Fated to the Wrong Alpha

Chapter 14 – Fractured Loyalties

I find Selene on the balcony outside the Voss guest suite, a mug of tea cooling between her hands.

City lights stretch out below, a scatter of stars spilled at our feet. The Lyall tower rises to our left, its glass sides still scarred from the brief blackout. Somewhere above us, Corren is buried in strategy with his wolves.

Down here, the air smells like damp stone and my aunt’s lavender shampoo.

“You’re brooding,” she says without turning. “I can feel it from three doorways away.”

“I get that from your side of the family,” I answer, stepping out into the chill.

She smiles at the skyline. “You get stubbornness from both.”

I lean on the rail beside her. The wind carries the faintest trace of burned herbs from the direction of the tower’s core. My mark pulses in response, a quiet, hateful reminder.

“You knew him,” I say. No preamble. We’re past that. “Vaelis Crow.”

Her fingers tighten around the cup. Porcelain creaks.

“Yes,” she says. No denial, no detour. “I did.”

“How well?”

She exhales. “Well enough to know his real name before the Council gave him that pretty, ominous one. Well enough to know what he lost before they turned him into their favorite knife. Not well enough to stop him when he started using it.”

Anger flashes, sharp and unexpected. “You could have told me.”

“I could have told you many things,” she says dryly. “When you were ten. Twelve. Sixteen. None of them would have saved you from a circle I was forbidden to speak against.”

I turn to face her fully. “Tell me now.”

She studies my face, the strain I can feel written there. After a moment, she nods.

“Sit,” she orders, dropping into the chair by the little iron table. I obey, more from habit than anything.

“He wasn’t always the Council’s pet ritualist,” she begins. “Once, he was just a talented wolf from a small, unimportant pack. Good with patterns, better with people. He and his mate had one of those storybook bonds—loud, bright, impossible to ignore. The kind that made elders nervous.”

“Nervous,” I echo. “Because they couldn’t control it.”

She dips her head. “They called it ‘volatile.’ They brought in an ‘expert’ to help them ‘stabilize.’ That expert used some of the same structures you saw under your feet today. The ritual went wrong. His mate died. He survived. Barely.”

Silence hums between us.

“The Council offered him a choice,” she continues. “Disappear quietly with his grief…or learn how the system really worked and make sure ‘no one else’ suffered like he did.”

My stomach twists. “By helping them…do the same to other people.”

“They told him it would be different,” she says. “That they’d be careful. That it was for peace. He was angry and hurting enough to believe them. Angry enough to want to tear the whole thing down from the inside. He thought if he held the knife, he could control who it cut.”

“And instead,” I say, “he cut everyone.”

She looks at me, eyes bright with something too complicated to name. “Including you.”

The wind picks up, stealing my breath for a second.

“You were there,” I manage. “In my circle.”

“I argued,” she says softly. “Your father was already gone. Maelor listened to the Council. They said your mark was…unusual. That you needed ‘guidance.’” Her tone makes the word sound like poison. “Vaelis watched you the way a surgeon watches a patient. I hated his eyes. I hated that they weren’t the only ones like that in the room.”

My hands curl into fists on my knees. “You didn’t stop it.”

“No.” The word is a cut across her own skin. “I didn’t. I stayed. I held your hand while you bled. I wiped your face when you blacked out. I told you it was inconclusive because the truth would have broken you sooner.”

“I’m broken now,” I say. It comes out rougher than I intend.

“No.” She reaches across the table and takes my hand, her grip firm. “You’re cracked in places. There’s a difference.”

My throat tightens. I stare at our joined hands: her fingers lined with faint silver scars of her own, mine marked by a bracelet Lyssa insisted I keep.

“Did Maelor know exactly what he was buying?” I ask. “When he agreed to that ritual. When he signed off on Vaelis.”

She’s quiet for a long moment. “He knew enough,” she says at last. “Enough to be guilty. Not enough, perhaps, to be the architect. That distinction won’t comfort you.”

It doesn’t.

“You’re going to go after Vaelis,” she adds.

“Of course,” I say. “He’s the only one who understands this mess. The only one who might know how to undo it.”

“And you’re going to go against the Council to do it,” she says. “Against your uncle. Against some of our own allies.”

“If I have to.” The words feel like stepping off a ledge.

She squeezes my hand harder. “Then listen carefully, little wolf. Because loyalty is about to get complicated.” Her gaze turns flinty. “You do not owe blind obedience to blood that sold you. You do not owe mercy to a man who carved you open. But you also don’t get to pretend you can fix this alone.”

My chest aches, but it’s a cleaner pain than before. “You’re with me?”

“I’m with the girl I practically raised,” she says. “The one I watched be shaped into a tool and then discarded when the shape didn’t fit. I’m also with my pack.” She grimaces. “Unfortunately, those aren’t clean lines anymore.”

“Welcome to my week,” I mutter.

She laughs, soft and sad. “You’ll need allies in both houses. In Lyall’s den and Voss’s. Choose them well. And when you find Vaelis?” Her voice drops. “Remember he’s both monster and victim. Don’t let either excuse the other.”

I nod. The bond between me and Corren hums faintly, picking up my resolve, feeding it back.

Selene releases my hand, then leans back, studying me with that sharp, assessing gaze she usually reserves for Maelor.

“You’re angry,” she says. “Good. Be angry. Just make sure you aim it at the right hearts.”

“Vaelis first,” I say. “Then whoever pointed him at us.”

“And between them?” she asks.

I think of Corren in the training room, of Elira’s echo in our bond, of the tangled web of lives we never agreed to share.

“Between them,” I say quietly, “I figure out how much of me is still mine.”

She smiles, sad and proud.

“That,” she says, “is the part they’ll never be able to rewrite.”