Marked By the Fake Alpha

Chapter 1: Chained Before the ThroneUntitled Episode

POV; Jenny

“You came back.”

The voice was close enough that she could feel it in the air around her. Jenny frowned in her sleep and forced herself to speak

“No,” she muttered. “I didn’t.” Her voice sounded strained.

Silence then filled the room, but it did not last long; not until a laugh was heard. It was interpreted in a way that suggests the person had never asked permission for anything in their life.

“You always say that,” the voice replied. “And you keep coming back.”

Jenny then forced herself to open her eyes; the darkness felt heavy on opening.

like it was sitting hard on her chest. The air smelled like rain and burnt pine. Something warm brushed her wrist, her eyes quickly snapped open. But it was all empty, just the moonlight stretched too wide and bright, hanging over a breathing forest.

She was terrified, and her heart pounded faster than it ever did, she quickly sat up, raised her face to scan the environment.

“Okay,” she said to herself. “Either I’m dead, or very dramatic trees have kidnaped me,......ohhhhhh Goshhh, i seriously hate drama.”

Almost no response came up, but a sound from a cracking branch behind her. She quickly turned, her impulses hit high when she noticed there was no one there.

Then a man’s voice was heard, closer now.

“You are worse at lying in dreams.”

she froze.

“I don’t have dreams like this,” she said slowly. “My dreams are usually about forgetting deadlines and crying in public.”

“Haaaaaa, hmmmmm......” the man simply moulted it, he then stepped out into the light. Now Jenny could see him.

He was tall, painfully handsome without seeming to try. Messy hair fell over his forehead, his shoulders wide beneath his shirt. His face looked rough in the right places: sharp jaw, tired eyes, a mouth that seemed built for smirking.

He looked at her for quite a long time without saying a word, and just tilted his head. Jenny appeared unease and shuddered

“You really don’t remember me.” He said

She stood up slowly, her left hand supporting her from the ground, then brushed off dirt from her dress.

“How do i even know you? Because I feel like that is a dangerous question.”

His mouth curved slightly, not quite a smile.

“You always talk like that when you are confused.” He replied.

“I’m not confused,” she said immediately. “I’m extremely informed. Just informally informed. In a forest. With you. And i do not know how?”

He looked at her hand, which was bleeding, then back to her face and calmly said to her. “You’re bleeding.”

She looked down at herself and noticed nothing, and there was no problem with her hand.

“There is nothing wrong with me,” she said.

He stepped forward, coming close to her, but she quickly stepped back. He noticed her move and stopped; that moment carried an unexpected gravity of importance, but did not get it.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” he said.

“Oh good,” she replied. “And I wasn’t planning on staying either. I was actually trying to wake up. Do you know where the exit is? It’s usually the part where my alarm screams at me.” Her voice was snarky.

He was totally confused, could not tell what was going on with her.

“You are not asleep.”

Jenny blinked rapidly at high speed. Then laughed once, short and sharp. “That’s comforting. So this is just… reality now? Great. Love that for me.”

A wind passed through the forest, cold enough to make the trees shiver as if they were listening to everything. The man’s expression shifted, subtle but enough to send unease crawling beneath Jenny’s skin. Then everything just snapped. Jenny was now awake, choking on cold air, panic still gripping her chest. There were no more moonlight and forest surrounding her. Only a concrete ceiling and wooden beams above her, though still carried the panic from her dream.

She sat up too fast. “Ow,” she muttered. “Fantastic start to the day.” A bucket clanged nearby.

“You are late.”

Jenny turned her head slowly. Her eyes falling on a woman who was standing on the doorway, arms crossed, expression like she had never experienced joy and didn’t intend to start now. Jenny rubbed her face.

“Late for what? Life?” her voice still shaky

“For cleaning the east corridor,” the woman snapped. “Again.”

Jenny stared at her and replied instantly, “I cleaned it yesterday.”

“And now it’s dirty again.” The woman said.

“That feels like a personal problem between you and physics.”

The woman’s eye twitched in annoyance. Jenny did not mind; she stood up and stretched her body out. It was aching like she had spent the whole night cultivating, worked too hard, and possibly had been emotionally taxed by existence itself. She then grabbed a cloth from the table and walked out, swinging her head.

“If I die today, please don’t make me clean anything in the afterlife.” Her voice was very loud that anyone under the same roof could hear her.

No one laughed, and they never did.

Silver Creek Pack House always sounded like it was holding its breath. Servants moved fast, though Wolves moved faster. Rank decided everything in it, silence had hierarchy. Jenny walked through the corridor, wiping stone walls that did not need wiping. Someone bumped her shoulder hard enough to make her stagger, but did not apologize b, and she didn’t bother to turn around.

