Claimed by the Alpha Who Rejected Her

CHAPTER 2

Lila's POV

PRECENT

Blood. That was the first thing Lila smelled the moment she stepped off the elevator, three doors down from her own apartment, and her stomach dropped straight through the floor.

Not much. Just enough. Just enough to send her sprinting the rest of the hallway in scrubs that still reeked of antiseptic and twelve straight hours of other people's emergencies, praying the emergency waiting for her tonight wasn't the one she couldn't fix.

By the time her key hit the lock, her hands were shaking so badly it took her three tries to get the door open.

"He's fine. He's fine, I swear, he's fine" The babysitter was already talking before Lila even had the door fully open, hands raised like she expected to be attacked. Which, given the state of her forearm, wasn't an unreasonable fear to have.

Lila's eyes dropped to the four raw lines torn into the woman's skin, still welling at the edges, and something cold settled behind her ribs. Not fear, exactly. Recognition. This wasn't the first time she'd stood in this exact hallway smelling someone else's blood on her son's account. It was just the first time it had scared her enough to feel it in her teeth.

She'd lost count of how many sitters had walked out that door over the last two years. This one lasted eight days. A personal best, lately.

"Tell me what happened," Lila said, low and even, the tone she used on patients who were about to panic. It worked about as well on babysitters as it did on ER intake.

"He was fine, honestly, he was fine right up until I told him it was bedtime, and then he just" The young woman's voice cracked, and she hugged her wounded arm to her chest like it might fall off if she let go. "His eyes did something. I don't know how to explain it. They weren't right."

Lila went very still.

In eight years of raising a werewolf child alone in a world that didn't believe in werewolves, Ryder had scratched, snarled, broken furniture, and put his fist through drywall more times than she wanted to remember. His eyes had never done anything.

Until, apparently, tonight.

"He's ten," Lila said, more to herself than to the sitter, working hard to keep the tremor out of her voice. "He gets overwhelmed. I'm so sorry he hurt you."

She was already digging through her purse, pulling out enough cash to cover triple the night's rate, pressing it into the woman's uninjured hand before she could argue.

"I need you to understand something," Lila said, holding the woman's gaze and letting just enough steel into her voice to make the point land. "Whatever you think you saw tonight, it stays between us. I need your word."

It wasn't a threat. Not really. Though she knew exactly what her family back home would say if they ever found out how she handled this, there were older, uglier ways of guaranteeing someone's silence, ways that didn't involve cash and a pointed stare. Ways Lila had never once considered, because she couldn't shift even if her life depended on it, and pretending otherwise had never sat right with her anyway.

"I won't say anything, I promise, I just" The sitter was already inching past her into the hallway, snatching the money like it might vanish. "I can't come back. I'm sorry. I just can't."

"I understand," Lila said quietly, and meant it.

Then the door clicked shut, and she was alone with the silence of the apartment and the low, thudding dread of what she'd find in the next room.

She thought, not for the first time, of Mrs. Rowlings across the hall, who'd probably grumble through her arthritis and take Ryder tomorrow anyway, because she was the only person left in this city who still would. She thought of the six times in two years they'd packed a car in the dark and vanished before sunrise, chasing distance the way other people chased second chances. And underneath all of it, quiet and constant as a heartbeat, she thought of the one place she'd sworn she would never take her son.

She pressed her palm flat against Ryder's bedroom door before she opened it, bracing.

The wreckage told her everything before she even saw him the dresser knocked sideways, stuffing torn from a pillow and scattered like snow, the carpet shredded in long, deliberate lines. And there, half-hanging off the edge of the mattress in a shirt that hadn't survived the evening, was her son. Ten years old. Fast asleep, exhausted the way only rage could exhaust a person, as if he'd run a marathon instead of losing a fight with his own instincts.

Lila stood in the doorway and let herself feel it, just for a second the particular, hollow kind of heartbreak that came from watching your child fight a war you'd never once been drafted into yourself.

She had spent her whole life waiting for her own wolf to show its face. It never had. Not as a girl, not after her parents were gone, not on the worst nights when she'd needed it most. Whatever ran in Ryder's blood ran nowhere in hers, and it was starting to feel less like bad luck and more like a debt coming due.

How was she supposed to teach a child to control something she had never once been allowed to touch?

She already knew the answer. She'd known it for months, maybe longer, and had simply refused to say it out loud. Standing there in the doorway of her son's ruined bedroom at one in the morning, she finally let herself say it.

She had to take him home.

She eased the door shut and had her phone out before she'd even made it back to the kitchen, thumb hovering over her mother's contact for exactly three seconds before she called. It was well past midnight. Mara wouldn't care.

"Lila? What's wrong?" Her mother's voice came through sharp with alarm before the first ring had even finished, like she'd been sitting by the phone waiting a decade for exactly this call.

"We're coming back." The words tasted like defeat on the way out. "To Sparkle Hollow. To the pack."

There was a beat of stunned silence, and then a sound that was somewhere between a sob and a laugh. "Oh, thank the moon. Lila, you have no idea"

"Mom, keep it down," Lila hissed, glancing instinctively toward the hallway even though Ryder's door was shut tight. She had no idea anymore how sharp his hearing had gotten. "He's asleep. This isn't a happy call. It happened again tonight. Worse than before."

"Worse how? Is he hurt? Is the boy alright?"

"He's fine. The sitter isn't," Lila admitted, pinching the bridge of her nose. "I'm exhausted, Mom. I can't keep doing this on my own."

"Then it's settled. You should have called me years ago." Mara's voice gentled, the scolding gone soft with relief. "Everything will be ready before you even pull into the driveway. Your brother's going to lose his mind when he hears."

"He's not exactly little anymore, you know," Lila said, throat tightening. Ryder had barely met either of them, a handful of visits scattered across a decade, snapshots instead of a real relationship. She had no idea how any of this would go once they actually got there.

Sparkle Hollow lived in her memory the way certain songs did. the mountains that boxed the town in on every side, summers spent baking by the lake, winters buried in more snow than made any sense. She still caught herself, sometimes, glancing up in the middle of some flat, featureless city and expecting to see peaks in the distance.

She missed it. She had never let herself say that out loud either.

"We're not staying," Lila added quickly, before her mother could get any ideas. "Ryder needs the pack right now. That's the only reason."

"Must you make everything sound like a funeral?" Mara huffed.

"Yes," Lila said, and meant it. "I'll see you soon. Love you, Mom."

She hung up before Mara could answer, before the sound of her mother's voice could crack the careful composure she was barely holding together.

There was still time to change her mind. She knew that. Some small, cowardly part of her wanted to. But every time she closed her eyes, all she could see was that torn-up bedroom, and underneath it, quieter but unmistakable, the memory of a boy she once tormented her and the question she'd been avoiding for ten straight years finally forced its way to the surface.

What exactly was she walking back into?

She hadn't asked her mother a single thing about him. Not once, in ten years of phone calls. And Mara, for her part, had never once brought him up unprompted, which felt now like it had been less of a kindness and more of a warning she simply hadn't wanted to hear.

A wolfless woman crawling back to the pack that had all but chased her out, dragging a half-shifted, furious ten-year-old behind her.

It sounded like the setup to a disaster.

But it was, Lila realized with a sinking heart, the only choice she had left.