Stripped wet for the Alpha

Running From the Moon

She did not sleep.

Zephyrine lay on her narrow mattress and stared at the ceiling while the city outside her window made its usual sounds and her wolf made sounds louder than all of them. The mate bond hummed beneath her skin like a live wire, low and insistent, pulling in the direction of the northern quarter with a patience that felt almost mocking. As if it knew she could run every night for the rest of her life and the distance would never actually grow.

She had counted the money twice before getting into bed. Vanya had made sure she got her full payment before they left, sharp-eyed and suspicious when Zephyrine appeared at her elbow fifteen minutes before the booking was supposed to end. She had not asked questions until they were in the car. Then she had asked four of them in rapid succession and Zephyrine had answered none of them.

The money was enough. Emryn's medication for six weeks. Two months of rent with a small cushion left over. She should have felt relief.

She felt nothing except the pull.

She turned onto her side and pressed her face into the pillow and tried to be logical about it.

Fated mates were not a guarantee of anything good. Every omega in Ashveil knew that. The moon paired wolves by instinct and chemistry and something older than either, but it did not check references first. It did not care about rank or history or the stories that circulated in hushed voices about what Dravek Ironmoor had done to the last Alpha who challenged his borders. Three packs absorbed in four years. Wolves who had opposed him were disappearing quietly. An enforcer named Ravek spoke about the way children spoke about things that lived under beds.

The moon had looked at all of that and pointed at her anyway.

She was an omega. A stripper. A girl keeping two children alive on stage money and stubbornness. She was nobody's Luna and she had no business being inside that compound and she was never going back.

She decided that clearly and firmly at approximately two in the morning and then lay awake until five enforcing it.

Emryn padded into her room just after sunrise, his breathing audible even before she heard his footsteps. He climbed onto the foot of her bed with the careful movements of a child who had learned not to use too much energy at once and looked at her with his large quiet eyes.

"You didn't sleep," he said.

"I slept a little."

"You have the face."

"What face?"

"The one where you're pretending." He pulled her spare blanket over his legs and settled in as if he planned to stay until she told him the truth. He had done this since he was six years old. It had never worked and he had never stopped trying.

She sat up and reached over to press her palm against his forehead out of habit. No fever. She exhaled.

"I'm fine, Emryn."

"Lirien said you came home late."

"It was a booking. Bookings run late sometimes."

He considered this with the gravity of someone four times his age. "Did you get paid?"

"Yes."

"Enough for my medicine?"

The question landed the way it always did, clean and direct, because he was eleven and had already learned that pretending things cost nothing was a luxury none of them could afford. She hated that he knew how to ask. She hated that she had taught him the shape of their survival without meaning to.

"Enough for your medicine and the rent," she said. "Go wake your sister. I'll make breakfast."

He slid off the bed and she listened to his careful footsteps move down the hall and told herself again that she had made the right decision. She had run. She would keep running. The bond would ache for a while and then it would quiet and she would find a way to live inside the silence of it the way she had learned to live inside everything else.

She was making eggs when someone knocked on the front door.

She froze.

The knock came again. Three times. Measured and unhurried, the kind of knock that was not asking permission.

Lirien appeared in the kitchen doorway, still in her sleep shirt, hair loose around her shoulders. "Are you expecting someone?"

"No."

"Should I get it?"

"No." Zephyrine turned off the stove and moved to the hallway. She looked through the peephole and her blood went cold.

The man outside was not Dravek. He was large enough to fill the doorframe and dressed in black with the flat expression of someone paid to deliver messages rather than feel things about them. On his jacket, barely visible, was the Ironmoor Pack insignia. A wolf inside a closed fist.

She stepped back from the door without making a sound.

Her wolf surged immediately, reading the proximity of the scent that clung to the messenger, the residue of the compound, of him, and she pressed her hand flat against her sternum and breathed through it.

The knock came a third time.

"Zephyrine Vale." His voice was low and carried through the door without effort. "Alpha Dravek Ironmoor requests your presence at the compound. A car is waiting."

Lirien had appeared at the end of the hallway. Her eyes were wide.

Zephyrine looked at her sister. I looked at the door. Looked at the window at the end of the hall that opened onto the fire escape.

The messenger knocked again. Patient. Certain. The knock of someone who had never once delivered a message that went unanswered.

She grabbed her jacket off the hook.

She went to the window.

She went through it.

The fire escape rattled under her feet as she dropped to the second level and she heard the messenger's voice shift below her, calm turning sharp, and she ran anyway because running was the only plan she had and she was very good at it.

She hit the alley at full speed and turned north out of instinct before she caught herself and turned south instead, away from the pull, away from the compound, away from the name her wolf would not stop saying.

She made it exactly one block and a half.

A hand closed around her arm from a doorway she had not checked and the world spun as she was turned and pressed against the wall with a gentleness that was somehow more frightening than force. The man holding her was not the messenger. He was bigger. Quieter. His eyes were the color of old iron and they looked at her with the patience of someone who had been expecting this exact moment.

"Hello, Zephyrine," Ravek said. "The Alpha said you might use the window."