The Alpha's Hidden Flame

Chapter Five

VIVI

The bread turns to sawdust on my tongue. Jamie hovers like a worried moth, sweet boy who thinks kindness can crack stone. I force another bite while the pack girds itself for war—voices rising and falling in waves of preparation, fear, determination.

Harder to kill than I look.

The words escaped before I could leash them, and now Luka's eyes burn verdant in memory. He left trailing pine and purpose, and my wolf stirred beneath her chemical burial like something disturbed in deep water.

All around me, hands prepare for violence. Rosie sketches battle formations on stained napkins. Park counts bullets between mouthfuls of venison. Sarah Chen weaves through the crowd dispensing comfort through casual touches that make my skin ache with phantom heat. Everyone readying themselves to bleed. To die. To burn.

They have no idea I could incinerate them all without trying.

The first time, I was four. Furious about something forgotten—bedtime, a denied sweet, some small tyranny of childhood. Nanny Margaret reached for me and I reached back with something that wasn't hands. Her polyester sleeve caught first. Then her graying hair. The stench of burning wool and flesh still visits when sleep comes careless.

Mother hired a replacement within hours. Father upgraded the fire suppression system. Neither spoke of the handprint seared into Margaret's forearm, perfect and small as a child's rage.

"You finished?"

Tom gestures at my abandoned plate.

"Yes. Thank you."

He clears it without comment, though his gaze lingers on my carefully distant hands. Everyone notices eventually—the space I maintain, the borders I enforce. They assume it's Council conditioning. If only isolation were that simple.

The pack disperses into nighttime rituals. Guard rotations. Weapon inventory. Cubs shepherded to reinforced safe rooms that might buy minutes when Cascade comes. I should retreat to my quarters, document fortification efforts and territorial escalations. Instead, I drift to windows that frame our watchers on the ridge.

One lifts binoculars. Distance collapses, and I know those pale eyes. Not Richard—his spawn. Marcus Henley, who tried to corner me at a Council gala when I was seven and he was twelve, already learning to view omega girls as future property. He'd pressed me against the coat check wall until I bit deep enough to scar.

Eighteen years later, still watching.

My tablet weighs heavy with unwritten reports. Personal connection to hostile pack. Previous aggressive contact. Potential bias in observations. But my fingers refuse their duty, and words dissolve like smoke in water.

The vacation house immolated on my tenth birthday. Tahoe, just the three of us. Rare respite from Council obligations and performed perfection. That night I dreamed of drowning—lake water flooding my lungs while something else flooded my veins. Woke to walls of flame and Father carrying me through windows turned exits.

Investigators blamed faulty wiring. Insurance paid without question. We never returned.

But I remember the moment between sleep and waking when fire felt like breathing. Like coming home. Like becoming.

"Heading up?"

Rosie passes, arms full of welding equipment for tomorrow's fortifications.

"Soon."

She pauses, reading something in my stillness. "Moon's waxing full. Makes rest difficult when she pulls."

After she leaves, I stand in the emptying hall, feeling that gravitational tug. The moon calls to wolves, but what celestial body commands creatures who dream in flame? What heavens govern the burning things?

My room shrinks nightly. Lock engaged, back pressed to door, I count heartbeats that refuse to slow. The suppressants fail by degrees—have been failing since I first breathed pine and possibility in this place that shouldn't exist.

The shower beckons. Sleep clothes await, reeking of industrial sterility. Three pills lined up like soldiers, ready to drag me into chemical void.

Instead, I sit on narrow bed and remember fifteen.

Bad day—first failed exam in anything. Calculus, of all things. Mother's disappointment cut deeper than silver, and I carried it home like shrapnel between ribs. She found me crying with careful tears that didn't disturb makeup she'd taught me to apply like armor.

"Oh, sweetheart."

Her arms opened. I fell into them seeking comfort I'd never learned to give myself.

The smell hit first—bacon frying. Then her scream, high and horrible. She shoved me away, clutching her arms where my face had pressed. Second-degree burns in the perfect outline of my cheek, already blistering.

The Otherkind doctor arrived within forty minutes. Council connections purchase many things, including silence. He treated her wounds while Father questioned me in measured clinical terms. How long had I felt feverish? Did I remember thinking of fire? Had I wanted to hurt her?

No. No. Never.

But intent and outcome rarely align when your blood burns wrong.

That night brought partial truths. Not everything—never the whole story—but enough. How they'd found me. How I was special. How special meant dead if the wrong people knew. The pills would help. Would keep me safe. Would keep everyone safe from what I carried.

I was the curse requiring constant cage. The weapon that couldn't be trusted with itself. The daughter they loved enough to chain.

Father taught me marksmanship that winter. Every weekend at the range, patient lessons in breath and squeeze and finding the calm between heartbeats.

"Omegas need advantages. The world isn't kind to vulnerable wolves."

But I heard the subtext: You're dangerous. This is control. This is how we keep you leashed.

I never missed. Turns out destroying things from distance comes naturally.

Now the moon pulls through my window. The compound settles into watchful quiet—guards walking routes, someone playing guitar with lonely fingers, others coupling with tomorrow-might-die desperation.

Sleep. Pills. Chemical dreams that don't char sheets.

Instead, I lace boots and slip out like smoke between door and frame.

