Obsessed With My Alpha

Broken Elements

Jonah's POV

I called after her before I'd made the conscious decision to move.

That's the part that unsettles me, lying here in the dark of my room hours later, staring at a ceiling I can't see. I didn't think *I should go after her.* I didn't weigh it, consider it, or decide. My body just moved — like something in me overrode the part that knew better, the part that had spent eleven years maintaining exactly the right amount of distance.

I'd caught up to her. Touched her arm without thinking. And then stood there in the cold with my hand on her jacket sleeve, feeling like an i***t who had no idea what I was trying to say.

*I don't want tonight to be the thing that ruins us.*

Smooth, Jonah. Real articulate.

I press the heels of my hands against my eyes and exhale slowly. The room smells faintly of pine resin and laundry detergent and something else — something soft, faintly sweet, like warm amber. Gemma had been in here last week, borrowing one of my old flannel shirts because she'd spilled something on hers, and the scent had just... stayed. I'd noticed it every time I walked in since. Hadn't opened a window.

Which was pathetic. I was aware of that.

I sit up, swinging my legs off the bed, letting the cold floorboards ground me. The house is quiet. Everyone else has been asleep for hours. I should be asleep. I have training at six, and Alpha Alaric does not accept excuses, not even from his own son. Especially not from his own son.

But every time I close my eyes, I see Gemma's face.

Not the hurt — though that's there too, carved into me in a way I didn't expect. I see the moment just before, when she was saying it. When she stood on that treehouse platform with the moonlight behind her and told me she loved me, not like a friend, not like family, but the real kind — the terrifying, irrevocable kind. Her voice had been steady. Her hands had been shaking. She'd looked directly at me the entire time, like she refused to give herself an exit.

I'd never seen her look like that before.

And something in me — something below thought, below language, some animal layer of myself I don't have clean access to — had gone absolutely still. Like a hunting dog catching a scent. Like a compass needle swinging hard toward north and locking there.

I'd ignored it. Filed it under *you're projecting, Snow* and focused on being kind.

But it's still there now, hours later, that pull. Quiet and insistent. The way a bruise announces itself every time you forget it's there.

I scrub a hand over my face and stand up. Move to the window. The pack grounds spread out below, silver-blue in the moonlight, the training fields empty, the tree line dark and still. Somewhere out there, past the oaks, is the treehouse. Our treehouse. I can't see it from here, but I know exactly which gap in the canopy to look through.

I've always known.

That's the thing I can't quite work out. I've known Gemma Harris since we were six years old. She's been my constant — the one person in my life I never had to perform for, never had to be *Alpha Heir* for. With everyone else, I'm always calculating. What they need from me, what I'm allowed to need from them, how much to give and how much to withhold. With Gemma, I just... existed. And she existed beside me, and it was easy in a way nothing else in my life has ever been.

So why does it feel like I've been deliberately not-looking at something for years?

I think about my father.

That's usually where my brain goes when things start feeling complicated. Alpha Alaric Snow, the immovable object, the man who has never once in my memory shown softness to another living thing and seemed to consider that a point of pride. I'd grown up in that house, learned to read moods like weather patterns, learned that the safest version of myself was also the most contained one.

*Love is a weakness, Jonah. It makes you predictable. It makes you controllable. You give someone that kind of power and you've handed them the knife.*

He'd said it so many times it had become a kind of internal wallpaper. Always there. Easy to stop seeing.

Except tonight, standing in the cold with my hand on Gemma's arm, I hadn't felt like someone handing over a knife.

I'd felt like someone terrified of dropping one.

I press my forehead against the cool glass of the window. My wolf stirs at the edges of my awareness — that other self, quieter than most alpha wolves I've met, more watchful. He doesn't speak in words, exactly. More in impressions, in weights. Right now he's pressing against the inside of my chest like he's trying to get my attention, low and steady and *persistent.*

"Stop it," I tell him.

He doesn't.

I push back from the window and drop onto the edge of my bed, elbows on knees. The honest version of tonight, the one I'll never say out loud to anyone, goes like this:

When Gemma turned to leave, my wolf lost his mind.

Not dramatically. It wasn't a movie moment. It was quieter than that — a sudden, acute wrongness, like a sound cutting out mid-note. Like something important going dark. And my body had moved before I told it to because some part of me, some deep-coded animal part, could not tolerate the direction she was walking.

That terrifies me more than anything she said.

Because I know what the mate bond feels like. I've heard it described my whole life — the pull, the recognition, the sense of "found." I've seen unmated wolves shift at the scent of their mate without meaning to. I've seen grown men look at women they've known for years and go suddenly, completely certain.

And I've told myself, with great conviction, for a very long time: *Gemma is not my mate. I would know.*

But tonight I chased her down a dark path without thinking, and my hand on her arm felt like the only thing holding me level, and her scent is still in my room, and my wolf is still pressing against my ribs like a second heartbeat that won't sync up.

So either I'm losing my mind.

Or I've been lying to myself.

I won't let myself finish the thought. I fold it up and put it somewhere I don't have to look at it, the way I've put everything my father ever burned into me — not gone, just managed. Controlled.

Gemma deserves someone whole. Someone whose idea of love isn't a threat assessment. Someone who doesn't catch himself calculating the risk of caring too much, every single time.

She deserves better than me.

That's the one thing I'm certain of. And as long as I hold onto it, I can hold everything else at arm's length too.

I lie back down. Close my eyes.

The room still smells like warm amber.

I leave the window shut.