The Alpha's Unrecognised Mate

I’ve never denied being a bit of a hopeless romantic. The idea of finding my mate danced around my head on the regular, my daydreams following into night dreams. It surprised me, then, when my first reaction to feeling that pull I had been waiting on for as long as I could remember was, Fuck. Not all werewolves had to have normal human jobs. Most notable packs owned large companies whose finances supported all of their members. The alpha would assign a CEO or, if they were more hands-on, run the company themselves. This left the rest of the pack time to train, raise pups and pursue projects that could enhance the prestige of their pack. My pack wasn’t so fortunate. “Please, Tori. Maddi just called in sick, we really need you to stick around!” Liza, the night resident nurse, begged. “I’m really sorry, Liza, but I have church. You know I can’t miss it,” I apologized, unclipping my ID badge from my pants and tapping it against the automated sign-in machine. It dinged as it registered me. Tori Higgins Sign out accepted Liza groaned behind me, but she knew ‘church’ meant ‘no exceptions’. It was surprising how often being part of a cultish religion made my life easier. Fortunately, I wasn’t really part of a cult. It was just the cover my pack used to get out of human activities. For the first time I could remember, the ‘church’ cover wasn’t as much of a lie as it usually was. Not only were we all congregating together for a pack meeting, but our new meeting place was a dilapidated church on the edge of town. Our previous alpha had lost our pack house, along with all of the other assets our pack owned, to a gambling addiction. Our new alpha had purchased the decommissioned chapel on the cheap, and while it was kind of depressing to look at, it was less depressing than having no meeting place at all. His reign was the catalyst for many forgotten rituals starting again, and pack meetings were one of them. I sighed deeply as I finally made it into my car. I’d already worked two doubles that week and was relieved to have been able to avoid making it a third. I turned on the engine to get the heating going and glanced at the time. I wasn’t going to be late, but I didn’t have too much time to sit and unwind. The drive was a scenic one, passing through heavy woodland that got Lyra, my wolf, longing to ditch the car and stretch her legs. I would have loved to oblige her, but clothing was kind of expected at formal gatherings. Eventually I turned off down a long, dirt driveway. The car behind me did, too. There wasn’t much reason to come out this way if you weren’t headed to the chapel, and there wasn’t any reason to head to the chapel if you weren’t one of the pack. I didn’t recognise the car, but the driver looked vaguely familiar. “s**t,” I thought to myself. “How many names have I forgotten? How do you politely ask a member of your lifelong pack what their name is?” The winding tunnel of trees finally broke away into a large clearing. The amount of space was excessive for the small chapel that sat at the back of the lot. There was a dirt patch that seemed to have been designed to serve as a car park and I turned my car in to join the rest, taking stock of the number of vehicles present. It had been years since the entire pack had met in one place. There were a lot less of us since then, too. Not all families had been willing to accept their pack going dormant and had chosen to pledge their allegiance to another alpha. Leo, our previous alpha, made no effort to stop them. Of the few families left in our pack, mine was noticeably on the less important side. We were respectable, but we carried no high honours in our history and seemed to tend towards adequate over exemplary. It didn’t help that my parents had brought only one child into the pack, and I didn’t even do them the favour of being a male. At least lacking the prestige of the large packs meant there wasn’t much room between our members to permit elitism to enter. We were as welcome as anyone. I think that made the smaller pack thing more tolerable to our family, and probably a few others that stayed behind. As I locked my car I waved awkwardly to the couple that had driven in behind me. They had parked a ways over from me so I began walking towards the chapel at what I hoped looked like a normal pace. I wasn’t excited to make small talk with people I had forgotten, and whether by choice or by my own brisk walking, they didn’t get a chance to start a conversation. The chapel had been built long before I was born, and it was showing its age. White paint peeled off the wooden walls, with a light warping of the wood giving the building a bit of a condemn-able look. Some of the wooden accents had fallen off, with one near the top of the ‘A’ of the chapel