Claimed by the Alpha Who Raised Me

Elowen's POV The rain hadn't stopped in seven days and neither had the silence inside my head where my wolf should have been. I sat by the window hugging my knees and watching raindrops race each other down the glass while my white dress stuck to my legs from the damp creeping through the cracked seal. I couldn't make myself move because moving meant thinking and thinking meant seeing it all over again, the blood and the shift and the way my mother's wolf turned on my father before turning on herself. So I sat and I didn't move and I didn't speak and I let the rain do the talking for me. Aldwin's voice came from the front hall, tired and careful the way it had been all week. "A week, sir. She hasn't spoken or shifted, though her wolf has never surfaced. It's dormant. She saw it happen. Both of them destroying themselves, right in front of her." "Can someone her age still be turned out as a rogue?" That second voice was deeper and colder and carried the kind of authority that didn't need volume because every wolf in the room already knew to shut up and listen. My whole body went tight at those words and I turned my head toward the sound, slow and stiff like I was remembering how to use my neck after days of sitting in the same position. He stood in the doorway with the storm raging behind him. He was tall with his black coat hanging open as if the rain couldn't be bothered to touch him, one hand holding a black umbrella he clearly hadn't used while the other hung loose at his side. His face was the kind of handsome that made you nervous instead of comfortable, all sharp cheekbones and a hard jaw and those pale amber eyes that only pure-blood Alphas carried, except his held nothing warm behind them, no curiosity, no concern, just a flat steady coldness that said he'd already weighed me and hadn't found much worth keeping. I knew those eyes because I'd seen them once before 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 leathers 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. When I opened my eyes those same amber ones were looking down at me. He was so handsome it almost didn't register how dangerous he was, much younger than my father and so much less kind, with a face that belonged on a predator too beautiful to be safe. I burst into terrified sobs and he frowned at me with the kind of irritation you'd show a stain on a new shirt. "Keep crying," he said, "and I'll let the hounds loose." My tears pooled right at the edge and stayed there because I was too scared to let them fall or even breathe loud enough for him to hear me. 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 that the terrifying man on the bed was her younger brother in all but blood, Thornveil's true-born second son, Kael. He'd entered the Blood Trials at sixteen, cleared the Shadow Garrison by eighteen, and spent five years doing classified work that nobody was allowed to talk about before being called back to take a seat on the High Council as the youngest Alpha the Northern Reach had produced in three generations. Everyone who worked with him feared him and everyone who worked against him feared him twice as much. My mother cut ties with Thornveil the day she mated my father and that childhood visit was the first contact in years. Now this, her dying wish that Kael take me in, was the second. 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 and didn't want. 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 slide down your cheeks and drip off your chin onto your dress while you sit there letting it happen because you've run out of reasons to wipe them away. Aldwin's knees hit the stone 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 to his guard and stepped inside, and the air in the room changed the way it always does when a wolf of his rank enters a space, heavier and tighter, pressing down on your chest until you want to look at the floor. His gaze swept over me the way you'd look at a stray you hadn't decided whether to keep or throw out. "Aren't you going to greet me?" I lifted my swollen eyes to meet his and my throat was so raw from a week of silence that it took everything in me to push the word out. "Kael."