Rejected by Her Alpha, Claimed by His Brother

Chapter 8 – Circle in the Trees

By nightfall, the forest felt like it was holding its breath.

We moved along a narrow game trail, Corren in the lead, me on his shoulder, Bryn a shadow behind us. Maera had called this a “small check of a suspected hotspot.” My skin called it something else.

Trap.

The moon was only a thin slice, but wolves don’t need much light. The trees crowded close, trunks black against deeper black. Every step sank into damp loam and old needles. The air tasted metallic, like a storm that hadn’t made up its mind.

“Kids are still jumpy?” Bryn asked quietly.

“Less than yesterday,” I said. “Different, though. Like… pressure moved off them.”

“Onto what?” he asked.

Me, my resonance whispered. And whatever this is.

Ahead, Corren slowed. “Here.”

The trail broke into a small clearing I didn’t recognize at first. The canopy opened just enough to let a wash of gray light spill over the ground.

And over the circle.

Grass here didn’t grow right. A ring of earth lay bare, darker than the soil around it, as if something had burned there long ago and never quite healed. On the nearest tree, faint lines glimmered where bark should have been unmarked.

Runes.

My stomach turned. “You’ve been walking kids past this?”

“We thought it was an old ritual site,” Bryn said. “Dormant. We checked for fresh magic. Nothing lit up.”

“Magic you know how to feel,” I muttered.

Resonance coiled low and tight inside me. Not the sharp, localized pain of a fresh wound, but a deep, slow ache, like a bruise in the bones of the forest.

I stepped to the edge of the ring.

“Liora.” Corren’s hand closed around my wrist, warm and solid. “We don’t know what it is.”

“That’s the point,” I said. “It knows me.”

His jaw clenched, but he didn’t pull me back.

I knelt and touched the bare earth.

The world lurched.

Snow, again. Always snow. Not here, not now, but that night—that other circle. Torches. Wolves in cloaks. Chants under their breath. And outside the main ring, smaller ones, half-buried in shadow.

Two children in one of them, hands locked so tight their knuckles were white.

Tavis. Kiva.

“Liora?” Bryn’s voice came from far away.

I wasn’t in the clearing anymore. I was standing in that other circle, my bare feet numb, my heart pounding. Only this time, when I looked up across the etched line, it wasn’t Jarek in front of me.

It was Corren. Younger, eyes wild with fury.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” he growled, voice echoing strangely. “They said—”

The vision wrenched, tearing like cheap fabric. Voices bled together. Children screaming. The old alpha roaring. A woman chanting words that made my teeth ache.

I yanked my hand back.

Except I didn’t.

My body didn’t move.

A cold, slick feeling wrapped around my fingers, climbing my wrist, my arm. Not physical, not quite, but very real. The circle under my palm woke, lines of dim, sickly light crawling outward from my touch.

“Liora.” Corren’s voice sharpened. “Let go.”

“I can’t,” I said, and heard the thin edge of panic in my own voice. “It’s—”

The earth vibrated.

Not an earthquake. A pulse.

My resonance blew open, every sense screaming. I felt Bryn’s sudden spike of fear, Corren’s alpha power flaring in response—

—and behind it, a chorus of tiny heartbeats, too many, too fast.

Children.

Dozens of them.

They cried out without sound, tugging at me from far away, from everywhere. My vision went white at the edges as the forest tilted.

“Liora!” Corren hauled on my arm. Pain shot through my shoulder, but my hand stayed glued to the soil, held by invisible hooks.

“It’s a gate,” I gasped. “It’s—”

The ground inside the circle flashed, runes flaring bright, and something cold and hungry yanked hard on the line of my resonance.

For one impossibly heavy heartbeat, I wasn’t in my body anymore.

I was falling.

Stone walls, iron doors, the stink of stale fear. Small hands clutching at the air. A boy’s voice, thin with exhaustion: “Please. Please.”

“Tavis—”

His head snapped up. For the first time, he looked straight at me. Not through me. At me.

“You found us,” he whispered. “But you’re not alone.”

He glanced past my shoulder, at someone I couldn’t see in the dark.

A hand I did not know closed around his arm.

The connection snapped.

I slammed back into my body with a choked scream, knees hitting dirt. Corren caught me before I went face-first into the circle, his arms a locked band around my torso.

The clearing spun. The runes guttered, then flared brighter, hungry now, tasting fresh blood in the water.

From somewhere behind us, deep in the trees, a young wolf howled in sudden, sharp pain.

Niko.

My heart stopped.

“Bryn,” Corren snapped, voice like broken glass. “Get back to the den. Now.”

He didn’t move.

Because none of us could.

The circle surged again, light spearing up around my trapped hand like the bars of a cage.

And this time, when it pulled, it wasn’t just my resonance it grabbed.

It took Corren, too.