FATED TO THE ALPHA WHO REJECTED ME

CHAPTER FIVE: THE FIRST VISION

I didn't sleep.

The photograph sat on my kitchen table where I'd left it, face-up, a woman with my exact bone structure staring back at me across two decades and a stranger's terror. I made tea I didn't drink. I paced the length of my studio apartment enough times to wear a groove into the floorboards. Somewhere around two in the morning, exhaustion finally won, and I collapsed onto my bed still fully dressed, the photograph clutched loosely in one hand.

The dream came fast. Faster than dreams usually do.

I stood in a forest that didn't exist anywhere in the world I knew.

The trees were ancient—black bark, silver-veined leaves that caught moonlight like something alive. Fog pooled low around roots thick as my waist. The air smelled of pine and something else, something older. Copper. Ash. Power.

I wasn't wearing what I'd fallen asleep in. I wore something pale and flowing, and my hands, when I lifted them, glowed faintly gold at the fingertips, like embers banked beneath skin.

Movement rippled through the treeline.

Wolves emerged from the fog not shifters caught mid-change, but true wolves, massive, silver-black, eyes burning amber in the dark. Dozens of them. Then more. A tide of predators pouring from between the trees, and every instinct in my body screamed to run.

I didn't run.

I couldn't. Some ancient certainty rooted me in place, some knowledge that lived beneath thought, beneath fear.

The wolves stopped ten feet away. And then, one by one, they bowed.

Not cowered. Bowed heads lowering to the forest floor in a gesture so deliberate, so reverent, that my throat closed around a sound I didn't have a name for.

A voice spoke behind me. Female. Layered, somehow, like more than one voice speaking in perfect unison.

They remember you," the voice said. "Even after everything. Even after we tried to make them forget."

I turned.

The woman from the photograph stood at the edge of the clearing, except she wasn't frozen in sepia anymore she was alive, dark hair moving in a wind I couldn't feel, her face an older, sharper echo of my own. Her eyes were the same gold that pulsed at my fingertips.

"Who are you?" My voice came out strange, layered too, like something ancient was trying to speak through my throat.

You know who I am," she said. "You've always known. They just made very sure you forgot."

Who's 'they'?

Her expression darkened—grief, fury, something in between. "The ones who feared what we were. The ones who buried the bloodline so deep they thought no one would ever dig it back up." She stepped closer, and the wolves around us lifted their heads, watching with an intensity that made my skin crawl. "But bonds don't lie, little one. Not even bonds forged to bury the truth. He felt you before he ever saw your face. That should tell you something."

Axel.

His name left me like a question and an accusation at once.

The Kane line has been tangled with ours for longer than either of you know." Her gold eyes narrowed. "They've spent generations making sure the two bloodlines never remembered each other. And now fate has gone and undone all of it in one snap of a bond neither of you asked for.

The forest around us began to blur at the edges, fog thickening, wolves dissolving back into shadow.

Wait" I reached for her.

Tell me what I am. Tell me your name.

You'll remember," she said, already fading, voice splintering into something that sounded almost like static, almost like pain. "It's already starting. You need to be careful who's near you when it does. Some of them will want to use it. Some of them will want to kill it. And some of them.

Her voice cut off entirely.

Some of them will want to claim it, she finished, and her gold eyes locked on mine with sudden, terrible clarity, "the same way he wants to claim you.

I woke up screaming.

Not a small sound a full, ragged scream that tore out of my throat before I even understood I was awake, back in my own dark apartment, tangled in sheets soaked through with sweat. My whole body convulsed like I'd been electrocuted. Every nerve ending felt raw, overloaded, like my skin had become a live wire.

I stumbled out of bed and hit the floor hard, vision swimming, my own heartbeat roaring so loud in my ears I couldn't hear anything else. The room strobed—dark, then impossibly bright, then dark again—and underneath it all, that same golden pulse from the dream throbbed behind my eyes like a second heartbeat trying to force its way out through my skull.

I made it to the bathroom on hands and knees, hauled myself up by the sink, and looked in the mirror.

