The Alpha's Cursed Spare

Chapter 3: Six Weeks

The Choosing Ceremony notice goes up on the main board outside the pack hall at exactly seven in the morning.

I know because I'm already walking past when they pin it. Two of the Alpha's administrative staff, both in the formal gray uniforms with the Ashford crest on the breast pocket, moving quickly and not making eye contact with anyone. The notice is printed on heavy cream paper. Official seal at the top. I don't stop walking but I read fast, the way you learn to read things you're not supposed to care about.

*All unmated ranked wolves between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five are required to attend the Ashford Pack Choosing Ceremony. Attendance is mandatory. Absences without medical documentation will be recorded.*

Required. Mandatory. Recorded.

I keep walking.

The hallway smells like floor cleaner and someone's breakfast, eggs and something charred, carried out of the residential wing on a paper plate. Two freshman boys are arguing about something near the water fountain. A girl I don't know is crying quietly into her phone against the far wall, and nobody is stopping for her, and I don't stop either, which I think about for three steps and then stop thinking about because stopping doesn't actually help anyone in this pack, I learned that early.

Damon falls into step beside me at the junction between the academic wing and the training corridor.

My brother. Nineteen. Taller than me by half a head and broader in the way that means his wolf is fully integrated and well-fed, the kind of physical ease that comes from a body that has never once doubted itself. He smells like his morning run. Sweat and pine and the particular green-sharp smell of the east training fields after rain.

He doesn't say anything for about thirty seconds, which is how I know he saw me read the notice.

"You don't have to go," he says.

"It's mandatory."

"Dad can get you a medical—"

"Damon."

He stops talking. We walk. The floor cleaner smell fades and gets replaced by the chalk-and-old-rubber smell of the corridor that leads to the training rooms, which I know so well at this point it barely registers as a smell at all, more like a texture, something I move through.

The thing about Damon is that he isn't cruel. That's the specific shape of the problem. If he were cruel it would be easier, I'd have somewhere to put it. Instead he's just absent in a way that looks like kindness from a distance. He shows up after the damage is already done. He doesn't start fires. He just never carries water.

"I heard about the records," I say.

He misses half a step. Small. Recoverable. He recovers it.

"I don't know what he's planning to do with them."

"Mary thinks it's about the Choosing."

"Mary thinks a lot of things."

"Mary is usually right."

He doesn't answer that. We stop at the junction where my route goes left toward combat theory and his goes right toward the senior strategy rooms, because Damon is already in advanced track, already being groomed for the Beta role he'll inherit when our father steps down, already living three steps ahead in the future that was decided for him before he could walk.

He looks at me. He has our mother's eyes, or so I'm told. I don't have anything to compare it to.

"Just keep your head down for six weeks," he says. "After the Ceremony things will settle."

"Will they."

He holds my gaze for a moment. Something moves in it, something genuine and uncomfortable, the look of a person who knows the answer to the question and has decided not to say it.

"Go to class," he says, and turns right.

I go left.

---

Combat theory with Mr. Tallis is held in a room that used to be a storage space, which you can tell because the ceiling is lower than it should be and there's a smell of old cardboard underneath the chalk smell, something slightly sweet and decaying in the walls. There are twelve of us in the class. Eleven ranked wolves and me.

Mr. Tallis doesn't rank us by blood. He ranks us by result, which is the only reason I've survived four years of his class without losing my mind entirely. He's sixty-something, former garrison commander, one ear slightly higher than the other from a break that healed wrong, and he has a way of looking at you like he's estimating your weight and your breaking point simultaneously.

He's already at the board when I come in. A tactical map, hand-drawn, the kind he makes himself with a fine-tipped marker at five in the morning because he doesn't trust printed materials. Some border region I don't recognize immediately. Three pack territories, contested ground in the middle, and what looks like a rogue movement pattern sketched in red.

"Six weeks," he says, without turning around. Not a greeting. Just a fact dropped in the room. "For those of you planning to be selected for the Alpha-heir's inner circle, I'd suggest paying particular attention to the next two units."

He turns around.

His eyes land on me first. Not because I'm near the front — I'm not, I sit three rows back on the left, same seat every class, same as the canteen, same as everywhere — but because they always do. Mr. Tallis has a habit of finding me in a room the way a compass finds north. He has never once explained it.

"Border strategy," he says to the class. "Who can tell me the primary weakness of a three-point defensive formation against a rogue incursion from an unmapped direction?"

Silence. Marcus Vane, who sits in the front row because he believes proximity to the front of a room confers authority, shifts in his seat. Opens his mouth.

"The center point is response-dependent," I say. "If the incursion comes from a direction the three points weren't calibrated for, the center wolf has to make a judgment call alone. The formation only works if the center reads it right."

Mr. Tallis looks at me for a long moment.

"Correct," he says. "The center wolf." He turns back to the board. "Which is why the center is never the strongest wolf. It's the most perceptive one."

Marcus turns in his seat and looks at me. He has a particular expression he makes, something between a smile and the thing that comes before a decision, and I look back at him steadily until he turns around.

My hands are flat on my desk. The desk surface is slightly sticky near the left corner, someone's old tape residue, tacky under my fingertip when I press it. I press it twice. Let it ground me.

---

It's after fourth period when I find the note.

It's in my locker. Which means someone who has my combination or knows how to get around a standard pack-issue lock put it there between third and fourth period, slid through the gap at the top. A small folded square of paper, white, no envelope.

I open it standing at my locker with my back to the corridor, the metal door blocking it from view on one side.

Three lines. Handwritten. Small, controlled letters, the kind that belong to someone who learned to write from the same formal instruction I did.

*Your bloodline assessment. 3rd year. The secondary reading.*

*Ask the healer why it was removed from your official file.*

*Then ask who requested it.*

No signature.

I read it twice. Fold it back along its original creases. Put it in the inside pocket of my jacket, against my ribs, where I can feel the slight pressure of it when I breathe.

The corridor is full of noise behind me. The usual post-class movement, voices and footsteps and a door banging somewhere far down the hall. I shut my locker. Turn around.

Cade Holloway is leaning against the wall across from me.

Not looking at me. He's talking to someone beside him, one of his ranked friends, head slightly turned, the casual posture of someone who has never once had to perform relaxation because it comes naturally. His arms are crossed. He's wearing the senior training jacket with the Alpha-heir band on the sleeve, dark red on black.

But as I turn he looks up. Directly at me. Like he was waiting for it.

I hold the look for one second. Two.

Then I walk away.

My wolf is moving low in my chest, slow and deliberate, the way she moves when something is close. Not a threat. Something else. Something she recognizes and I don't have a name for yet, something that makes the note against my ribs feel suddenly very heavy.

The healer's office is in the east wing. I know the hours. I know the layout. I've been there enough times for assessments and documented accidents and the two occasions the pack medic needed official documentation of why Beta Rowan's daughter had bruises that weren't from training.

I have forty minutes before fifth period.

I turn left instead of right.