The Alpha's Cursed Spare

The canteen smells like burnt porridge and wet fur. Someone shifted in the rain again. I can tell by the way the smell sits low near the floor, animal and damp, rising with the steam from the food trays. Against pack rules. Doesn't matter. Rules are for people the pack wants to keep. I find my seat at the end of the long table nearest the exit. Same seat. Every morning. The table has a c***k running left to right near the edge, a slight curve like a river on a bad map. Four years of eating here. I know that c***k. I put my tray down and my thumb finds the widest part of it automatically, the way a tongue finds a loose tooth. I don't look up when the bench shifts under new weight. "You're in my seat." Presley Vane. Beta-born. Same rank blood as me, which is the one thing she cannot stand. I keep my eyes on my food. "Forty-six other seats," I say. "I want this one." She doesn't. She wants me to push back. I've learned the difference. I pick up my tray and move one seat left without a word, and I hear the small sound she makes — not quite satisfied, not quite frustrated — because she wanted the resistance and I didn't hand it to her. She sits down next to me anyway. Of course she does. She picks up her spoon and studies her porridge like it's a document requiring her full attention. Her shoulder is two inches from mine. I can smell her body wash, something floral and expensive, and underneath it the faint metal tang of a wolf who shifts often and hard. "My dad was talking to yours last night," she says, very casual. Tracing the rim of her bowl with one finger. "Something about the border garrison. After graduation." She pauses. "Permanently." The border garrison. Where you send wolves with nowhere to go. Rogues who surrendered. Omegas who aged out. Wolves the pack has quietly decided it doesn't want anymore. I already knew. Not the details. Just the shape of it. The way my father's eyes move past me at dinner, not around me — past me, like I'm a window he's already looked through and found nothing on the other side. You learn to read that kind of nothing. It started twenty-two years before I was born, with a prophecy nobody talks about directly but everybody knows. The Beta bloodline would split. One heir would carry the line forward. The other would carry something else. When my mother went into labor and came out with two of us, my father held Soren and his face did something I've seen in photographs. Open. Unguarded. A man who believed in something. Four days later Soren was gone. Some quiet failure of the body that nobody named properly for me. And my father looked at me in the hospital room and whatever had been open in him closed, and it has never opened again, and the pack watched it close and drew their own conclusions. I am the reason the line split. I am the one who lived. These are the unspoken facts that organize my entire existence. "Thanks," I tell Presley. Flat. Giving her nothing. She glances at me sideways. Waiting for the flinch. When it doesn't come she loses interest and turns to talk to someone across the table, and I go back to my porridge, which has gone cold and thick and tastes like nothing at all. Across the canteen, Cade Holloway laughs at something Marcus said. I don't look. I know the sound of that laugh by now the way you know the sound of weather changing — the slight shift in pressure, the way the air in a room reorganizes itself around whoever holds the most power in it. Future Alpha. Heir to the Ashford Pack. Every ranked wolf in this room orbits him without appearing to, the way they teach you in navigation class that objects bend toward gravity without choosing to. I move my spoon through my porridge. A hand lands flat on the table in front of me. Palm down. Close enough to my tray that the vibration travels up through the plastic. I look up. Marcus Vane — Presley's older brother, nineteen, broad across the shoulders in a way that means he's been allowed to train with the senior warriors since he was sixteen — is standing across the table from me with his friends fanned out behind him like a sentence with too many words in it. "Beta Rowan's daughter," he says. Like a greeting. Like an insult. Both. "Heard you tested top of the combat class again." I didn't answer. "Weird." He tilts his head. "Girl with no wolf spirit managing that." He picks up my water cup. Looks at it. Sets it back down on the wrong side of my tray, a small rearrangement that shouldn't matter and does. "Almost makes you wonder what you're compensating for." The table is quiet now. Not silent — the canteen is still loud — but our specific corner of it has gone the particular quiet of people pretending not to listen. My wolf stirs. Low in my chest. She's been there since I was twelve, smaller than she should be, slower to respond, like a fire that never quite caught. The pack healer said it was grief. My father said it was proof. I've never been sure there's a difference. I look at my tray. The cold porridge. The water cup on the wrong side. I move the cup back. "Noted," I say. Marcus waits for something more. I don't give it. After a moment he makes a sound like I've disappointed him and walks away, and his friends go with him, and Presley is already talking to someone else like none of it happened. I finish my porridge. Cold. Tasteless. Every bite. The bell rings for first period and the canteen fills with the scrape and clatter of trays being cleared, bodies moving, the whole loud machinery of pack life reassembling itself around the day. I stand. Pick up my tray. At the door, I almost collide with someone coming the other way. I step back. Look up. Cade Holloway. Up close he's — I don't think about how he looks up close. That's a door I keep shut and bolted and have never once tested the lock on. What I notice is that he's holding the door open, which means he was coming in while I was going out and he stopped, which he didn't have to do. He looks at me. I look at him. Something moves in his expression. Quick. Gone before I can name it. His eyes drop to the tray in my hands and then come back to my face and there's something there I don't have a word for, something that isn't the usual nothing I get from ranked wolves when they bother to look at me at all. "Lira," he says. Just my name. Nothing attached to it. "Alpha-heir," I say back. He holds the door. I walk through it. I don't look back. But three steps down the hall, the back of my neck is warm in a way that has nothing to do with the temperature, and my wolf, small and slow as she is, lifts her head for the first time in months. Which is how I know something is about to go very wrong.