roof hanging down from a single nail. Though transforming back and forth into wolf form made excess clothing undesirable, the splintering wood made shoes a necessity inside. Once inside the chapel you could see the glass-stained windows on the sides and rear. They were the only real evidence that this chapel had once been used for a genuine religion, depicting acts relating to some bible story or another. The windows’ symbolism was lost on the current users, but they were undeniably beautiful in the right light. There was a place for a cross to hang on the back wall, but it had been removed early into the pack’s tenancy, leaving a faded mark where it had stood undisturbed for years prior. A small stage filled the back portion of the floor with a podium standing upon it. The rest of the room was filled with wooden pews. Fortunately, the wood on these had been well treated when they were made, relieving the attendees from splinters in their behind. I saw my parents sitting at a pew near the back and eagerly slid in beside them, giving them a brief greeting. One downside of being in a pack was the inability to truly get away from your family. I was immensely grateful that mine let me have my space- for the most part, anyway. Not everyone in the pack was so lucky. If my life was a movie, I wouldn’t have felt the connection until he’d taken his position at the podium. The sun would have fallen through the stained-glass window behind him to cast him in some sort of angelic glow. He would have been looking perfect, too, a slight smile and perhaps a loose tendril of dark hair brushing against his sharp cheekbones. The reality was a little less exciting, but the connection was no less powerful. Clint walked determinedly through the chapel doors, nodding slightly at those closest to him as he headed up to his place at the podium. His commanding footsteps echoing on the creaking timber was what alerted me, and most of the pack, that our alpha had arrived and the meeting was about to begin. I knew from the first glance at his side profile that I was seeing him in a way I never had before, and that I wouldn’t be able to stop seeing for as long as I lived. Him. Clint. The alpha. Fuck. It took all I had to stop myself reaching out to him immediately, and I suspect if I had been beside the aisle I would have grabbed his hand. Instead, I waited patiently for him to glance my way, to feel the connection for himself. With his steady pace he passed our row in moments. I made to call out his name but stopped myself. He was the alpha. That made me the pack’s future luna. My world was shell-shocked, and shortly, his would be too. There was a lot to unpack here. A lot to feel, to discuss. A lot that wouldn’t be comfortable to share with the entire pack in the middle of our meeting. I only hoped that he wouldn’t be too jolted when he did glance my way to make a scene. Though maybe, a small part of me hoped he would. I had finally found the love I had been searching so long for and I wanted to share my joy. “Are you alright?” my mother asked, making me jump as I ripped my eyes away from Clint and into my mother’s. “Ye-yeah, all good,” I stammered, nodding. She didn’t seem totally convinced, but my intonation didn’t give me away, either. Clint’s march had come to an end in front of the podium, signalling the meeting was about to begin. Whatever concerns my mother had, she laid them to rest for now. She probably wouldn’t have been so easy to quiet if she’d had a clue what it was that was rushing through my brain, but telepathy was one of the few skills she hadn’t managed to attain. All eyes turned to Clint at the podium. “It’s good to see you all. I know it has been a long time since we’ve all gathered together, and I want to thank you for staying loyal to our pack. The main agenda for this meeting will be the new training schedules,” Clint said, his powerful voice filling the chapel without issue. He glanced around the room as he spoke, trying to make eye contact with all of us. I waited desperately for his eyes to glance over mine, not even sure what reaction I was hoping for. The reaction I got, however, was… well, it was no reaction at all. It was if he couldn’t feel the desperate need to be close to me, the bond between our wolves that said we were chosen for one another. I had considered him managing to avoid a scene a good thing, but even with his astounding composure and the control required to be the alpha I hadn’t considered that he would show nothing. That he could show nothing. I stared directly into his eyes the entire meeting, not hearing a thing, and not receiving any more than a glance in return. The only way I knew the meeting was over was when Clint stepped away from the podium. In moments, the overwhelming sound of my thoughts was