Alpha by Blood Luna by Fate

Chapter 2

Not with my ears but inside my mind that warm, quiet place where the pack bond lived, where voices came through like hands touching your shoulder in the dark. I had learned to hear it when I was only fifteen. My father had been so proud. Most children didn't develop that sensitivity until their early teens.

His voice came through now, and it was broken.

I love you so much, Serena. I'll always love you with all my heart.

The world stopped.

Come meet me soon. I'll be waiting for you.

The silence that followed was the loudest thing I had ever heard.

My mother froze. Like something inside her had been severed clean. Her knees buckled and she went down slowly, clutching her chest with both hands, her face crumpling inward like a structure whose foundations had just been pulled out from under it.

I dropped beside her before she hit the floor.

"Mom."

She wasn't looking at me. She was looking at something I couldn't see, her eyes wide and glassy, her lips moving without sound.

"Mom." I grabbed her face the way she had grabbed mine, forcing her eyes to mine. "What did he mean? What did Dad mean by what he just said Mom, what happened to Dad"

I already knew. I think part of me had known the moment the words came through the bond. I knew. But I needed her to tell me herself. I needed her voice saying it out loud to be wrong. I needed her to look at me and say it's nothing, baby, it's nothing, the way she had said a hundred times before when the darkness got too close.

But this time she didn't say a word.

She just pulled me into her arms instead.

She held me so tight that I could barely breathe, her chin pressed to the top of my head, her whole body shaking. And the moment her arms closed around me the thing inside my chest that had been straining against itself finally broke open, and I cried. I cried so hard that it hurt, great heaving sobs that I couldn't control, my hands clutching at her like I could hold both of us together through grip alone.

"Shhhh." Her lips brushed my hair. Her voice was wrecked. "Baby. Not a sound. Not a single sound."

"Mom." I could barely form the word through the crying. "Mom, Dad….he's coming back, right? Tell me he's coming back."

She didn't answer.

She just held me tighter.

And in the silence of that holding, I understood that no answer was coming.

That the grief tearing through my mother right now was not the grief of someone who didn't know. It was the grief of someone who knew exactly and was trying to survive it long enough to keep me safe.

I had been told, in the quiet lessons that preceded every young wolf's education that a mate bond was the most profound thing a wolf could experience. That to share yourself so completely with another soul, to be chosen and cherished and known in the deepest possible way was like touching something divine. The elders described it in hushed, reverent tones. The older warriors grew soft around the eyes when they spoke of it.

And to lose it, they said is to have that bond severed, which was a wound that never healed. Never. A fate, some said worse than death itself.

Looking at my mother now watching her face as she stared at the burning world through the window, her arms still wrapped around me, her chest heaving with silent sobs I understood for the first time what they meant.

Her heart was not just broken. It had been taken.

"Dad," I whispered into her shoulder. "He's really not coming back, is he?"

It wasn't a question anymore.

She pressed her lips to my hair. One long, trembling breath.

"No, baby," she whispered back. "He's not."

I let myself fall apart. I didn't have a choice. I wept for my dad for his steady hands and his deep laugh and the way he used to carry me on his shoulders when I was small enough for it. I wept for my mother, for the thing I could feel being ripped out of her even as she held me. I wept for the people who were screaming and burning and fighting and dying while I stood at a window and did nothing.

And then, through my own crying, I heard footsteps.

My mother felt it too. She went rigid not with fear, but with something colder than fear. Her arms tightened around me for one fierce moment.

And then a voice filled the room

"Finally. There you are beautiful."

My mother let go of me instantly, stepping in front of me so fast I stumbled. Her eyes had shifted not brown anymore but deep, burning red, the eyes of a Luna at full power, every protective instinct she had ever possessed blazing to the surface.

"Stay. Behind. Me."

I didn't argue. I did just like she asked me to.

I tried to see around her. Through the gap between her arm and the doorframe, I caught my first glimpse of him and wished, immediately, that I hadn't.

He was tall, broader through the shoulders, filling the doorway with his presence that seemed to take up more space than his body. Long white hair fell loose around his face, so pale it caught the firelight and turned it to silver. And his eyes.

His eyes were the worst part.

Pale and bright, they moved from my mother's face to the space where I was half-hidden behind her, and the delight in them deepened into something that made my stomach drop through the floor.