Claimed by the Ruthless Alpha

Chapter 5

I cleaned up the broken mug and washed the counter. Then I reorganized the coffee shelf that did not need reorganizing. I was still there, pointlessly straightening things that were already straight, when Jeremy came back inside.

His face was different.

Not upset, exactly. Not worried in the way he looked when I was hurt or sick. This was something else.

He was controlled in a way that was deliberate, like he was choosing each expression and checking it before he showed it to me.

That was the face he used when he was about to tell me something that was going to hurt.

"Sit down," he said.

"I'd rather stand."

"Zara. Sit."

He only used that tone in specific situations. I sat.

He sat across from me and put his phone facedown on the counter, and was quiet for long enough that I started calculating whether I could make it to the hallway before he started talking.

"How much did Ryker say to you?" he asked.

"Some."

"Did he explain what you are to each other?"

I felt my jaw tighten. "He implied it. And then he rejected it."

Jeremy’s expression moved through something quick and quiet and then settled back into controlled. "He told you. Okay." He leaned forward and put his forearms on the counter and looked at me with those eyes that always made it impossible to pretend. "That call was from my dad. They've known since last night."

"Known what? That your best friend is apparently someone's mate and that someone decided he wanted nothing to do with her? Because I can save your dad the call, I don't need……"

"He knew before last night," Jeremy said. "Not that it was going to be Ryker specifically. But Dad's been communicating with the pack elders, and there's been……" He stopped and rubbed the back of his neck.

"Zara, there's something about you that the elders have been researching for two years. Something about what you are."

I went still. "What does that mean?"

"You know how you've always been different? Even for a human? How you move, how you track, the way your instincts work, how the pack bond almost reached you even though they said it couldn't………"

"They said it would *kill* me."

"They said it *might*." He looked at me steadily.

"They were wrong. They were wrong about a lot of things. The elders think……" He stopped and continued again slower. "Zara, they think you have wolf ancestry. It's dormant and maybe from generations back but it's diluted enough that you present as human but deep enough that it's still there. And a dormant wolf bloodline can still call you a mate,which is what happened last night."

The kitchen was very quiet.

"That's not possible," I said. "My parents were human. Completely human."

"Your dad was," he said. "Your mom……"

"Aunt Nadia would have told me."

"My mom didn't know. She genuinely didn't know, Zara. She and your mom were friends their whole lives and she had no idea until my dad started asking questions after you started showing abilities you weren't supposed to have."

Hm

I thought about every time my tracking had surprised them. Every time my instincts had been right when they had no rational basis. Every time the pack's energy had moved through the air and I had felt it differently than I should have.

"What does dormant mean, exactly?" I asked. My voice sounded calmer than I felt.

"It means it could stay dormant. It's not a guarantee of anything. You're not going to shift, Zara, that's not what I'm saying." He searched my face. "But it explains some things. And it explains why the mate bond reached you at all, when biologically it shouldn't have been able to."

"So Ryker felt it too."

"Yes."

"And he still rejected me."

"Yes." Jerey's voice went flat on that word. Something moved under his expression that looked like anger. Old anger, the kind that had been sitting quiet.

"Don't," I said.

"He rejected a human with dormant wolf blood during an alliance gathering, in someone else's territory, and walked out before making sure she was okay. He doesn't get to do that and have me be calm about it."

"It's done." I pressed my hands flat against the counter. "Whatever it was, it's over. He made his choice."

"It doesn't work that way," Jeremy said. "A mate bond doesn't disappear because one person says it does. Especially not one that crossed bloodlines to reach you in the first place. It's going to….."

"Jeremy." I looked at him. "I am not going to spend whatever time I have left here chasing someone who looked me in the face and told me he didn't want me. I have a plan. I have college and the studio and a life that is entirely my own. I don't need a mate, I don't want a mate, and I especially do not want one who decided before he knew a single thing about me that I wasn't worth keeping."

He was quiet.

"I need you to promise me something," I said.

"Zara……."

"Promise me that this doesn't change my leaving. That you won't let this become a reason to keep me here, or a reason to interfere, or a reason to start a war with his pack because your feelings are hurt on my behalf."

"My feelings aren't……."

"Jeremy!."

He looked at me for a long time. Something in his face that I could not name, something deeper and older than the moment we were in.

"Promise me," I said.

"I promise," he said. He was quiet and serious and exactly like the boy who had climbed into my bed at two in the morning for two years because he knew I needed him there. "I promise, Zara."

I nodded and stood up.

"Good," I said. "Then I'm going to training. And after that I'm going to school. And after that I'm going to the studio. And this does not get to take any of that from me."

I walked out of the kitchen before he could see that my hands were shaking.

I made it to the end of the hallway before I had to stop and put my back against the wall and press both palms flat against my chest where the broken pull still ached like a bruise.

“You'll recover quickly, he had said. Humans usually do.”

I breathed through it twice.

He did not know the first thing about me.

He did not know that I had survived the accident,that I had learned to fight in a house full of wolves and I had rebuilt myself from nothing, twice, and came out the other side still standing.

He had looked at me and seen a human girl and decided she was not worth the inconvenience.

He was going to spend the rest of his life wishing he had looked closer.

I pushed off the wall and kept walking.

Three weeks later, I found out I was leaving for college early.

And two months after that, I found out something else entirely. Something I had not planned for, something that changed the calculation on every decision I had made in the last month, something that made my careful, mapped out plan look suddenly very fragile.

I stood in the bathroom of my dorm room on a Tuesday morning, looked at the small plastic stick in my hand, and understood for the first time what it felt like when the universe decided your plan was finished.