BLOODBOUND TO THE ALPHA AND HIS PUPS

Static

CHAPTER 5 — Static

Wren

The ache never fully left.

I told myself it would, the way sore muscles fade after a hard shift, but three weeks out from the screening it was still there — low and constant, a strange pull behind my ribs that had no business existing and no explanation I could make sense of. Some nights it felt like a held breath. Some nights it felt like a hand resting flat against my sternum, patient, waiting for something.

I didn't tell anyone. There wasn't anyone left to tell.

Ivy stopped by on one of my rare days off, took one look at me, and frowned in the particular way doctors frown when they're deciding whether to be your sister or your physician. "You look wrecked, Wren."

"I'm fine."

"You're gray." She pressed two fingers to my wrist without asking, counting under her breath. "Your pulse is doing something strange. Elevated, but not — I don't know, it's not textbook anything."

"Maybe it's the screening. Some kind of delayed reaction."

"Maybe." She didn't sound convinced, but she also looked like a woman running on fumes herself, still recovering from her own collapse, still carrying whatever guilt she hadn't let herself name out loud. "Rest. Actually rest, not the version of resting you do where you just work fewer hours. If it doesn't ease up, I want you seen properly."

I promised her I would. I didn't mean it. Milo needed groceries and I needed shifts, and rest wasn't a line item I knew how to afford any more than pride had been.

***********

I picked up an evening shift at the bar two days later — Denise was now short-staffed, and some stubborn part of me refused to let Derek and Paige chase me out of a paycheck on top of everything else they'd already taken.

Paige was working the floor. Of course, she was.

"Wren!" Delighted, like always, like cruelty was just her resting register. She held up her left hand, fingers spread, and I saw it before she even said the word — a ring, obscene and glittering, sitting where mine used to. "Guess who's getting married."

I didn't say anything. I didn't have it in me.

"October," she went on, undeterred by my silence, maybe even fed by it. "Small, tasteful, obviously — my dad wants it here, actually, right in the courtyard. Feels a little poetic, doesn't it? Considering." She tilted her head, studying me the way you'd study something you'd already won. "You're not even going to congratulate me?"

"Congratulations," I said, flat, and picked up my tray, because the alternative was saying something I couldn't afford to say to my boss's daughter with a full shift ahead of me.

She laughed, delighted by my exhaustion in a way that would have gutted me two months ago. It barely touched me now. I didn't have room left to feel it — the ache behind my ribs was taking up too much space, along with a bone-deep tiredness that four cups of coffee hadn't made a dent in.

I got through the shift. I don't remember most of it.

A week later……..

I called the Kade intake line six times over the next week.

The first two calls, someone picked up, cool and professional, and told me Mr. Whitlock wasn't available and would return my call. He never did. By the fourth call, the line just rang out. By the sixth, a recorded message told me the number was no longer in service.

That should have scared me more than it did. I think some numb, exhausted part of me had simply stopped being able to process new frightening things and was just adding them to a pile.

So I drove out there myself.

I remembered the road, or thought I did — the turn off the highway, the long stretch through the hills, the gate that had opened for Whitlock's car like it recognized him personally. I found the turn. I found the road.

I didn't find the estate.

There was a house there, dark stone, old — but smaller than I remembered, windows shuttered, a real estate sign staked crookedly in an overgrown front lawn like it had been sitting unsold for months, maybe years. No gate. No gold fixtures. No cold, expensive silence.

I got out of my car anyway, some stubborn animal part of me refusing to believe it, and knocked on the door of the house next to it, an elderly man answering in a cardigan, squinting at me like I'd woken him.

"I'm looking for the Kade estate," I said. "I was here about six weeks ago — there was a private medical facility, a family called Kade—"

"Kade." He said the name slowly, testing it, and shook his head. "Never heard of it, sweetheart. Been on this road thirty-one years. That house has been empty since the Petersons moved out in 2019."

"That's not possible. I was *here.*"

"I'm sure you think you were." Not unkind. Just certain, in the way people are certain about their own thirty-one years of watching a road. "Wrong turn somewhere, maybe. Roads out this way all look the same in the dark."

I sat in my car for a long time after he shut the door, hands on the wheel, staring at a house that had clearly been empty for years, trying to reconcile it with the cold, glittering estate I knew I'd walked into. I wasn't losing my mind. I'd signed papers. I had sixty thousand dollars that had cleared into my account and paid my brother's hospital bill in full — that part, at least, was undeniably real.

But the man who'd called me candidate seventeen, who'd stood in a doorway and made my whole body go up in heat without laying a finger on me — it was starting to feel like something I'd have to prove had happened at all, even to myself.

*****************

That night, exhausted past the point of thinking straight, I sliced my thumb open on a kitchen knife I wasn't paying enough attention to.

It wasn't deep. It shouldn't have mattered. But the second the blood welled up, the ache behind my ribs surged into something sharper, something that felt almost like recognition, and the kitchen light overhead flickered once, twice, and went out.

"Wren." A voice from the dark, low, wrong in a way I couldn't name.

I turned, thumb still bleeding, and there was something standing in the doorway of my own kitchen that had no business being there — tall, wrong-jointed, eyes flat and colorless in the dark. It tilted its head at me, slow, curious, the way you'd study something you weren't sure how to classify yet.

"Kade," it said, tasting the word like it was checking it for a lie. Then, softer, almost thoughtful: "Or danger."

"What are you—"

It moved before I finished the sentence, fast in a way nothing human should move, and I stumbled back into the counter, blood from my thumb smearing across the tile as I threw my hand up uselessly. Its eyes weren't colorless anymore. They'd gone gray, then bright, then something closer to burning, mouth opening wider than a jaw should allow —

— and then it wasn't there anymore. Rhys was.

I don't know how he got into my kitchen. I don't know how he moved fast enough to put himself between me and something that had been inches from my throat. I only know there was a sound I'll never fully be able to describe — something between a snarl and a door slamming — and then the creature was gone, and Rhys was standing over what was left of it, breathing hard, eyes still bleeding from gray back toward something human.

He turned to me. Reached for me with a hand that was shaking.

"Wren." His voice cracked around my name in a way I'd never heard from him. "Are you—"

---

I woke up on my kitchen floor, thumb throbbing where I'd actually cut it, no blood anywhere but the small, ordinary line across my skin, no creature, no Rhys, no ruined tile.

Just me, alone, heart slamming against my ribs like I'd run a mile in my sleep.

I sat there a long time before I trusted myself to stand, telling myself it was a dream — exhaustion, stress, an overactive imagination filling in the blanks, a vanished estate and an unreturned phone call had left wide open.

I believed that, right up until the ache behind my ribs pulsed once, hard, like something on the other end of it had just noticed I was awake.