“You’re getting better at not bleeding,” a voice said behind her.

Jenny stopped whatever she was doing, simply composing herself. “That’s character development,” she said without turning. “I’m actually evolving.” She smiled and continued with her work.

A young servant girl passed her, whispering, “Don’t talk like that. They hear everything.” Jenny’s lips curved into a faint smile as she kept scrubbing the wall, her voice calm but edged with dry humor. “If they’re listening to me scrub walls, they need hobbies.” The girl looked around nervously before hurrying away, leaving Jenny alone with the steady rhythm of her work.

Above her, a figure moved along the high walkway, she looked up but did not see anything, only shadows stretched across wood and stone. Her chest tightened for a moment, sharp and involuntary, like someone had stepped too close to a memory she could not place. She held her breath, and forced it out slowly and then looked back down at her work.

She pressed the cloth harder against the wall, steadying her hands, telling herself the day remained ordinary, nothing else seemed uneasy.

The doors at the far end of the hall opened, and everything changed instantly. Movement slowed, voices dropped, and even the impression the air gave was different, heavier somehow. Jenny didn’t look up at first. She kept wiping the wall like nothing had happened until one of the older servants whispered,

“Alpha.”

She stopped what she was doing at that very moment and slowly turned her head to see who was coming in.

Austin Vale walked in like the entire building belonged to him and no one had ever dared question it.

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to, because he was the Alpha of the pack. The corridor shifted around him, heads lowering, bodies stiffening as silence spread faster than wind. Fear filled the hall faster than obedience ever could. Jenny watched him carefully. He wasn’t loud, but power clung to him like a living thing, quiet and impossible to ignore.

His gaze swept across the corridor, then stopped on her. Jenny forgot what her hands were doing. For one strange second, everything else faded: the noise, the movement, the people. Just him and her. Fear sat uneasily beneath her irritation, tightening her chest for reasons she couldn’t explain, strange enough to make her chest tighten, like recognition wrapped inside a lost memory, as if some forgotten part of her knew him even when her mind did not.

Austin’s expression shifted, and it was only her who noticed. His eyes narrowed slightly, his attention sharpening in a way that made her stomach drum, the sound being louder and embarrassing, almost like he had caught hold of something invisible, no one else in the corridor could sense.

Jenny swallowed and looked away for half a second.

“Great,” she muttered under her breath, gripping the cloth in her hand. “Apparently, I’m allergic to authority figures in every reality.

Austin stepped forward, and the corridor seemed to tense with him. Conversations that had already died stayed buried, servants straightened without meaning to, and the air itself became heavier, tighter, until nobody seemed willing to breathe too loudly. He stopped in front of her, close enough that she had to tilt her head slightly to meet his eyes. Jenny realized everyone else had frozen.

He looked at her for a long moment, not casually or with passing curiosity, but with a stillness that unsettled her and made her suddenly aware of herself, of the dust on her sleeves, the rag still hanging awkwardly in her hand, the fact that she had absolutely no idea why one terrifyingly powerful man was staring at her like she had interrupted the laws of nature.

“You.” He said

His voice was calm, controlled, smooth in a way that somehow appeared wrong, because people with that much power weren’t supposed to sound that quiet.

Jenny blinked. “Me?”

Silence settled again. “What is your name?”

Jenny hesitated because moments that started like this rarely ended well for people in her position.

“I’m Jenny,” she said carefully, forcing her voice to stay steady. Then, before common sense could stop her, she added,

“And before you ask, I didn’t break anything important today.” She added.

She paused briefly.

“Yet.”

Something unreadable crossed his face. It wasn’t amusement, though she almost wished it was. It wasn’t anger either. If anything, it looked disturbingly close to recognition, tangled with something sharper that she could not quite name.

Behind him, one of the guards leaned in and whispered a message urgently.

Austin didn’t look away from her, not even for a second, his expression unreadable as the silence around them stretched until it was heavy enough to touch. The servants nearby had gone painfully still, their heads lowered, their bodies tense in a way that made Jenny suddenly aware that whatever happened next mattered far more than she understood. Then, without raising his voice, he spoke.

“Bring her to the Alpha Hall.”

Jenny stared at him, certain she had either misheard him or accidentally wandered into the worst possible version of her day.

“Sorry,” she said slowly, blinking once.

“Could you repeat that, but in a version of the story where my life isn’t about to get dramatically worse?”...... forcing herself to kneel down yet she did not wish to ever kneel for anyone. But now everything had changed.

The moment the words left her mouth, regret hit instantly.

“Sorry...............”