Claimed by the Beta fate

Seraphine POV The smell hit me first wild azalea threaded through something sharper, like crushed sage warming in the last of the evening heat. I'd left the car window cracked for the past thirty minutes, using the night air the way I always had, as a first line of defense. But the only threats the breeze carried were the perfume of dusk-blooming flowers and the distant, frantic yapping of whatever dog the neighbors had acquired since I'd been gone. I couldn't put this off any longer. The car was starting to feel like a trap, and my wounds weren't going to wait. Being back here, though. That was its own kind of wound. I'd walked out of this place at eighteen, four years ago, and I'd told myself I'd never need to walk back in. The building looked almost identical from the outside a fresh coat of paint, nothing more but my old bedroom window still had those Pokémon stickers plastered across the corner pane, stubborn and sun-faded and relentlessly mine. Our parents had left the apartment to Jem and me. I doubt they planned for us to inherit anything so soon. I doubt they planned to get killed, either. I was twelve when it happened. Jem was fifteen. We buried our parents and inherited a cramped flat on Huston Road, and somehow that was supposed to be enough. Jem wouldn't be here now. But I also knew he would never let go of this place wouldn't sell it, wouldn't hand it off to a stranger. I'd kept tabs on things from a distance. After I left, he'd killed Oliver and taken the Alpha position, with his mate Hayley standing beside him. The two of them were the Three Rivers Pack now, in the way that mattered. The Three Rivers Pack. Even the name tugged at something deep in my chest. Distance hadn't loosened that hold the way I'd hoped it would. I shut my eyes for a moment, and the drive back came flooding in the land rising and shifting around me, pulling at things I hadn't let myself feel in years. The territory had always seemed almost alive to me, the Westfall and Coldbrook rivers threading through it alongside the quieter Whispering Willow, the three of them converging in a way that felt less like geography and more like intention. It was protective land. The kind that held things in and kept other things out. A natural boundary around the place I'd once called home. The town of Three Rivers sat at the center of it all, a mix of worn cobblestone paths and newer storefronts, old buildings that had been standing long enough to accumulate stories, a square where people gathered because some instinct told them to. I remembered standing in that square with Sofia Miller on warm summer nights, both of us pretending we weren't watching the Cassian brothers circling the fountain on their skateboards. Jem had been there too, back then. Before he had a Pack to run. I couldn't picture him like that now young and easy, flicking fountain water at people who passed too close. That version of my brother felt like something I'd half-invented. The Pack had always been more than a place, though. It was a system, an economy, a history. The rivers gave them fish; the forests gave them timber and game. The roads running south through Three Rivers made it the kind of territory that attracted attention the sort of strategic value that brought alliances and, more often, trouble. I had a past here that I couldn't fully separate from who I was. And the Pack had a past far older than mine, written in rivalries and loyalty and all the things that get fought over when there's something worth fighting for. I pressed my teeth together and reached for my bag. My arm was broken pretty certain about that and at least a couple of ribs had made themselves known in a way that suggested they weren't intact. My left knee was a mess I was trying not to look at directly. But I'd made it out. I'd put twenty hours of highway between myself and Seth, and I'd drive toward the only place I could think of where he wouldn't easily follow. I didn't need to see anyone. I could keep my head down, let things settle, and figure out where to go next. I'd rebuilt once before, after Cassian and I couldn't let myself go down that road right now. One thing at a time. Get inside. Reset the arm. I hauled myself out of the car, shut the door behind me, and breathed in the night. Forest and river and the particular scent of Pack territory filled my lungs layered, complicated, beautiful in a way that made my chest ache. I was home, even if home was the last place I was supposed to be. The steps up to the door were worse than I remembered, or maybe I was just worse than I used to be. I didn't have a key, but the lock had always been temperamental in a way that was almost useful a particular jiggle of the handle, a slight lift, and it gave. Hayley used to lock me out when she was in one of her moods, and I'd gotten good at this out of necessity. Muscle memory carried me through, and I stepped inside. The smell wrapped around me immediately. Home. Not just familiar actually home, in the marrow-deep way that nothing else quite manages. The couch was still there, the same tear in the left armrest that I used to pick at when I was nervous. The carpet still carried its old stains. The layout was unchanged open kitchen to the right, hallway straight ahead to the bedrooms and bathroom. Jem and Hayley had barely been here in the months before I left; they'd been consumed with positioning for the challenge against Oliver. And before that, Jem had been so focused on climbing to Beta that the apartment had become mine by default. I'd never decided how much of that was obliviousness on his part and how much was simply not caring. Either way, the apartment had been my refuge every time Hayley cleared out, and it felt like one now. For the first time since this whole nightmare started, something in me unclenched slightly.