Alpha by Blood Luna by Fate

Chapter 5

"Rough dare to enter our territory."

The alert cut through the mind link like a sharp blade, suddenly pulling me out of the morning's quiet before I had even finished my first cup of coffee. I set it down on my desk and pressed two fingers to my temple, tuning into the frequency of the patroller who had sent it.

I was at my desk before dawn. I was always at my desk before dawn. Sleep was a vulnerability I allowed myself in the smallest possible way, and the hours I took from it I spent here, in this room, working on the business that kept my empire functioning.

The file Cyran had left was open in front of me.

Border intelligence. Movement reports from the southern perimeter. The rogue faction we had been quietly dismantling for the past several weeks had fractured, their numbers were down, their coordination deteriorating, but the remnants were growing unpredictable in the way that cornered things always grew unpredictable. More dangerous in some ways than they had been when they were organised.

I read it. I made notations in the margins in the shorthand only Cyran could reliably decode. I drank my coffee while it was still hot, which was the one small discipline I maintained without compromise. Cold coffee was a concession to distraction, and I did not make concessions.

The knock came just as I turned to the third page.

Two knocks at a time.

“Cyran.”

I recognised his knock the way I recognised most things about him not because I had made any effort to learn it, but because he had been a consistent enough presence in my life for six years that the knowledge had accumulated without my permission. He was the only person in Blackthorn who knocked at all. Everyone else either waited to be summoned or sent word through the mind link, both of which I preferred.

Cyran knocked again.

I had never told him to stop, which was either a concession or an oversight. I had not decided which.

The growl that rose in my throat was not precisely anger, it was simply the sound I made when interrupted, which happened to communicate the same thing. I heard the door open.

"Alpha Draven"

I turned the page.

"There is an intruder," he said. "Sighted at the western border."

Damnit not again.

An intruder in Blackthorn territory. Who dares to step a foot in my pack and that is typically the end of them.

I continued reading.

Western border intruders were not a new thing. They were practically a feature of the territory at this point, a rotating cast of rogues and desperate wolves and the occasional ambitious fool from a neighbouring pack who had convinced themselves that the stories about Blackthorn were exaggerated. They were not exaggerated. They had, if anything, been understated by the time they travelled far enough to reach the ears of people stupid enough to test them.

We handled intruders. Which sent a message that had kept our borders largely clean for the better part of a decade.

"Bring me the intruder" I said.

I did not look up. The words required no thought they were policy, as reflexive and automatic as breathing, as fundamental to the running of this territory as anything else in the file open in front of me.

I heard Cyran draw a breath.

I turned to another page.

A beat of silence. The particular quality of a silence that meant something was being decided on the other side of it.

"Okay, Alpha," he said finally.

The door closed.

I read for another few minutes before I set the file down.

Not because I had finished it. Because something at the back of my mind had snagged on something, the way a thread caught on a rough edge was barely noticeable, not enough to demand attention, but persistent in the way that small irritating things were always more persistent than large important ones.

Western border.

I leaned back in my chair and looked at the ceiling.

The western border was where we had intercepted the rogue runners last week. Three of them were moving fast and light and carrying nothing that identified them, heading toward the ridge that marked the edge of Shadowfang territory. We had gotten very little out of them before the situation reached its natural conclusion but we had gotten enough. Enough to know that someone was using the space between our territories as a corridor. Running operations through it exploiting the buffer zone, keeping their fingerprints off whatever they were moving.

I drummed two fingers against the arm of my chair.

A single intruder.

Moving on foot toward the ridge.

Who the f**k is this mother fucker who dares to risk his life?

I slowly got off my feet and moved closer to my office window and looked out at the forest below the dark mass of it in the early morning light, the treeline still and grey and giving nothing away. Somewhere out there, Cyran and Tyler and the patrol team were moving through those trees toward the western outpost.

Just to go get the intruder.

While I wait for them to get back so I can cut the head of whoever the f**k he is that dares to lay his foot.