My eyes were gold.

Not dilated, not reflecting some trick of bathroom light—gold, entirely, iris to edge, glowing faintly the way embers glow when you breathe on them. I stared at my own reflection and didn't recognize the thing staring back.

"No," I whispered. "No, no, no"

Pain lanced through my skull, sharp enough that I cried out and gripped the sink to keep from collapsing. Something was trying to force its way out of me.some pressure building behind my sternum, hot and enormous and utterly unfamiliar, like my body had suddenly become too small to hold whatever had just woken up inside it.

The bathroom light exploded.

Glass rained down around me. I didn't feel any of it land. I was too busy watching gold light pulse visibly beneath my own skin, veins lit up like something out of a nightmare, power radiating off me in waves I could physically feel pushing outward, rattling the medicine cabinet, cracking the mirror in a spiderweb pattern radiating from where my reflection had just stared back at me.

Then, as fast as it came, it collapsed inward all of it, all at once, a sudden and total vacuum where power had been seconds before.

I hit the floor and didn't get back up.

I don't know how long I lay there. Long enough for the glow to fade entirely, for my eyes to burn with exhaustion instead of gold light, for my limbs to feel like something borrowed and badly used.

I heard the door before I fully understood what I was hearing not a knock. A splintering crack, wood giving way all at once, followed by heavy, urgent footsteps.

"Maya!"

Axel's voice, raw with something I'd never heard from him before not command, not control.

But Fear.

He found me on the bathroom floor amid shattered glass, and whatever composure he usually wore like armor simply fell away. He was on his knees beside me in an instant, hands hovering like he wasn't sure it was safe to touch me, eyes scanning my face, my hands, the blood from a small glass cut on my palm.

What happened? His voice shook. I felt it from across the city power like that doesn't just happen, Maya, what—

I don't know. My voice came out cracked, exhausted. I had a dream. A vision. There was a woman she looked like me, Axel, exactly like me, and there were wolves, and they bowed, and she said.

A sound at the window cut me off.

Axel's head snapped up, whole body going rigid, a growl building low in his chest that I felt more than heard. I followed his gaze and found a man crouched on my fire escape, having apparently scaled three stories of brick without any visible effort, one hand braced against the window frame, dark eyes taking in the scene me on the floor, glass everywhere, Axel's hands hovering protectively close with an expression that shifted rapidly from concern to something sharper.

"Lucas," Axel said, voice gone dangerously flat.

"I felt the spike from Brooklyn," the stranger said, not taking his eyes off me. Golden-brown eyes, I registered distantly, dark hair, a face that held some flicker of recognition I couldn't place. "Power like that hasn't moved through this city in generations. I had to see for myself."

Get away from her window, Axel said, low and lethal.

Or what? Lucas's mouth curved, not quite a smile. You'll reject her again? Word travels fast, Kane. Whole pack knows what you did in that council chamber. His eyes flicked to me, softer now, almost gentle in a way that made something in my chest twist with unwelcome recognition. Hello, Maya. It's been a long time.

I stared at him, disoriented, exhausted, gold static still humming faintly beneath my skin. "Do I know you?"

Something flickered across his face hurt, maybe, quickly masked. "You will," he said. "You definitely will."

Axel moved between us so fast I barely registered it, putting his body squarely in the window's line of sight, every line of him coiled and ready for violence. "Get off her fire escape, Archer. Now.

Lucas's gaze slid past him, back to me, and whatever he saw in my face made his expression sharpen with sudden, focused intent.

"That power," he said quietly, almost to himself, "shouldn't exist anymore. Which means someone's been lying to both of you for a very long time."

Behind me, through the shattered bathroom door, I caught my own reflection in the cracked mirror eyes still faintly, impossibly gold at the edges, a stranger's power still humming beneath skin I used to think of as entirely, boringly human.

Two alphas stood in my apartment, both of them staring at me like I'd just become something far more dangerous than a wolfless orphan, and I had no idea which one of them was more afraid of what I might be.