Night transforms the compound. Dangerous geometries emerge from shadows. Guards track my movement but don't challenge—I'm the observer, the documenter, the Council's tame pet who couldn't possibly threaten. If they scented what coils beneath my skin, they'd shoot first and apologize to ashes.

Past fresh concrete gleaming pale as old bones. Past training grounds where tomorrow brings lessons in efficient killing. Past everything that speaks of pack and belonging I've never tasted.

The forest swallows me whole.

No plan guides my feet—just movement away from walls that feel more like cages nightly. Deer paths appear beneath my soles, worn smooth by creatures who understand wildness. Pine needles whisper secrets older than Council law. Night birds shriek warnings to their kin. Everything breathes with ancient life untouched by bureaucratic decree.

Twenty minutes through darkness, then trees break like fever.

The lake spreads before me—black mirror holding stars I never see in Berkeley's light pollution. No structures. No civilization. Just water meeting sky meeting something in my chest trying to claw free.

I've never seen water that doesn't terminate in city glow.

Clothes abandon my body without conscious thought. Folded neat on granite, observer's uniform shed like old skin. Night air kisses flesh that hasn't breathed free in memory. The suppressants can't touch this—this liminal moment between control and whatever waits in darkness.

The water shocks—cold enough to stop hearts that aren't already stuttering.

I walk in anyway.

Ankle-deep where pebbles shift beneath feet. Knee-deep where water tugs insistent. Thighs, hips, waist—each step carrying me further from shore, from safety, from the meticulously constructed thing I've been shaped into. The lake accepts me like it's been waiting. Like it recognizes what swims beneath chemistry.

Chest-deep where breathing requires effort. Shoulder-deep where choice narrows to advance or retreat.

Something moves in the depths—fish or older things disturbed by this strange warm-blooded intruder. Fear should follow. Calculations of distance, temperature, exposure risk.

Instead, I spread my arms and let the lake claim me.

The last breath tastes of freedom and mineral darkness. Then I'm under, suspended in liquid obsidian that presses from every direction. No orientation. No surface. Just cold and pressure and the thing in my chest finally, finally quiet.

Is this what death feels like? This peace that comes from drowning what burns?

Lungs protest. Biology demands air, demands survival, demands I kick toward surface and safety. But I hang suspended, hair spreading like kelp in current, waiting for something unnamed.

The fire finds me even here.

Not external—internal. Blooming from that locked chamber beneath ribs, spreading through veins that remember magic older than wolf. Water around me warms. Not boiling. Not burning. Just... warm. Bathwater comfort. Womb-memory safety.

My eyes open to light.

Skin glows beneath the surface. Not bright—just enough to turn water luminous, like swimming through liquid starlight. Fish flee the warmth. Plants bend away from this unnatural thing. But I float in my own small sun, and for the first time in twenty years, nothing hurts.

This is what they've been drowning with pills.

This is what would kill them all if freed.

This is what I am beneath the lies.

Biology wins. I surface gasping, water streaming from hair gone copper in my own light. The glow fades as air hits, leaving just another naked woman trembling in mountain lake.

Shore seems impossibly distant now.

I swim anyway, graceless strokes barely maintaining momentum. By the time I crawl onto granite, shivers wrack me violent enough to crack teeth. Clothes resist wet skin. Boots squelch with lake water. Everything cold except the ember beneath ribs that refuses extinction.

The return journey stretches endless. Each step heavier, like the forest itself grasps at ankles. Stay wild. Stay free. Stay what you are.

But I know the path back. Know the walls waiting. Know the chemical soldiers lined up on nightstand.

The compound materializes through pines, lights burning defiant against darkness. Guards maintain their routes. Guitar continues its lament. Life persists despite what prowls the ridges with binoculars and bad intentions.

I slip back unseen, leaving puddles that will evaporate by dawn. Strip again. Shower again. Try to wash lake and revelation from skin that remembers now.

But it clings—memory of warmth, of light, of what lives beneath when chains break.

The pills wait. Three paths to emptiness.

Instead, I lie in narrow bed still damp, still shaking, still tasting lake water and truth. My phone sits cracked against the wall where I threw it. Good. Let them wonder at my silence.

Outside, a howl rises—pure longing given voice. Others join, harmonizing grief and hope and pack bonds I'll never know. My wolf stays mute. She's not what sings in my blood tonight.

Tonight, the fire remembers its nature.

Tomorrow brings weapons training I'm forbidden to join. Cascade scouts who watch and wait. A boy who might die for the crime of kissing another boy. A pack preparing to bleed for each other while I document their destruction.

But tonight—tonight I burn beneath my skin, and the lake knows my secret, and somewhere in this compound walks an alpha who smells like home I've never had.

God help me, I want to let it all burn.

The guitar stops. Even the guards grow quiet. But I lie awake feeling fire crawl through veins, tasting char on my tongue, knowing that Luka was wrong—I'm not harder to kill than I look.

I'm impossible to kill.

That's the problem.

That's why the pills.

That's why the chains.

Water drips from my hair onto thin pillow, and I wonder if drowning would be kinder than this slow suffocation. Wonder if the lake would take me back. Wonder if fire can learn to love without destroying everything it touches.

My wolf whimpers, sensing something shifting in our careful chemical balance.

Tomorrow I'll swallow the pills. Document the training. Pretend I didn't glow beneath dark water like some forgotten star.

But tonight—tonight I burn, and remember, and begin to understand why my parents spent twenty years teaching me to fear myself.

They were right to be afraid.