CLAIMED BY THE DARK ALPHA

Chapter 2 What Rogues Become

Three months since the fire. Three months of being no one.

I built a life here, in this nowhere town, in the space between what I was and whatever this new thing pretends to be. I work. I smile at strangers who will never know what I survived. I count coins at the end of every shift like they mean something, like they can buy back what burned.

No one here knows my name — not the real one. That is the only mercy this place offers.

But mercy has a cost. Every morning I wake a little less like myself. The wolf beneath my skin has gone quiet, curled somewhere deep and cold, and some days I cannot find her at all. I tell myself it is safer this way. A rogue who forgets she is a wolf cannot be hunted like one.

I am not sure I believe that anymore.

"Selene, take the order for table 17." Adelle's voice cut through my thoughts, sharp enough to startle me back into my body.

I crossed the floor to where a new table had settled in. "Good evening. What can I get you?"

They deliberated for a long moment — a couple arguing gently over the menu, the kind of ordinary indecision I used to find comforting to watch. I waited, pen hovering, pretending my attention was only on them.

It was the conversation behind me that I was actually listening to.

Two men at the counter, voices low but not low enough. One of them said a word that made my pen stop moving entirely.

Bloodmoon.

I did not turn. I had learned, in three months, exactly how to listen without looking — how to keep my face soft and human while every other part of me went rigid and still.

"Word is it came from above. An order. Somebody wanted that bloodline gone, root and branch." A pause, the clink of a glass set down too carefully. "Whoever gave it — nobody's saying the name. Not even here."

Someone wanted us gone. The thought landed like a stone in my chest. But who? I ran through every name I could think of — every rival, every old grudge my father had ever mentioned — and found nothing that fit. Nothing big enough to warrant fire and silence and thirty bodies in the ash.

"We'll take these two." My customer's voice snapped me back into the room, into my own skin, into the version of myself that smiled and carried trays and did not know anything about dead packs.

"Of course. Fifteen to twenty minutes, and I'll bring it right out."

I walked away from their table with my order pad pressed against my palm like a shield. Behind me, the two men had already moved on to something else — football, maybe, or the weather — as if they had not just handed me the only piece of truth anyone had offered me in three months.

Somebody from above. Not a rival pack. Not bad luck. A decision. Made by someone with enough power to erase an entire bloodline and enough reach to make sure no one said their name out loud, not even in a town three hundred miles from the ashes.

I did not know who yet.

But for the first time since the fire, I wanted to.

The rest of my shift passed in a blur of orders and small talk, my hands moving on memory while my mind stayed fixed on two words. From above. By the time Adelle flipped the sign to CLOSED, the sky outside had gone the color of a bruise, and the street lamps had not yet decided whether to come on.

I untied my apron and stepped out into the cold without waiting for anyone to walk with me. I never did. Three months of solitude teaches you that company is a liability, that the fewer people who know your routine, the safer you are.

The walk home cut through the edge of town, where the streetlights thinned and the woods pressed close on either side of the road. I had made this walk a hundred times without incident. My guard was down in a way it usually was not — my thoughts still tangled in rumors of orders from above, of bloodlines and reasons I did not yet understand.

That was my mistake.

I felt it before I heard it — that old, animal certainty that something in the dark had noticed me back.

The first wolf came from the left, low and fast, and I had already moved before I consciously decided to.

I dropped my bag and let instinct take the rest. Three months of running had made me faster than I used to be, but it was three years of my father's training that saved me in that first half-second — the way I twisted instead of retreating, caught the wolf's shoulder with my own before its teeth found my throat. We went down together in a tangle of fur and fists, and somewhere in the fall I felt my human shape peel away, felt claws replace fingers, felt the wolf I had been starving for months finally, furiously, wake up.

There you are, I thought, almost giddy with it, even as teeth grazed my forearm and drew blood.

The second wolf circled while the first and I fought, waiting for an opening, and that told me everything. This was not random. This was coordinated — a pack tactic, one to engage and one to finish. Rogues did not hunt like this. Rogues did not hunt in pairs at all.

I threw the first wolf off with more strength than I expected from myself, sent him skidding into the treeline, and turned to face the second before he could close the gap. He was larger, older, more careful — and it was in the half-second before he lunged that he spoke, human words dragged rough through a wolf's throat.

"The Bloodmoon girl. We know it's you."

The name hit harder than any blow he'd landed. I did not answer. I let the wolf in me answer instead — I met him mid-lunge, claws finding the soft place beneath his jaw, and put him down hard enough that he did not get up again.

The first wolf was already retreating, limping toward the trees, and I let him go. I stood in the middle of the road with blood on my hands that was not entirely my own, chest heaving, human shape stuttering back into place around me like something reluctant to return.

Not a rogue. Not a stray wolf who wandered too close to someone's territory. Me. Specifically. By name, by blood, by the pack I no longer had.

Three months of hiding, and someone out there was still looking.

I picked my bag up off the ground with hands that would not quite stop shaking, and for the first time since the fire, I understood that disappearing was never going to be enough.

I stopped to rest once I was certain I had put enough distance between myself and the road — far enough that the trees around me were unfamiliar, which somehow felt safer than the opposite.

How did they find me?

I had been so careful. Three months of never staying in one place too long, never speaking my real name, never letting the wolf out except when I was certain no one was watching. And still, two of them had known exactly what I was the moment they saw me.

I sat with my back against a tree, catching my breath, and that was when I remembered it — my father, weeks before the fire, pressing something cold into my palm.

"If you ever feel you are in danger," he had said, in a voice too serious for the moment, "open this."

I had not thought of the locket in months. My hands found it now beneath my shirt, and I tore it open before I had fully decided to. Inside was a single folded scrap of paper, small enough that I almost missed it.

One sentence.

If you are reading this, it means I am already gone. Do not trust anyone — including your mate.

I read it twice, certain I had misunderstood. Not even Conall? I had not even met him yet, back when my father wrote this. He had known, somehow, that there would be a mate, and that the warning would still apply.

Then I saw the last line, and everything else stopped mattering.

My father's handwriting trembled there — something that had never happened once in thirty years of him signing decrees as Alpha, thirty years of a hand that never shook for anything.

Your blood is the reason they killed us, Selene. Not who we were. But who you are.

I folded the paper with hands that shook worse than his writing had. Somewhere behind me, wolves were still combing the woods for my scent — Ashveil wolves, I understood now, piecing it together with a horror that settled into my bones like cold water. And their Alpha — the dark-eyed man who had stood over me the night of the fire and chosen, for reasons I still did not understand, not to kill me — was the one who had ordered my pack's destruction in the first place.

My knees buckled before my mind caught up with them. I pressed a hand flat against the tree at my back, breath coming ragged, the paper crushed in my other fist. The forest tilted, then steadied.

The man who let me live. The man who burned everything I had ever loved. They were the same man.

The realization didn't just strike me; it shattered me, leaving only a cold, hard resolve in its wake.