The Alpha's Second Chance Son

Sage POV "We leave in ten minutes. Don't ask why, just move." My dad's voice cut through my sleep like a blade. I sat up in the dark, heart already pounding before my brain caught up. Through my window I could see Micah loading bags into the trunk of our car, moving fast and quiet, the way he only moved when something was wrong. I didn't ask why. I already knew. Alpha Draven had looked at me again at training yesterday. Not the way an Alpha looks at a packmember. The way a man looks at something he's decided already belongs to him. I'd told my dad about it in a whisper after dinner, and he'd gone so still I thought he'd stopped breathing. Now I understood what that silence meant. I threw on sweatpants and a hoodie and grabbed the bag I kept packed under my bed the one my dad taught me to always have ready, "just in case." I never asked what "just in case" meant until tonight. Downstairs, Micah shoved a duffel bag into my arms. It was heavier than clothes should be. I unzipped it an inch and saw the dull metal of a hunting knife wrapped in cloth. "We don't use weapons," I whispered. "We're wolves. We are the weapon." "Not tonight," Micah said. His jaw was tight. "Get in the car, Sage." I got in the car. My dad drove with the headlights off until we hit the main road out of Ironwood territory. Nobody spoke. I stared out the window at the trees blurring past and tried to remember every corner of the only home I'd ever known the training yard where I'd bled and bruised and gotten stronger every single day since my mom died. The porch where she used to braid my hair. I didn't know yet that I'd never see any of it again. "Dad." My voice came out smaller than I wanted. "Where are we going?" "Your mother's old pack," he said. "Stormhollow. Your grandparents are already there. They've agreed to take us in." "And the Alpha there? Does he know why we're really coming?" Dad's hands tightened on the wheel. "He knows enough." That wasn't a real answer, and we both knew it. An hour later, we stopped at a gas station on the edge of nowhere. While Dad filled the tank, Micah turned to me in the back seat, his face lit orange from the streetlight outside. "You know Draven's been asking Dad for weeks to bring you to the packhouse alone," he said quietly. "Dad kept saying you were busy. Training. Anything he could think of." My stomach turned over. "Why didn't anyone tell me?" "Because you would've done something reckless," Micah said. "Like challenge him yourself." He wasn't wrong. I probably would have. When Dad got back in the car, his phone rang. He looked at the screen, and his whole face changed went hard and flat, the way it did right before a fight. He silenced it without answering. A minute later, my own phone buzzed with a number I didn't recognize. "Don't answer that," Dad said. "Save anything you need off it, then turn it off. We're leaving it behind." "Leaving it behind how?" "Out the window. Once we're back on the road." My hands shook as I scrolled through my photos one last time pictures of Mom, of Micah and me as kids, of the pack I was about to lose. Then I powered the phone off and, when Dad gave the signal, threw it out into the dark. It felt like throwing away a piece of myself. We drove for hours after that. The land changed slowly flatter fields giving way to thick forest, then hills, then, far in the distance, the shadow of real mountains rising against the gray morning sky. I'd never seen mountains before. Ironwood territory was flat and dry and boring, and somehow that made this place feel like it belonged to a different world entirely. "Almost there," Dad said, more to himself than to us. I rolled my window down an inch, needing air, needing to feel like I could breathe again after a night of holding my breath. Cold wind rushed in, and with it came a scent I'd never smelled before pine and something sweet, like caramel warmed over a fire. It hit me so hard I gasped out loud. "You smell that?" I asked. Micah frowned. "Smell what?" He couldn't smell it. Only I could. That should have scared me more than it did. Something huge moved between the trees outside, fast, there and gone before I could really see it a shape too big to be any wolf I'd ever seen back home. My whole body went rigid. "Dad" "I saw it." His voice was calm, but his knuckles were white on the wheel. "That's their territory. We're being watched." "Watched by what?" He didn't answer. He didn't need to. I already knew we'd crossed into land that belonged to something much bigger and much stronger than anything Ironwood had ever produced. The car slowed as the road narrowed between the trees. Up ahead, I saw four figures step out onto the road directly in our path two clearly warriors, built and alert, and two others standing behind them who were simply enormous, wider and taller than any grown man I had ever seen in my life. "Stay in the car," Dad said. "Both of you. No matter what happens." He opened his door and stepped out slowly, hands raised, walking toward the largest of the four men like he was approaching something that could end his life in a single move. I pressed my face to the window, straining to see, my heart slamming against my ribs. And even from here, even through glass and thirty feet of empty road, I felt it a pull low in my chest, sudden and strange and impossible to explain, aimed straight at the giant figure standing perfectly still at the edge of the trees. He hadn't even looked at me yet. And somehow, I already knew everything was about to change.