MY ALPHA'S REGRET

Chapter 5: What Hunts in Packs

The first wolf broke from the tree line before Lyra had time to process the warning fully — a massive black-furred shape moving with the coordinated precision of a trained war-pack rather than the loose, opportunistic aggression of rogue attackers.

"Inside, now." Damien's voice had lost every trace of the careful patience he'd shown her all night, gone hard and commanding in the specific register Alphas used only in genuine emergencies. "Mara, get the lodge sealed—"

"No." Lyra's own voice surprised her, steady despite the fear spiking hot and sharp through her chest. "If they're here for me, hiding just means they tear through everyone standing between us to get what they want. I'm not doing that to your pack on their first night sheltering me."

"That's not your decision to make—"

"It's exactly my decision to make." She held his gaze, something cold and resolved settling over the fear. "You said thirty days to become someone strong enough that hunting me costs more than it's worth. I don't have thirty days anymore, apparently. I have about thirty seconds."

Three more wolves broke from the tree line behind the first, spreading into a loose hunting formation.

Lyra's stomach dropped. This wasn't a scouting party or a simple show of force. This was an extraction attempt, fast and coordinated, built by people who'd clearly planned for exactly this kind of resistance.

Kane had already shifted, his human form dissolving into the massive gray-and-black wolf Lyra had glimpsed only once before, years ago, at a distance. He placed himself between her and the advancing wolves without hesitation, a low, bone-deep growl building in his chest.

"You don't get to decide you're protecting me either," Lyra said, though the words came out shakier than she wanted, watching four trained war-wolves close the distance with terrifying speed.

*I don't have thirty days. I have thirty seconds.*

She didn't know, afterward, exactly how she found it — the same power that had torn free of her in the clearing, black and formless and utterly alien to anything she'd been taught about her own body her entire life. It rose in her now not as pain but as something closer to instinct, an old, buried reflex finally remembering what it had been built for.

The black smoke that had curled harmlessly from her fingertips hours ago spread now like something with purpose and weight, pooling low across the frozen ground between her and the approaching wolves, thickening into a wall of writhing shadow that swallowed the moonlight whole.

The lead wolf hit the shadow-wall and simply vanished.

Not killed — she felt that instantly, some instinctive certainty telling her the power hadn't taken a life, only removed a threat from the space it needed to protect — but gone, swallowed into the black the same way a stone disappears into deep water.

The three wolves behind it skidded to a stunned, snarling halt at the edge of her expanding shadow.

"Lyra." Damien's voice, sharp with something between alarm and awe. "Pull it back. You don't know what that costs you yet, you could—"

The world tilted violently, her vision fracturing at the edges, the shadow-wall guttering as her own strength buckled beneath the weight of a power she'd held for less than a day.

She felt herself falling and registered, distantly, strong arms catching her before she hit the frozen ground — not Damien's, not Mara's, but the solid, familiar warmth of a body her own had ached for every hour since a fire pit had torn them apart.

"I've got you," Kane said, human again, his voice rough with an urgency that had nothing performed about it. "Lyra, stay with me—"

The remaining Vantor wolves regrouped at the tree line, clearly recalculating in the face of a threat they hadn't anticipated.

Lyra caught one last, fading glimpse of Renner's scarred face among them, his expression no longer coldly assessing but something closer to genuine alarm.

"That's not possible," Renner said, his voice carrying thin across the frozen clearing. "A fresh awakening doesn't manifest full extraction on its first night. Not without training. Not without a bloodline anchor to draw from." His eyes swept once more over Lyra, and something in his calculating expression shifted into a wariness that hadn't been there before. "Someone's been feeding her power before tonight. That's not a fresh awakening at all. That's a bloodline that's been building toward this for years, and somebody let it happen right under the Ironclaw Alpha's nose."

He didn't finish the thought.

With a sharp gesture the three remaining wolves melted back into the tree line, retreating rather than pressing an attack against a power none of them had come prepared to face.

The clearing went suddenly, ringingly silent, broken only by Lyra's own ragged breathing and the last thin tendrils of black smoke dissolving from the frost-covered ground.

---

Mara emerged cautiously from the lodge doorway, a heavy iron poker gripped white-knuckled in one hand.

