The Weight of Unsent Letters

Chapter Two — The Alpha's daughter

Cole didn't answer her right away. He was still catching his breath, still human-shaped and in disbelief, and Mila watched something shift behind his eyes as the pieces assembled themselves.The window seat, the letters, the girl he'd humiliated in September who apparently already knew more about his own body than he did.

"Say something wrong," she said. "Say something that proves it's not you. Please."

"I wrote that I hate the person I have to be at school," he said slowly, like he was reading it back off the inside of his own skull. "That the version of me everyone laughs at isn't he paused, that I don't even like him.Mila went very still.

"I've been thinking about her more than I think about anyone I actually talk to," he said, quiet now, not performing for anyone. "Which is insane, because I don't even know her name." The words landed in her chest like a struck bell, ringing long after the sound should have stopped. She knew that sentence. She'd read it four times, alone in her room, at eleven p.m., certain it had been written for a version of her that no one at this school would ever meet. She had never once imagined it had been written by the boy currently on his knees in front of her, shaking apart in a body that didn't belong to him yet.

"This is insane. You've seen me shift. You know what I am before I do."

"You're a wolf," she said. "Bitten, not born, which by the way isn't supposed to be possible. Nobody's been turned in this territory in eleven years. That's not a coincidence, Cole. That's a problem, and it's about to become my problem, because I'm supposed to report anything like this to the pack by sundown."

That landed harder than she meant it to. "Report me?"

"I don't have a choice. My mother's the beta. If she finds out I found an unregistered wolf and didn't say anything, it's not just my problem anymore, it's my whole family's." She hated how it sounded out loud pack law, obligation, the same net that had kept her friendless and careful since September, closing around the one person who'd made her feel like herself in months. "I'm not going to let them hurt you. But I have to tell them. There's no version of this where I don't so please just go home."

The pack met at the old Ferris place Friday night, in the barn that had stopped smelling like horses two generations ago and started smelling like territory instead.Cedar smoke and old blood and the particular electricity of a room full of wolves pretending to be calm.

Mila's mother, Renata, stood at the front beside the Alpha, and it was the Alpha's daughter not Renata, not the Alpha himself who made Mila's stomach drop the second she walked in.

Sabrine Ferris. Seventeen, effortless, born wolf, the kind of pack royalty who'd never once had to prove she belonged anywhere. Mila had spent September watching Sabrine orbit Cole in the school hallways with the proprietary ease of someone who considered him a foregone conclusion, not a boyfriend yet, but a plan. Mila hadn't cared, back then. Cole had just been the insufferable boy in her Bio class. Now Sabrine's eyes moved from Mila to the doorway, to whatever Renata was about to announce, and narrowed like she already sensed exactly whose name was coming.

"An unregistered bite," Renata said to the room. "A human boy, turned without pack sanction, discovered by my daughter in our territory two nights ago."

The barn erupted. Mila had expected fear, an unauthorized turning was serious, could mean a rogue wolf loose nearby.Could mean exposure but what she hadn't expected was the particular, personal fury on Sabrine's face when the Alpha asked the boy's name and Renata said it.

"Cole Ashford," Renata said, and Sabrine's jaw went tight enough to c***k a tooth.

"I know him," Sabrine said, too fast, too controlled. "From school." A pause, calculated to the second. "I was going to claim him. Everyone knew that. Now he's turned, unsanctioned, discovered by her" a look at Mila that could have stripped paint "and suddenly I'm supposed to believe that's a coincidence?"

"It is a coincidence," Mila said. "I didn't do this to him. I found him mid-shift, alone, and I helped him, because that's what any of us would've—"

"Would you?" Sabrine's smile was thin and lovely and entirely without warmth. "Because from where I'm standing, the new girl nobody liked just happened to be the one who got to him first, and now the Alpha's about to decide the fate of a boy I've had my eye on since freshman year, based entirely on her account of what happened in those woods." She turned to her father. "I want to meet him. Before anyone decides anything. I want to see for myself what she's claiming she found."

The Alpha considered this, and Mila felt the ground tilt again, the way it kept tilting lately, every time she thought she understood the shape of her own life.

"Bring the boy to the pack," the Alpha said. "Sunday. We'll decide together what he is to us and to this territory once we've seen him for ourselves."

Mila caught Sabrine's eye across the barn, and understood, with total clarity, that she'd just made an enemy who outranked her in every way that mattered here.And that whatever this was with Cole, she was going to have to fight for it in a world with actual teeth.