The Alpha who Watched Over Me

ELARA POV The clock above the register read 11:38 when the bell over the door rang for what I hoped was the last time. Fridays never worked that way, but a girl could hope. The man who came in smelled like he'd already had a few drinks somewhere better than here. He grabbed a pack of cigarettes, slid his card across the counter, and looked at my uniform like it explained something about my life he'd already decided. "Long night, huh? Rough gig for a pretty girl." "Rough gig for anybody," I said, and handed him his receipt with a smile that cost me nothing and meant less. Inside, I was already writing the version I'd tell Mira tomorrow — the one where I had a much better comeback and he left looking embarrassed instead of amused. That was the job. You smiled, you survived the shift, and you saved the good lines for people who'd actually laugh at them. My phone buzzed on the counter once he'd gone. Mira, checking in from home like she did most nights I closed alone. *lock up good. text me when ur home. also i had a dream you married a rich guy and I want details when I see you* I typed back a laughing emoji and told her I'd see her tomorrow, then put the phone away before I could start wondering what kind of dream that actually was. Mira had opinions about my love life that outpaced my actual love life by a wide margin. At 11:52 I counted the drawer, killed the lights, and stepped out into air that had turned sharper since I'd clocked in. I locked the door behind me and started the walk home the way I always did — alone, keys already threaded through my fingers, telling myself it was fine because it had to be. Mill Street was quiet in that particular way it got after midnight, the streetlights spaced too far apart, throwing more shadow than light. I knew this walk by memory — the buckled slab of sidewalk past the Hendersons', the porch light that never turned off at the corner house, the place where the trees behind the old lumber yard grew close enough to the road that the dark pooled thick underneath them. The wind had picked up since I'd left the store, cold enough to cut through my jacket, and my breath came out in short white clouds that disappeared before I could really see them. Somewhere behind the Hendersons' place a dog barked twice and went quiet. I counted my own footsteps out of habit, the way I always did on this stretch — a small, stupid ritual that made the empty street feel a little less empty. Mira always told me to take the bus. I always told her it didn't run this late, which was true, and that I wasn't scared, which mostly was. That was where I felt it. Not saw. Felt, the way you feel someone watching you in a crowded room, except the street was empty. I slowed without deciding to and looked at the tree line. For half a second — no more than that — something in the black beneath the trees caught a stray gleam of streetlight. Two points of gold, low to the ground, there and then gone, so fast I couldn't be sure I'd seen anything at all. I told myself it was a dog, or nothing at all, and kept walking a little faster than before. I hadn't gone twenty more steps when I heard footsteps behind me that weren't mine. Two of them, closing the distance too fast to be casual. One said something about how late it was for a girl to be walking alone. I kept my eyes forward and didn't answer, and that was when I noticed the second one glance toward the trees and go quiet mid-sentence, like something out there had caught his attention and he didn't like it. I didn't get the chance to look myself. A hand closed around my arm and spun me half around, and every thought in my head went white and cold at once. "Let go of me." "That's not very friendly." I don't know what I would have done next. Pulled away. Screamed. Dropped my bag and run. I never found out, because footsteps came from the direction of the tree line, unhurried and certain, and a voice cut through the dark before the man could say anything else. "She asked you to let go." He was just there. Tall, dark-haired, dressed like he belonged somewhere far more expensive than this street, watching the hand on my arm with an attention that made the man release me without being told twice. "This isn't your business," the second man tried, though his voice had already lost its nerve. "I'm making it my business." He didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. The two of them muttered something and walked off fast, glancing back once like they expected to be followed. He let them go and turned to me instead. My pulse was still slamming against my ribs, loud enough that I half expected he could hear it. Up close he was even more unsettling than he'd been from a distance — not frightening, exactly, just impossible to look away from, like standing too near something that could do a great deal of damage and had simply decided not to. "Are you hurt, Elara?" I stared at him, and for one strange second the streetlight caught his eyes full-on — a gold so pale it barely looked human — and something old and buried shifted loose in my chest, something I couldn't name and didn't like not being able to name. "How do you know my name?" Something crossed his face, there and gone before I could read it. "You should get inside," he said, which wasn't an answer at all. "It isn't safe out here this late." "I didn't tell you my name." "No," he agreed. "You didn't." He glanced once toward the trees behind me, the same place I'd been watching minutes earlier, and something in his jaw tightened like he'd seen what I hadn't. Then he told me to go home and lock the door, and walked back into the dark before I could ask anything else. I stood there long after the sound of his footsteps had faded, staring at the empty dark where he'd disappeared. He'd known my name before I'd ever given it to him. I didn't have the first idea how.