"What in the name of every dead ancestor," she breathed, taking in the scattered scorch marks left across the frozen earth, "was *that*? I've lived on this land my whole life and I have never once seen the ground burn black like it's been touched by something out of the old grandmother-stories."

"I don't know," Lyra admitted, her whole body trembling now that the immediate danger had passed. Her hands wouldn't stop shaking. When she looked down at them, the black had already faded from beneath her fingernails, leaving only ordinary, human hands that didn't feel like they belonged to her anymore.

"What did I do?" Her voice came out small, shaking. "Where did that wolf go?"

"I don't know," Damien admitted, crouching beside her, his usual composure visibly rattled for the first time since she'd met him. "I've read every fragment of Shadow-blood history I could find in fifteen years of searching, and nothing described a power like that. Extraction. Removal. Not killing — I'd stake my life that wolf is still alive, wherever it went. But alive somewhere none of us can currently reach."

"That's not a comforting answer, Alpha," Mara said, lowering the poker slightly, though her eyes stayed fixed warily on the scorched patch of ground.

"I didn't say it to be comforting. I said it because it's true." Damien's gaze moved to Lyra. "Can you feel where he is? Any sense of it at all — direction, distance, anything?"

Lyra closed her eyes, reaching inward toward the place the power had come from, and found only exhaustion there now, a vast, hollowed-out quiet where fire had roared minutes before.

"Nothing," she said. "It's just — gone. Like closing a door I don't know how to open again."

"That's actually useful information, in its own grim way," Damien said, though the grimness in his voice didn't match the reassurance in his words. "It means the power isn't fully instinctive yet — it's reactive, drawing on something outside conscious control. Training will change that. Whether we have time enough left to do it properly before Vantor comes back in force is a different question entirely."

"Then we work with what we know," Kane said.

His arms hadn't loosened around her.

"It doesn't matter what it was tonight," he continued. "It matters that Renner just watched you do something no one in that Alliance has ever seen a fresh Shadow-blood accomplish, and by morning every pack within three valleys is going to know it too."

"That's not good," Lyra managed, the last of her strength draining out of her all at once.

"No," Damien agreed grimly, his silver eyes fixed on the dark tree line where the Vantor wolves had vanished. "It's not good at all. Because the Alliance Council doesn't send its enforcers back empty-handed twice. Whatever comes next, it won't be four wolves testing the waters. It'll be an army — and it'll come a great deal sooner than thirty days."

Mara crouched down on Lyra's other side, her earlier alarm settling into something steadier and more practical. "She needs to be inside, warm, and asleep before we plan one more single thing," she said firmly. "Whatever's coming, it isn't coming in the next hour, and a Shadow-blood who collapses from exhaustion mid-fight is exactly as useless to all of us as one who never woke up at all. You can plan your wars in the morning, Alpha. Tonight she sleeps."

Damien nodded slowly. "She's right. Voss—" His eyes cut to Kane, wary but no longer openly hostile. "You should go. Whatever goodwill tonight bought you, it doesn't extend to sheltering under my roof."

"I know." Kane's grip on Lyra tightened fractionally before he made himself loosen it, easing her carefully into Mara's waiting arms instead of his own. "I'll go. But I meant what I said, Lyra. Whatever comes next — Vantor, my father's dying, all of it — I'm not standing on the sidelines of it again."

She wanted to answer him. The words wouldn't come, exhaustion pulling her under too fast now, the world narrowing to the warmth of Mara's steady arms and the distant, retreating sound of Kane's footsteps crossing back toward the tree line.

The last thing Lyra registered before the darkness finally took her under completely was his voice, low and fierce, carrying back to her across the frozen clearing with none of the careful, rehearsed cruelty he'd used to reject her twelve hours earlier.

"I'm not leaving you again," he said. "Whatever it costs me. Whatever my father would say if he were still standing here to say it."

And somewhere in the black, dreamless exhaustion pulling her under, some small, wounded, still-bonded part of her chose, against every ounce of hard-won caution she'd built in the last twelve hours, to believe him.

Even as a colder, more careful part of her — newly awakened alongside the shadow-power still humming faint beneath her skin — quietly resolved not to make that mistake so easily a second time.

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