I Left Potatoes, My Alpha King Raged

Chapter 2

The truth is, I was never the kind of woman to wilt like a hothouse flower.

My name is Chris, and before I ever met King Alexander, I was the freest Rogue on the open wild.

I was four when my parents died in the Pack War. I ended up homeless in the bowels of a human city, fighting strays in back alleys over half-eaten sandwiches and the rind of yesterday's pizza.

Then I met my Mentor,a half-mad old Rogue who looked like he had misplaced his sanity decades ago.

He scooped me up off the curb and brought me back to his strange little Pack of three.

The members were: him, me, and a tortoise so ancient that nobody could remember when it had been hatched.

According to my Mentor, the creature carried the bloodline of an Ancient Lycan,though all the evidence I ever saw was the way it craned its leathery neck for sunlight.

Our lineage practiced a long-lost art known as Turtle Breath.

In the violent world of werewolves, this was practically a punchline. Other wolves trained to rip out throats. We trained to hold our breath like reptiles in winter.

My Mentor told me that, taken to its extreme, I could enter a kind of hibernation: no food, no water, no breath, metabolism dropped to almost nothing. The ace up my sleeve. The thing that would one day keep me alive.

At fifteen, I graduated. My stealth and my breath suppression had surpassed even my Mentor's.

But graduation also meant unemployment, because my Mentor had met a wealthy widowed Witch online,and abandoned me without a backward glance to chase his late-life love affair.

I went back to drifting.

I floated around the edges of various Packs, trading favors for food, solving small problems for low-tier wolves who couldn't solve them on their own. I learned assassination at Shadowfang Pack. I picked up a few weeks of guard training at Sunfang Pack. By the time I was done I had a messy but very useful skill set.

Then, one night, in a grimy human dive bar in the basement of an industrial block, I met King Alexander.

Back then, he wasn't the Alpha King yet,only an unfavored contender for the heir's seat in Moonstone Pack. A rival faction had ambushed him, and a dagger soaked in Wolfsbane was streaking toward his heart.

I happened to be hiding under a table at the time, gnawing on a chicken leg.

Out of some half-formed urge to play hero,really, I was furious about the lavish spread the brawlers had knocked off the table,I moved.

Using the strange, slithering footwork my Mentor had taught me, I threw myself between Alexander and the blade. I took the cut on my own ribs. Then I jabbed the chicken bone straight into the assassin's eye.

King Alexander stared at me, stunned. For the first time, my reflection appeared in those bottomless black eyes of his.

"Who are you?" he asked, gripping his bleeding side.

"Doesn't really matter who I am," I said, wiping grease off the corner of my mouth. "What matters is,how do you plan to repay your savior? You take cash? Or do you do wire transfers?"

He laughed.

The first smile he ever gave me.

"Come back to Moonstone Pack with me," he said, holding out his hand. "As long as I'm around, you'll never go hungry again."

So, in pursuit of long-term meal tickets, this feral little Rogue jumped headfirst into the dumpster fire that humans like to call love.

Looking back now, I really should have squeezed him for cash that night and run.