Oops! My Twin Alphas Claimed Me

Chapter 12: A Sister's Visit

Mia arrived on a bright, ordinary afternoon that felt entirely wrong for how nervous I was to see her.

I'd asked Ryker and Ash to let me greet her alone, just the two of us, without an audience of guards or curious pack members hovering at the edges. To my surprise, they'd agreed without argument — though I caught Ryker positioning himself just close enough to the courtyard entrance that I suspected "alone" had a generous definition in his mind.

Mia climbed down from the small cart that had carried her from our parents' village, and for a moment we just stood there, staring at each other across the gravel drive like strangers instead of sisters.

She looked older. Only a few weeks had passed, but something in her posture had changed — straighter, more careful, like she was walking through a room full of things that might shatter if she moved wrong.

"You look like a Luna," she said finally, breaking the silence with something that might have been awe or might have been accusation. I genuinely couldn't tell which.

"I don't feel like one," I admitted, closing the distance and pulling her into a hug before either of us could overthink it. She was smaller than me, always had been, and she felt fragile in my arms in a way that made my chest ache.

"Everyone in the village talks about you now," she said against my shoulder, voice muffled. "The wolf-less omega who threw a Shadowfang Alpha across a battlefield. Mama cried when she heard. Papa hasn't stopped telling anyone who'll listen that his daughter is Luna to two Alphas."

I pulled back, studying her face for whatever she wasn't saying out loud. "And you? What do you think?"

Mia's jaw tightened, and there it was, the thing she'd been carrying since she stepped off that cart. "I think it's strange, watching people who ignored you your whole life suddenly fall over themselves trying to get close to our family. I think Papa's taking credit for something that has nothing to do with him. And I think—" She stopped, looking down at her hands.

"Tell me," I said gently.

"I think I'm scared for you," she finally admitted, eyes glassy when she looked up again. "Everyone acts like this is the best thing that could have happened to you. A prophecy. Power. Two Alphas who apparently can't stop staring at you like you're the moon itself. But nobody asked if you wanted any of it, Elara. Nobody ever asks you what you want. They just decided you for it."

Her words landed somewhere tender and unguarded, a truth I hadn't let myself sit with fully since the festival. "I didn't ask for it," I agreed quietly. "Some days I still don't know if I want it. But it's mine now, whether I wanted it or not. I'd rather learn to hold it than let it hold me."

Mia studied me for a long moment, then something in her expression softened, some of the guardedness melting into the little sister I remembered. "You always did that," she said. "Even when we were kids. Made the best of whatever terrible hand you got dealt. I used to think it was because you were braver than me."

"It was never bravery," I said, looping my arm through hers and steering us toward the gardens, away from prying eyes. "It was just not having any other choice. Bravery is easier when someone's watching. I never had that luxury before."

"You do now," Mia said, glancing back toward the mansion, where I could just make out Ryker's shadow near the doorway, patient and watchful despite his best effort at subtlety. "Two someones, apparently."

We walked the gardens for an hour, trading small, ordinary things how our mother's garden had finally recovered from last winter's frost, how our father had taken to bragging about connections he didn't actually have, how the village elders who'd once looked past me now went out of their way to greet Mia by name. Some of it made me laugh. Some of it made something old and bitter twist in my chest, a lifetime of being overlooked suddenly rewritten by people who'd never once looked twice at me when it mattered.

"Is it true," Mia asked eventually, quieter now, "what they're saying about the other pack? That their Alpha wants you for himself?"

"It's complicated," I said carefully, unwilling to explain the full weight of Vane's claim, the prophecy, the war brewing at our borders, not when she'd only just arrived, not when I could still see the fear underneath her careful composure. "But you don't need to worry about that. I have people protecting me now."

"I know." Mia's hand tightened around my arm. "That's what worries me. People who need protecting always seem to end up in the most danger, in every story I've ever heard."

I wanted to tell her she was wrong. I wanted to promise her nothing would touch her, that whatever storm was building around me would never reach the quiet, ordinary life she still got to live back home.

I didn't make that promise. Some part of me some old, quiet instinct I didn't yet understand already knew better than to make promises I might not be able to keep.

By the time the cart came to take her home, the sun had started sinking low and gold over the mansion's walls, and I held onto her a moment longer than necessary at the goodbye.

"Be careful," she whispered into my shoulder. "Whatever this power is. Whatever they need from you. Don't let anyone make you forget you're still allowed to be scared."

I watched the cart disappear down the long drive, her small figure waving until the trees swallowed her from view, and something settled cold and heavy in my stomach that I couldn't quite name.

It would be weeks before I understood that feeling had been a warning.