suddenly overtaken by the murmurs of the pack as the need to stay silent fell away. Clint must have spoken about something interesting, because the chatter was louder than normal. “Some training will be good,” my father mumbled, more to himself than to my mother or I, but still clear enough for us to hear. My mother nodded. “I’ve been so worried about what will happen to us if an attack comes. We’ve been so unprepared for so long, and I can just feel the other packs looking to take us over,” Mother fretted. She is, as I suppose most mothers are, a little on the protective side. To be fair, though, her concern wasn’t really that an extreme a possibility. We’d relied on Leo to be the strength of our pack, and the other elders had long lost their touch. I never really understood why they didn’t maintain their skills on their own, but Leo’s lack of action on training had set a precedent that the others seemed to follow. Worse, it meant that the next generation had very little experience using their wolf forms for violence, myself included. If a threat did manage to break through the other packs along our borders, we would be poorly equipped to stop it. If those bordering packs decided our weakness was unacceptable and decided to wipe us out… it wouldn’t be without consequence, but it would certainly be in their power to do so. Re-introducing training to the pack was an interesting update indeed, and one that the pack had desperately needed. It wasn’t, however, interesting enough to keep my mind away from the broad-shouldered man stepping off the short stage. I’d assumed he would walk straight towards me, but as others came up to him to discuss the new training strategy, I found myself not as much of a focus for Clint as he was to me. As the pack filed out of the chapel I stayed seated on my pew, numbly saying goodbye to my parents. A few more prominent members of the pack were still talking to Clint, their words falling off me much as the rest of the meeting had done. Some sort of farewell was spoken, and the group headed for the door, the last remaining people in the chapel spare myself. Clint walked past my pew, merely nodding at me as he walked past. Whatever reason I had for staying in the decrepit little chapel, he had no interest in learning and no pressure to push me out. I was nothing more than I had ever been. “Clint,” I said, my voice a little rough from the prolonged silence. I cleared my throat. I couldn’t think of a single other thing than him, and us, and the pressure of the universe pulling me into his arms. There was no way I was letting him leave this chapel without me. Even with my choked voice, he heard me, and waved the remainder of the pack off as he walked over. His face was flat, stern even. I’d known him all my life as a member of the pack, but even as his determination to become alpha had grown through his teenage years, he’d never worn the expression he did now until the day he claimed the title in full. Only two years older than me at twenty-five, he somehow looked to be in his early thirties. There was no room for juvenile innocence in his persona anymore and he’d somehow managed to kill what little he had left. I’d thought- perhaps, more so, hoped- that he would lean in and kiss me right there in the empty chapel. The very possibility sent me tingling all over, but especially at my core. The more he stared, though, the more I realised that was not what he had in mind. “Do you have questions about the training regimen?” he asked. I did, in a way, since I had no idea what said regimen was. However, I shook my head. That was hardly on my mind right now. He waited for me to speak, but I stayed silent, words out of reach, so he tried again; “What did you want to ask me?” There were no clocks in the room- at least, no analog ones- yet I could feel the seconds pass as clearly as if their audible ‘tick’ could be heard in the background. As his brow furrowed at my continued silence, my world was slowing draining of colour. Realisation was starting to hit me, and it wasn’t pulling its punch. “You don’t feel it, do you?” I asked, in retrospect quite cryptically. “Clearly not,” he responded, slightly annoyed at my vague response after such a long pause. I winced hard, enough for a small whimper to escape from my wolf and out of my mouth. His expression shifted to puzzled, but he still wasn’t keen for the elongated discussion. “What am I not feeling?” he asked, a little more empathy entering his voice. “I’m- well, I think I’m,” I hesitated for a moment, wondering if I had somehow made a huge mistake and managed to confuse some sort of a crush with my mate. Like a strike of lightning, the thought disappeared as fast as it had come. There was no mistaking this feeling for anything in the common realm. “I’m your mate.”