Claimed by the Alpha Who Raised Me

 Elowen's POV The rain hadn't stopped in seven days. Neither had the silence inside my head, where my wolf should have been. I sat by the window hugging my knees, watching raindrops race each other down the glass, my white dress stuck to my legs from the damp creeping through the cracked seal. Over and over again, I tried not to see it but it was all I could picture. The horrific scene of watching mother’s wolf turn on father and then on herself. I could still smell the blood, still see their maimed bodies and the terror still felt raw in my chest. Aldwin's voice came from the front hall, tired and careful the way it had been all week. “It’s been a week sir and she hasn't spoken a word. As for her wolf, she’s yet to shift, maybe she—” "Can someone her age still be turned out as a rogue?" A deeper voice cut him off. Cold as ice and reeking with the kind of authority only an Alpha could possess. My heart hammered against my chest, hearing those words. Life as a rogue was a death sentence itself. Perhaps mother should have turned on me too and saved me from this existence. “Alpha. It was her mother’s request that you take her under your wing,” Aldric’s voice came again, full of plea and uncertainty. “I am not obligated to fulfill that request, am I?” His voice sounded even colder. I forced myself to move for the first time in days, so I could see him, moving my neck slowly as if I had lost knowledge of how to use its muscles. The man stood in the doorway, the storm raging behind him. He was tall, handsome in the kind of way that made you nervous, sharp cheekbones and a hard jaw with pale amber eyes that only pure-blood Alphas carried. I froze, recognizing those eyes immediately. I had first seen them ten years ago when my mother took me to the Thornveil stronghold in the Northern Reach. I wandered off while she was arguing with someone downstairs and pushed open a door that wasn't locked, and inside a man in combat gear was sleeping on the bed with one arm thrown over his face. I was eight and tired and everything about his size and his stillness felt safe, so I climbed up and curled into the crook of his other arm like a pup and fell asleep against him. He woke me up with a rough shaking, those amber eyes cold and calculating as they stared at me and even though I was a little girl, helpless in his fierce grip, he looked at me like I was a threat to be eliminated and even threatened to call the hounds on me. Mother gave him an earful that day for making me cry so much and that was the day I learned that my mother had been taken in by the Thornveil pack as an orphaned pup and raised as one of their own, and the terrifying man on the bed was her younger brother in all but blood. Thornveil's true-born second son, Alpha Kael. He entered the Blood Trials at sixteen, cleared the Shadow Garrison by eighteen, spent five years doing classified work that nobody was allowed to talk about before he was called back to take a seat on the High Council as the youngest Alpha the Northern Reach had produced in three generations. Mother cut ties with Thornveil the day she mated with father and that childhood visit was the first contact in years. I could see it in those flat amber eyes as clear as anything, that I was not welcome. His very first thought wasn't to comfort me or crouch down or tell me it would be okay but to ask how quickly he could turn me out and make me someone else's problem. Those eyes scared me when I was eight because of how cold they were and they scared me now because of what they were telling me, that I was nothing to him, a burden he hadn't asked for, an inconvenience he would rather not have. The tears I'd been holding for days finally slipped out, not the loud gulping sobs of a child this time but the quiet kind that slid down your cheeks and dripped down your face while you sat there letting it happen because you've run out of reasons to wipe them away. Aldwin's knees hit the floor so hard the sound cracked through the room. "Alpha Kael, for her mother's sake I beg you. Don't turn her out. She starts her final year after summer and you'd only need to shelter her, see her through her training, and then she can stand on her own feet. Please, just let her stay." Kael didn't answer him. He handed the umbrella in his hand to his guard and stepped inside, and the air in the room became heavier and tighter and pressed down on my chest strongly until I looked away from him. His gaze swept over me the way you'd look at a stray you hadn't decided whether to keep or throw out. "I hear you have become a mute." His frown was just as I remembered. Something about the way he looked at me or perhaps his presence itself made me lift my swollen eyes to meet his and my throat, so raw from a week of silence, took everything in me to push the word out. "No."