrubbing. The collar around my throat felt heavier than usual today, the way it always did when I hadn't slept enough. It never let me forget it was there. A thick band of steel and something chemical underneath, cold against my skin no matter the season, humming faintly if I pressed my fingers to it. It kept my wolf locked somewhere so deep I couldn't remember what she used to feel like. "I'm up," I said. "I'm working." "You're standing there," Garrick said. "That's not the same thing." He leaned against the doorway of the kitchen like he owned it, because he did. Everything in Thornridge belonged to him now. The pack, the house, the memory of our parents, and me. Especially me. I grabbed the bucket and got back on my knees. "The floor's already clean," I said, quiet enough that it wouldn't sound like arguing. "Then do it again. I want it clean enough to eat off of." He crossed his arms. "We have important guests arriving in six days. I won't have this house look like something a servant lives in." "I am a servant," I said, before I could stop myself. Garrick's eyes narrowed. For a second I thought he might hit me, the way he had a hundred times before. Instead he just smiled, the kind of smile that made my stomach drop harder than any slap would have. "You're whatever I decide you are," he said. "Don't forget that." He left before I could answer. I heard his boots echo down the hallway, unhurried, the way a man walks when he knows no one will stop him. Somewhere behind him, a door slammed, and one of the younger servants let out a small, startled gasp before catching herself. Nobody in this house made a sound they didn't mean to make. We'd all learned that the hard way. I let out a breath I didn't know I'd been holding and looked down at my hands, red and cracked from the cold water. Eleven years old, I had been, the night our parents died. Eleven years old and too scared to run fast enough when the fire spread through the old training barn. Garrick had been sixteen. He remembered every detail of that night differently than I did, and his version always ended with the same sentence. You did this. You and your carelessness. You killed them. I didn't remember starting any fire. I remembered smoke, and heat, and my mother screaming my name before the world went black. But Garrick had told that story so many times, to so many people, that even I had started to wonder if he was right. The collar around my neck had gone on two years after that, the day Garrick officially took the Alpha title our father should have passed to no one, because our father was dead and there was no one left to argue. He said it was to keep me "manageable." He said a girl who couldn't control herself as a child shouldn't be trusted with a wolf as an adult. I still remembered the day the pack blacksmith fitted it around my throat, thirteen years old and too frightened to fight it. The metal had been warm from the forge, and the chemical strip lining the inside had burned like nettles for a full week before my skin finally went numb to it. Garrick had stood in the doorway and watched the entire process without saying a word, and when it was done, he'd nodded once, satisfied, like he'd fixed something broken instead of breaking something whole. I scrubbed the floor until my knuckles bled a little at the edges, and I didn't cry, because crying never once made anything better in this house. It only made Garrick smile wider. I had learned, somewhere in those first few years, that the fastest way to survive him was to give him nothing at all to enjoy. By the time the sun went down, my back ached in four different places and I still had the west hallway to finish. I was halfway through wringing out my rag when Ivy, one of the older house servants, found me. "You heard him," she said. "About the guests." "I heard him." "It's not just any guests." She lowered her voice, glancing over her shoulder like the walls themselves might report back to Garrick. "It's Alpha Cassius. From Stonemere." I'd heard the name before, whispered like something between a warning and a prayer. Stonemere was the largest territory for two hundred miles, built into the mountains, and its Alpha was talked about the way people talked about storms. Something you respected because you had no choice. "Why would an Alpha like that come here?" I asked. "Trade contract," Ivy said. "Garrick's been trying to get an audience with him for over a year. Something about mountain routes and steel." "So Garrick finally got what he wanted." "Looks that way." Ivy glanced down the hall again before she kept talking, her voice dropping even lower. "My cousin works the stables two territories over. She says Stonemere wolves don't wear collars. Says nobody there gets punished for things that happened when they were children." "Every pack says things like that about itself," I said. "Doesn't mean it's true." "Maybe not." Ivy shrugged, but something wistful crossed her face before she smoothed it away. "Still nice to imagine, isn't it? A place like that." I didn't answer, because imagining things I couldn't have had stopped being nice a long time ago. It only made the wanting worse. "He told the staff to keep you out of sight while they're here," Ivy went on. "Said you'd embarrass him." That shouldn't have stung. I'd heard worse a thousand times. But something about being hidden away like a stain on the carpet, in the same house where I was born to lead, settled cold and heavy in my chest. "Fine by me," I said, even though it wasn't. "Less work watching an Alpha eat dinner." Ivy didn't laugh at the joke. She just looked at me the way people sometimes did when they'd forgotten, for one unguarded second, that I used to be someone before I became this. "Just be careful," she said. "Garrick's been on edge all week. If this contract falls through, I don't know what he'll do." I nodded and went back to my rag and my aching knees, because there wasn't anything else to do. Six days until strangers arrived to watch Garrick perform the role of a great leader in a house built on other people's fear. Six days until I would disappear into the background the way I always did, invisible enough not to matter, quiet enough not to be noticed. That night, lying on the thin mattress in the servants' quarters, I pressed two fingers against my collar and felt the familiar hum beneath my skin — my wolf, somewhere far away, asleep and silent, the way she'd been for eleven years. I used to imagine what she looked like, back when I still let myself imagine things. Golden-eyed, maybe. Fast. Unafraid of anyone, least of all my brother. Down the hall, I heard Garrick's voice again, lower this time, talking to someone I didn't recognize. I caught only fragments through the thin wall — can't afford for this to fall through, and whatever it takes, and she stays out of sight, understood — before a door shut and the house went quiet again. I didn't know yet that in six days, the sound of an unfamiliar car pulling through our gates would change everything I thought I understood about my life. I didn't know that somewhere beyond the mountains, a massive, silent Alpha was about to become the reason I finally learned my own name again. All I knew, staring at the cracked ceiling above my bed, was that Garrick's warning to stay invisible had sounded less like an order this time, and more like fear. And Garrick was never afraid of anything.