The Rogue Who Tamed The Ruthless Alpha

CHAPTER 1

CADEN: FOUR YEARS AGO

"You don't have to say anything. I already know what's coming."

She says it with her back to me, pushing a blouse into her bag without looking at it. Selene moves fast when she is done with something. I have watched her do it with hobbies, with friendships, with plans she made and lost interest in. I did not expect to be on that list. I did not expect our daughter to be on that list either.

"Selene." I keep my voice low and even. "Lena is three weeks old."

"I am aware of how old she is, Caden."

"Then act like it."

She turns around. Her face is flat and far away, the face of a woman who has already arrived somewhere else and is only now bringing her body along.

"I cannot do this." She zips the bag. "I told you when I went into heat. I told you I was not ready for any of this."

"You told me after. When she was already coming."

"Which is the entire point." She picks up the bag. "I did not choose this. The heat chose it. You cannot make me responsible for biology, Caden."

The pain does not arrive like a wave. It arrives like a blade tip, quiet and exact, right between the ribs.

"She is your daughter."

"She is a baby I was not prepared for." She holds my gaze. "You will be better at this than I will ever be. You already are. The whole pack can see it."

"I do not want to do it alone. I want us to work through this together."

"There is nothing to work through." She shoulders the bag. "I have spent three weeks trying to feel what I am supposed to feel. I do not feel it. I cannot perform it for the next eighteen years and call that a life."

I step between her and the door without meaning to. She stops in front of me and tips her chin up.

"Move."

"Selene."

"I, Selene Cross, reject you, Alpha Caden Voss, as my mate." Her voice does not waver. It is almost gentle, like she is doing me a service. "I denounce my role as Luna of Iron Ridge Pack. I give up all claim to our daughter Lena Voss. I release you."

The bond tears. It does not snap. It tears, slow and grinding, the way a root tears from stone when you pull it without stopping. Tor screams inside my head. My wolf, who has never shown fear in his life, screams like something is being ripped out of him. Because something is.

"Goodbye, Caden. Take care of her."

She walks around me. The door opens. The door closes.

I stand in the middle of our bedroom and I do not move. Then from down the hall, Lena begins to cry. Small and furious and red-faced, the way she has cried every time the world has surprised her with something wrong.

I walk to her room. I pick her up with both hands. She screams at the ceiling and I hold her against my chest and I understand completely.

"I have you," I tell her. "I am right here. I am not going anywhere."

She does not stop crying. But she closes her whole fist around my finger and holds on.

I reach for the last thin thread of the bond and I pull.

I, Caden Voss, Alpha of Iron Ridge, accept this rejection. I release Selene Cross from this pack, from all claim over my daughter, from all claim over this territory. She is banished from Iron Ridge lands.

The last of it goes out. Like a light switching off in an empty room.

Tor goes quiet. Still. The deep still of a forest before a storm rolls in.

I sit down in the rocking chair with my daughter against my chest and I make her a promise. I do not say it aloud. I say it inside where it will hold.

Nobody will ever make you feel like you were not worth staying for.

I will spend my whole life making sure of it.

My name is Caden Voss. I became Alpha of Iron Ridge Pack at seventeen, the same year rogues ambushed my parents and took four of our best warriors alongside them. I was three years from being ready. I took the position anyway, in the middle of a war, because the pack needed someone to step into the gap and I was the only one standing close enough.

Iron Ridge is the strongest pack in the Pacific Northwest. We have been the strongest pack for three generations. Most people assume it is training, territory, numbers. Only my closest circle knows the real reason.

My bloodline does not descend from an ordinary Alpha line.

Five hundred years ago, the old records name a creature called the Iron Wolf. Bigger than a bear. Faster than any wolf alive. Built from a kind of power that pre-dates the pack system itself, the original before territories were drawn and bloodlines were tracked. When that line was believed to have died out, the world stopped watching for it.

It had not died out. My great-grandmother was the Iron Wolf's last daughter. She loved a packborn Alpha and kept his secret and hers until she died, and the line ran on, diluting generation by generation, still present but quiet.

In me, for reasons no one has been able to fully explain, it came back.

My wolf Tor is the size of a draft horse. He is the color of storm clouds at dusk. When I run through Iron Ridge at full speed, the patrol wolves move aside without being told.

I did not choose this. I carry it.

For four years, I have given my attention to exactly two things: my daughter and my pack. I told myself that was enough. I believed it.

I believed it until a car rolled along the edge of my territory in the early morning, and a window came down a few inches, and I caught a scent that stopped my blood cold.