The Rogue Who Tamed The Ruthless Alpha

CHAPTER 2

ZARA: PRESENT DAY

"You are holding back." My brother Ryder walks a slow circle behind me, studying my footwork with the same expression Dad uses before he makes me run extra laps. "I can see it in your right shoulder."

"My right shoulder is fine."

"Your right shoulder drops the second you get tired and you have been awake since before five." He stops circling. "Hit the bag like you mean it."

I mean it on the next combination. Jab, cross, elbow, low kick. The bag swings hard enough to rattle the hook in the ceiling beam. Behind me Ryder makes the small sound he makes when he is satisfied but does not want me to know it yet.

"Better." He tosses me a water bottle. "Again."

This is what Fridays look like. Ryder runs the youth training program for Redwood Hollow Pack, and I have been part of that program since I was old enough to hold a proper fighting stance. Before that, Dad trained me privately. Dad's position on safety is simple and inflexible: in a world with rogues and rival packs and bad things that move at night, every wolf needs to be able to protect themselves. He started training me before he started training Ryder.

I used to think it was because I was smaller and would need more time. Later I understood it was because the world is harder on girls, and he had already learned that lesson once, and he was not going to let it happen to me.

Mom died when I was nine. Wolfsbane poisoning. Nobody ever found out how she was exposed or who was responsible. That silence has lived in our house ever since, in the shape of a person who is not there.

I do the combination again. The other students finish their sets and start pairing off for sparring. I am about to find a partner when the quality of the light in the building changes, the way it changes when someone large fills a doorway.

Alpha Vance is standing at the entrance.

He comes on Fridays sometimes. Watches the training, has a word with Ryder, checks in on the young wolves. It was normal. It used to feel normal. At some point in the last year, something shifted and it stopped feeling that way entirely, and now every Friday I spend twenty minutes working out where he is in the room without looking directly at him.

I keep my eyes on the bag.

"Zara."

His voice carries without effort. I stop. I turn around. He is standing forty meters away with three silver rings on his right hand catching the light, and the distance between us does not feel like forty meters.

"Alpha." I bow my head.

"Come here."

I cross the room. He looks me over. He is handsome in the specific way that makes the handsomeness itself a problem, because it makes you want to believe what it is attached to.

"Strong session today," he says.

"Thank you, Alpha."

"Your father trained you well." He pauses. "He trained you to be a warrior."

"Yes, Alpha."

"Wasted, don't you think." His eyes move over me again, from my shoulders down to my feet and back up. "A girl who looks the way you look. Fighting like this." He tilts his head. "You were built for something gentler."

There are twelve other people in this room. Two of them are senior students, adults, wolves who could say something right now. Every single one of them finds something else to look at.

"I enjoy training, Alpha," I say.

He smiles. "Come to the main house this evening. I want to discuss your future with your father." He does not wait for my answer. He turns and leaves.

I go back to the bag. I hit it until my knuckles ache and keep hitting it after that.

Ryder appears at my elbow twenty minutes later. "Go straight home," he says, quietly. "Do not go to the main house tonight."

"He said to come."

"I know what he said." His jaw is set. "Go home. I will talk to Dad."

I go home.

Something is happening. The signs are everywhere and I am trained to read signs.

Dad has been on his phone for three days in the way that means he is managing something, not just talking. Ryder is carrying his shoulders the way he only carries them before a fight. My bags have been slowly, quietly filling, clothes I left on the bed finding their way inside without me putting them there. This morning Dad skipped our run for the first time I can remember and stood on the porch instead, watching the tree line with a cup of coffee that went cold in his hand.

Tonight there is a birthday party for a girl from my class. She is turning eighteen. Her wolf will fully shift for the first time, and if her mate is anywhere in the pack, the bond will pull them together.

I want to go. I want to watch it happen because watching it happen to other people is the closest thing I have right now to believing it will happen to me. I turn eighteen in a month.

My wolf Sable has been awake inside me since I turned sixteen, a quiet presence in the back of my chest that communicates in emotions rather than words. She pushes feelings at me the way someone slides notes under a door. Tonight she keeps pushing the same one.

Urgency.

I go to the party because I need one normal evening. Ryder comes with me, scanning every person in the room in the particular way he scans rooms when he is expecting someone to come through the wrong door.

My classmate finds her mate two hours in. He is a boy from the year above us, and the moment the bond locks you can see it before either of them speaks. They both go still at the same time. The space between them compresses and neither of them can move away from it. The room fills with noise and someone starts crying the happy kind and I watch from across the room with Sable pressing against the inside of my chest like she is trying to see through my eyes.

Someone sits down beside me. I assume it is Ryder.

It is Carter Vance. The Alpha's son. Twenty-two years old, his father's cheekbones without the thing his father hides behind them. He has always been straightforward, the kind of person who means what he says and says what he means, which in this pack is unusual enough to be noticeable.

"You were somewhere else entirely just now," he says.

"Just watching," I say.

We sit quietly for a moment. Then he says, still looking across the room, "I heard your family is visiting family in another pack."

"Yes."

"Good." He says it like the word is doing two jobs. He stands up. "I hope the visit goes well, Zara." He crosses the room and disappears into the crowd.

Ryder is beside me before Carter has been gone thirty seconds. "What did he say?"

"That he hoped the visit went well."

My brother stares at the spot where Carter was. Then he nods, once, to himself.

"Let's go home," he says.

We are halfway there when footsteps come fast behind us. We both spin around. Carter is jogging toward us, out of breath, the evenness gone from his face.

"I needed to say this in person." He looks at both of us. "When you visit your family. Do not come back. Stay there. It is safer."

"Carter," I start.

"It is handled," Ryder says. The tone in his voice tells me this is a conversation that has happened before, between the two of them, without me.

Carter's shoulders come down a fraction. "Good." He grips my brother's forearm once. "Safe travels, both of you." He turns and jogs back toward the lights.

I look at my brother.

He looks at me.

"Inside," he says. "Now."