Rejected by Her Alpha, Claimed by His Brother

Chapter 5 – Ghosts in the Trees

The forest folded around us like a held breath.

One step past the boundary and everything sharpened. The air turned cooler, cleaner. The damp, loamy scent of earth, the resin of old pines, the faint musk of fox and deer — all of it layered over the deeper, older smell of our pack.

Their pack, I corrected myself. Not ours anymore.

Ferns brushed my calves as we left the last hint of asphalt behind. Birdsong threaded through the branches, scattered and uneasy. Somewhere far off, water moved over stone.

“You’re favoring your left leg,” Corren said after a while, not looking at me.

“It’s called walking,” I said. “Some of us do it without an entourage.”

“You do a lot of things without backup,” he muttered. “That doesn’t make them smart.”

I snorted, mostly to cover the way my wolf was pricking her ears in every direction at once. The resonance under my skin hummed, picking up fear from a distant rabbit, the heavy contentment of a doe bedding down, the restless flicker of… something else.

I slowed when the path curved toward a stand of twisted oaks.

The place hit me like a slap.

It was just a clearing at first glance. Sunlight dappled the ground through a break in the canopy, moss thick on roots, a ring of flat stones scattered like teeth. But underneath the green and gold lay other impressions: cold air slicing my lungs, the taste of iron on my tongue, the crackle of torches.

Memories not entirely my own.

“This used to be the training spot for first shifts,” I said, my voice strange in my own ears. “We brought the pups here to… ease them into the change.”

Corren’s gaze tracked the line of my shoulders. “I remember.”

“You weren’t there for many of them,” I added without thinking. “Patrols. Your father said—”

“My father said a lot of things,” he cut in, too quickly. “Show me what you feel now.”

I swallowed and stepped off the path, boots sinking into soft ground. The air here was heavier, like walking into a room that hadn’t been aired out since a funeral.

I knelt and pressed my fingertips to the moss.

Resonance surged.

For a heartbeat I was smaller, legs shorter, chest tight with the giddy panic of an almost-shift. Laughter echoed — high, breathless, undeniably childlike. Two voices chasing each other between the trees.

“Faster, Tavi! You’re so slow!”

“Kiva, wait—”

Their names brushed against the edge of my awareness and fled before I could catch them. My heart cracked anyway.

I blinked, the vision wobbling like water disturbed.

“Liora?” Corren’s voice, close now.

“Two kids,” I murmured. “Playing. Right here. It feels… old, but not gone.”

“Tavis and Kiva used to come here with the others,” he said quietly. “Before—”

Before they vanished.

Before that night.

Another image shoved through: the same clearing under snow, the stones bare and black against white, circles etched into the frozen ground. Older wolves ringed around, cloaks flapping in a wind I couldn’t feel. My own breath puffing white as I stepped into the center, the weight of a hundred eyes on my back.

My hand spasmed against the moss.

“Stop there,” Corren said, suddenly at my side. “Don’t go deeper.”

“Easy for you to say,” I rasped. “You didn’t stand in that circle.”

“I was there.” His jaw ticked. “Just not where you could see me.”

The forest noise faded, that old roar of blood in my ears returning as if no time had passed at all.

Jarek’s voice. The snap of something intangible breaking. The way the world went silent after.

I yanked my hand back.

Leaves rustled. A crow screamed in the distance.

Resonance didn’t subside this time. It twisted, reaching not just into the ground but outward, along invisible threads. My awareness skated over trees, rocks, roots — snagged on a knot of… wrongness farther ahead.

“Do you feel that?” I asked.

Corren’s eyes had gone distant, focused beyond the clearing. “Like toothache in the bone,” he said. “Maera described it that way. The younger ones go edgy when they walk this route.”

“Of course they do.” I straightened, brushing dirt from my palms. “There’s a wound up ahead. And your patrols walk straight past it like it’s a pretty view.”

“You think we haven’t checked?” he snapped, temper flashing for the first time. “We walked this forest until our paws bled. Whatever is there doesn’t want to be seen.”

A fair point. The knot in my chest thrummed, stubborn.

“Maybe it doesn’t want you,” I said. “But it remembers me.”

That landed between us, heavier than I liked.

His throat worked. “Then let it remember,” he said. “We go together.”

He stepped past me, deeper into the trees, as if trusting I’d follow.

I hesitated on the edge of the clearing, the ghosts of children’s laughter and my own humiliation clinging to my skin. The pack’s laws said I didn’t belong here. The smart thing, the safe thing, the thing I’d chosen for three years, waited back in town with antiseptic and stable schedules.

Behind my ribs, my wolf turned her head toward the knot of wrongness ahead and bared her teeth.

Fine.

I followed Corren into the shadows, toward the place where the forest hurt.