Claimed By The Ruthless Alpha

Chapter Four: The Man Who Raised Me

POV Alpha Morgan Vantor

I found Callum in the training yard, sharpening a blade like it was any other evening.

He looked up when I entered, and for a moment, I saw the man who taught me to hold a sword when I was seven years old. The man who stayed awake beside my bed the year I could not sleep after burying my mother. The only father I ever truly had.

"Morgan," he said, smiling. "You look like you have seen a ghost."

"Maybe I have," I said.

His smile faded slowly. He set the blade down.

"What is wrong," he asked.

I threw the burned note on the table between us. He picked it up, read it, and his face went pale.

"Where did you find this," he asked.

"North packhouse. Along with my mother's ring." I watched him closely, the way I watched every enemy before I decided whether to kill them. "Ronan says the handwriting is yours."

Callum stood very still.

"It is not what you think," he said.

"Then tell me what I should think," I said, my voice rising. "Because right now I think the man who raised me lied about my mother's death for fifteen years."

"Morgan"

"Do not say my name like that," I snapped. "Not until you tell me the truth."

He rubbed a hand over his face, looking older than I had ever seen him look.

"Your mother did not die that night," he said quietly. "She ran. I helped her leave."

The room seemed to tilt around me.

"You helped her abandon me," I said.

"I helped her survive," Callum said. "Your father would have killed her if she stayed. He found out she planned to take you and run. He was going to make her disappear that same week. I only had time to save her, not both of you."

"Why did no one tell me this," I shouted. "Fifteen years, Callum. Fifteen years I believed she was dead. I buried an empty coffin because of you."

"Because if you knew she was alive, you would have searched for her," he said. "And your father's enemies would have used you to find her. I protected you both the only way I could."

I wanted to believe him. Some broken part of me, the part still six years old and bleeding on the training ground, wanted so badly to believe the only man who ever showed me kindness.

But then I remembered Elara's scars.

"There is something else," I said. "A girl arrived on my land today. Someone hurt her for years. She says the man who hurt her wore my family crest."

Callum's face changed. Just slightly. But I had spent my whole life reading the smallest movements on men's faces before they tried to kill me, and I saw the flicker of fear cross his eyes before he could hide it.

"I do not know what you are talking about," he said.

"You are lying," I said.

"Morgan, I would never—"

"Stop," I said. "I can smell it on you. Fear does not lie, even when men do."

Silence stretched between us. The torches around the training yard flickered in the wind.

"Fine," Callum said finally, his voice dropping into something colder than I had ever heard from him. "You want the truth. Here it is. Your mother did not just run from your father."

"What are you talking about," I said.

"She ran because of what you were becoming," he said. "She saw it in you even as a child, the same coldness your father carried. She was afraid of her own son, Morgan. That is the truth you burned a note to find."

I stood frozen, his words cutting deeper than any blade ever had.

"You are lying," I said, though my voice shook for the first time in years.

"Ask her yourself," Callum said. "She is closer than you think."

Before I could respond, a scream tore through the packhouse behind us. Elara's scream.

I turned and ran, my heart pounding harder than it had in fifteen years, and when I reached her room, I found the window shattered, the curtains torn, and Elara gone.

The only thing left behind was a single silver ring, resting on the windowsill, carved with a wolf head that matched my own.