Luna Discarded, Alpha Forgotten

Five Years

Five years is long enough to become someone else entirely, if you are willing to do the work, and Elena had never once let herself stop.

She had promised herself, on the nights when training left her too tired to sleep and the old grief crept in anyway, that she would not waste this borrowed second chance being gentle with herself. Standing now in a yard full of recruits who called her Alpha without a flicker of hesitation, she thought she had mostly kept the promise.

She had learned to fight properly in the first year. Not the desperate burst that had put down a rogue in the mud on her eleventh day at Ashgrove, but real, trained strength. Roran's weapons master put her through the same drills he ran for the front line, without softening a single one for her sake. She still remembered the first time she put Roran on the ground instead of the other way around. Six months into training, both of them equally startled. He had looked up at her from the dust and said, dry as paper, "Well. That is going to be a problem for someone, eventually."

She had broken three fingers in the second month and finished the session anyway. The faint crooked line in her smallest finger was still there. A small, permanent reminder that she had chosen, deliberately, not to be gentle with herself during the years she needed to become someone else.

By the second year, wolves beyond Ashgrove had started using a name for her that she had not chosen and could not quite bring herself to correct.

The White Wolf.

It traveled the way pack rumors do, mouth to mouth across territories that had no reason to speak to one another. The story grew in the retelling. A rejected mate who had walked out of Blackthorn and come back a legend, her coat the color of old bloodlines everyone assumed had died out. It collected details she had never provided and could not have disproved. That she had faced down a whole rogue war band alone. That she could track a scent across three territories without losing it. That no Alpha in the region had beaten her in single combat since her third year of training, which happened to be true, though she never volunteered it. She let the story grow. A reputation, she had learned, could do work that words alone never managed, and she had a great deal of ground to make up.

By the third year, Roran had made her his second in everything but title. It raised eyebrows among Ashgrove's older wolves and settled, over time, into plain fact, the way most of his decisions did. He asked her once, late at night after a border dispute resolved without bloodshed, largely because of a plan she had designed, whether she meant to stay at Ashgrove forever or whether some part of her was always pointed back toward Blackthorn, waiting.

She had no good answer then. She still did not, entirely, though the question had stopped frightening her somewhere around the fourth year.

There was something between them. She would not have denied it. An easy gravity that had built slowly, across years of shared purpose, rather than the sudden violent snap of a true mate bond. Neither of them had rushed to name it. Elena was not certain she trusted bonds anymore, not the fast, binding kind. What she and Roran had felt sturdier for having grown slowly, chosen and rechosen instead of arriving all at once and demanding to be obeyed.

Every first snowfall, she walked out alone to the eastern tree line and stood in the place where Roran had once said, Do not die on my land. She never told anyone why. She stood there until her fingers went numb, and she let herself remember the girl she had been, face down in the cold, deciding not to stay. Then she went back to work. It was a private ritual, and it helped. It reminded her what she had been willing to lose, and what she had refused to.

By the fifth year, Ashgrove's territory had nearly doubled. Three smaller packs along the northern border had folded themselves under Roran's protection rather than risk facing the pack that had produced the White Wolf as an enemy. Elena had negotiated two of those alliances herself, sitting across a table from Alphas twice her age who had come in braced for a fight and left having signed terms far kinder to Ashgrove than they had planned to offer.

She had stopped thinking about Blackthorn every day. Some weeks she managed several days at a stretch without the old ache surfacing at all. She counted that as its own kind of victory, even on the days it did not quite feel true.

She was in the training yard on the morning it ended.

She was running a new set of recruits through drills of her own design, when one of the gate wolves came jogging across the yard with the particular urgency of someone carrying news he did not want to be the one delivering.

"Rider at the gate," he said. "Alone, unarmed, flying a white flag. She says she carries a formal message from Blackthorn Pack. She asked for you by name."

Elena's hands stilled on the practice blade. Five years, and it still took a moment to remember that Blackthorn had a name for her too. That the girl who had crawled through these gates half dead no longer existed as far as the outside world was concerned.

"Which name?" she asked, though she already suspected the answer.

"The White Wolf." The gate wolf hesitated. "She said something else, Alpha. She said to tell you Blackthorn is asking for an audience because they are dying, and they have no one else left to ask."

The yard had gone quiet.

Every recruit was watching her with the wide eyed attention of people witnessing something they would remember later as the beginning of a story. Elena set the practice blade down carefully. She had spent five years rebuilding herself into someone Blackthorn would not recognize. And the moment she had half expected, half dreaded, had arrived on its own terms instead of hers.

"Bring her in," she said. "Let us hear exactly how badly they are dying."

The woman led into the yard a few minutes later was older than Elena remembered. The gray in her hair had spread, and there was a stiffness in her shoulders that had not been there before. But the face was one Elena would have known anywhere, in any light, after any number of years.

"Marta."

The name came out rougher than she meant it to, catching on something she had not expected to still be tender.

Marta's composure, famous across Blackthorn for never cracking in front of a frightened patient, broke completely at the sound of her own name. "You are alive," she said, half laughing, half something closer to grief. "Gods above, girl, look at you. They said the White Wolf had silver fur and I told myself it could not possibly." She stopped, pressed a hand to her mouth, and started again, steadier. "I need to speak with you. Not as Blackthorn's messenger. As myself, first. There is a great deal you do not know, and most of it, I am ashamed to say, I should have found a way to tell you years ago."

Elena felt the yard, the recruits, even Roran's presence somewhere at her back narrow down to this one small gray haired woman and the look on her face. The look of someone who had come to say something that was going to cost them both before it was finished being said.

"Then say it," Elena told her. "I have waited five years. I can wait a little longer to hear it properly."