BLOODBOUND TO THE ALPHA AND HIS PUPS

Traced

CHAPTER 6 — Traced

Wren

I fainted mid-shift on a Tuesday.

One second I was pouring a round for a table of four, the next the floor was tilting sideways and Denise was shouting my name from somewhere very far away. I remember the tray hitting the tile before I did. I remember Dana's hands under my arms, someone's phone already pressed to their ear. After that, nothing — just a gap, clean and total, until fluorescent light and the low beep of a monitor pulled me back.

"There she is." A nurse, kind-faced, adjusting something above my head. "You gave your coworkers quite a scare."

"What happened?"

"You fainted. Heart rate was elevated when they brought you in — still a little high now, honestly, though it's coming down." She made a note on her chart. "We've run bloodwork, an EKG, the standard panel. Everything's coming back essentially normal, which is good news, but it also means we don't have a clean answer for you yet. Have you been under unusual stress lately?"

I almost laughed. "You could say that."

"We'll keep monitoring overnight. Try to rest."

I didn't tell her about the dream — the creature in my kitchen, the gray eyes, Rhys's hands shaking around my shoulders before the whole thing dissolved into an ordinary kitchen floor and an ordinary cut thumb. It sounded insane even inside my own head. Saying it out loud to a stranger with a chart felt like handing them a reason to keep me here longer than one night.

But lying in that bed, monitor beeping its steady rhythm, I made myself actually walk back through the last real thing I remembered before the floor tilted — not the dream, the *day.* Because something about it had gone soft and strange in my memory, the way things do right before you realize you've been avoiding looking at them directly.

I left the hospital late. I remembered that clearly — Ivy asking me to stay back for at least a few more hours till her next shift,which I refused due to the fear that engulfed inside of me. I couldn't wait one hour. the parking lot was empty except for my car under a light that buzzed and flickered the way it always did. I remembered deciding to walk the last few blocks home instead of dealing with my car's dead battery again, cutting through the alley behind the pharmacy because it shaved off ten minutes.

I remembered footsteps behind me that weren't mine.

Not the dream-stairwell this time. This was concrete under real shoes, real cold air, a real prickle up the back of my neck that had nothing metaphorical about it. I remembered walking faster. I remembered the footsteps matching my pace exactly, unhurried, the way something matches your pace when it already knows how the night ends and is simply waiting for you to catch up to that knowledge yourself.

I remembered turning, and there wasn't one shape behind me. There were four.

They didn't look human, not exactly — human enough to have walked past unnoticed on a street, wrong enough up close that my whole body understood the danger before my mind caught up to naming it. Eyes too flat. Movements a half-second off from how joints are supposed to work. One of them smiled at me, and it took too long, like counting to a number a mouth wasn't built to reach.

"There she is," one of them said — the same words the nurse had used, except nothing about the memory felt kind. "Kade's little liability."

I ran. I don't remember deciding to. My body just did it, lungs burning, feet slipping on wet pavement, and it didn't matter, because they weren't running to catch me — they were already ahead of me, already closing the distance from both sides like they'd choreographed it in advance.

A hand closed around my throat.

Not hard enough to end things immediately — hard enough to make a point, hard enough that black spots opened at the edges of my vision, hard enough that some animal part of my brain understood, with perfect clarity, that this was the last handful of seconds I might ever get.

"Don't kill it outright," another voice said, somewhere close, almost bored. "We want him to feel this one."

And then the night broke apart.

I don't have clean words for what happened next. I remember the hand around my throat vanishing so fast it felt like it had never existed. I remember a sound that didn't belong to anything I'd heard before — not quite a roar, not quite a voice, something underneath both, low enough to feel in my chest instead of just my ears. I remember the alley lit for one impossible second by eyes that had gone entirely, violently red.

Rhys didn't look like Rhys.

His jaw had lengthened into something that wasn't human anymore, dark fur rippling up along his forearms as his shirt tore straight down the seams, claws where his hands had been a half-second before — and none of it moved like a man losing control. It moved like something that had been holding itself back, deliberately, for a very long time, finally deciding it no longer had a reason to.

He didn't fight fair. He didn't fight slowly. One of the four never got a sound out before Rhys's claws opened him from collarbone to sternum, black blood hitting the alley wall in an arc, the body already wrong and disintegrating before it hit the ground, like whatever it had been wasn't built to exist once the thing animating it stopped fighting to hold the shape together. A second one turned to run and didn't make it four steps — Rhys was simply there, faster than the eye had any business tracking, and then that one wasn't standing anymore either.

The third begged. I remember that clearly, worse than any of the violence — a voice gone high and human and terrified, hands up, some name I didn't recognize spilling out of it like it thought a name might matter. Rhys didn't slow down for it.

The fourth tried to use me. Grabbed a fistful of my hair, wrenched my head back, put himself behind me like a shield made of a hostage.

"Come near me," he hissed, "and she goes with me."

Rhys stopped.

For one heartbeat, the red in his eyes flickered — not fading, but focusing, narrowing down to something colder and more precise than the rage that had torn through the first three. He went very, very still.

"You misunderstand your situation," he said, and his voice came out wrong, layered, half-shifted, but perfectly, terribly clear. "There's no version of tonight where you leave this alley."

He moved. I didn't see how — one second the thing's arm was locked around my throat, the next I was stumbling free, catching myself against the wall, and Rhys had him by the jaw, lifting him clean off the ground with one clawed hand like he weighed nothing at all.

"Please—" the creature started.

Rhys didn't let him finish that either.

When it was over, the alley was empty except for the two of us, black stains already fading from the pavement like the bodies were being unmade rather than left behind, and Rhys standing in the wreckage of his own shirt, chest heaving, eyes bleeding slowly back from red toward gray.

He crossed to me in two strides and dropped to his knees in front of where I'd sunk down against the wall, hands hovering over me, shaking, not quite touching, like he'd forgotten how to do anything gently.

"Wren." Rough. Wrecked. Nothing controlled left in it at all. "Look at me. Are you hurt? Tell me you're not hurt."

"I don't—" My throat ached where the hand had been. My legs wouldn't hold me yet. "How did you even find me? I didn't call anyone. I didn't—"

"I sensed a part of me was in danger." His hands finally landed on my shoulders, careful, urgent, grounding both of us at once. "I traced it. I didn't know what I was tracing until I got here and found *you.*

He stopped himself. Looked down, past my throat, past the torn collar of my shirt, to somewhere lower — my abdomen, hovering his hand there the way he had once before, in a hospital hallway, when I'd thought it meant nothing.

"My pups," he said, voice breaking clean in half. "Are they okay?"