Betrayed by my Alpha

They say the gods don't make mistakes. I used to believe that with my whole heart. I was twenty two summers old when the elders came to our house. Three of them, robes dusty from the trek and faces that gave nothing away. My mother gripped my hand so tight I thought my fingers would break. She already knew. Mothers always seem to know these things before anyone else does. They had consulted the Fates and they had their answer. I was to be the mate of Varek Navar, Alpha of the Ironpeak clan, the most powerful man in three territories and someone I had grown up watching from a distance like everyone else in the clan. A man five summers my senior. My mother cried tears of happiness that night and I cried with her. I had no idea what I was walking into. Varek was handsome and I won't lie about that. Tall and broad with dark eyes that made the younger girls forget their own names. But those eyes never really settled on me the way a husband's eyes should settle on his wife. There was always something else on his mind and everyone in the clan knew her name even if they were too afraid to say it out loud. Soraya. She was everything the elders had looked past when they made their decision. Beautiful in a way that turned heads, but with nothing behind it that would make her a good leader beside an Alpha. The elders had chosen me because I had spent years training the younger members of our clan, teaching them to fight and protect themselves. I put the clan before everything including myself and the gods had seen that apparently. But Varek didn't see it that way. To him I was just something that had been placed in his path and he never let me forget that, not even in the privacy of our own chambers. He would come to me some nights like it was something he had to get over with and I would stare at the ceiling and wonder what I had done to deserve a bond that felt so empty. A bond that the gods themselves had blessed felt like nothing more than a burden we were both carrying. The only person who made those early months bearable was Gaelan. Varek's Beta was nothing like his Alpha and I mean that in the best way. He would stop by when Varek was away, which was often, and sit with me and my mother over a meal and just talk. Simple conversation about the clan, about training, about nothing important really. He never treated me like I was just the Alpha's wife. He treated me like a person and that meant more than I could ever explain to him. My mother loved him immediately. She said he had a good soul and my mother was never wrong about people. Those were the only warm moments I had in that house. Everyone knew where Varek spent his time and that was the hardest part. He never touched Soraya, he couldn't. The bond the gods had tied between us made sure of that. I had heard stories of bonded wolves who tried to be with others and the pain it caused them was said to be unbearable, like fire spreading through your chest from the inside. So he kept his hands to himself but everything else he gave freely to her. His time. His laughter. The version of himself that I had hoped would one day be mine. He would leave before the sun was fully up and come back long after the clan had eaten their evening meal. Sometimes I would be in the training yard with the younger wolves and I would catch him walking past with Soraya beside him, her hand tucked into the crook of his arm, her head tilted up toward him while he said something that made her laugh. He looked relaxed around her in a way he never looked around me. Like she was where he actually wanted to be and everything else including me was just an obligation he resented. The clan noticed. Of course they did. I would catch the looks when I walked through the village. Women dropping their eyes a little too quickly, men suddenly finding something very important to look at on the ground. Even the younger wolves I trained, the ones who adored me, would sometimes go quiet in a way that told me they had heard something they didn't know how to tell me. Pity looks different on every face but it always feels the same when it's pointed at you and I had grown very familiar with the feeling. My mother would squeeze my arm whenever she saw it happening and say nothing because there was nothing to say that would make it hurt less. Gaelan was the only one who looked at me normally. No pity, no awkwardness, just the same steady respect he had always given me. I think he was angry on my behalf even if he never said it directly. Sometimes when Varek walked past with Soraya he would watch his Alpha with an expression I couldn't quite read and then look at me and just shake his head slightly like he was ashamed of what he was seeing. I appreciated that more than he knew. Months passed like that and I kept my head up because that was all I could do. I trained the young wolves harder than ever. I checked on the elderly members of the clan. I sat with my mother in the evenings and let her talk about small things so I wouldn't have to think about the empty side of my bed and the husband who preferred someone else's company to mine. I prayed too. Every night without fail I got on my knees and I asked the gods why they had chosen this life for me and whether there was a plan buried somewhere underneath all this pain that I just couldn't see yet. I never stopped believing they were listening even when the silence was too loud. Then something changed and I didn't know what to make of it at first. Varek started coming home later than usual, which I hadn't thought was even possible. Some nights the fire had burned down to nothing by the time I heard the door and I would lie still in the dark and listen to him move around the house and wonder where he had been. He never offered an explanation and I never asked because asking felt like setting myself up for something I wasn't ready to hear. But then the nights got later and the silences between us got heavier and I started to notice other things too. The way he would look at me sometimes and then look away quickly like he had caught himself doing something he shouldn't. The way he stopped eating the morning meals I left out for him, not because he was rejecting them but because he wasn't coming home until after they had gone cold. Gaelan had come by one evening looking for him and when I told him I didn't know where Varek was something moved across his face that he covered up too quickly for me to name it properly. I told my mother I thought something was wrong and she held my hands and told me to keep praying. So I did. And then one evening Varek came home while the sun was still up and that alone was enough to make me sit up straight from where I had been mending his tunics that had torn at the shoulder. He stood in the doorway for a moment just looking at me and I looked back at him and neither of us said anything. Then he asked me if I wanted to run with him. I remember the feeling that came over me when he said it. Something warm and cautious at the same time, like when you step toward a fire after being cold for a very long time and you're not sure yet if it's going to burn you or just warm you up. Bonded wolves running together in wolf form was something intimate. It was something mates did when they wanted to just be together without the weight of words and responsibilities and everything else. He had never once offered that to me in all the months we had been bound. I thought maybe the gods had finally answered me. I put down the tunic and I smiled at him and I said yes. My mother was visiting a neighbour that evening. I could not go to her to tell her where I would be for fear that Varek might change his mind if I wasted time. So, I followed my husband into the trees feeling something I had almost forgotten the name of. Hope. The forest was beautiful that evening. The light was coming through the branches in long golden strips and the air smelled like earth and pine and something clean. I shifted and ran beside him and for a little while it felt like what I had always imagined a bond was supposed to feel like. Just two wolves moving through the same world together. I didn't notice at first that he was leading me somewhere specific. By the time I heard them it was already too late. They came from three directions at once, rough looking wolves with no clan markings and eyes that had already decided what they were there to do. Rogues. I spun around looking for Varek and he was standing at the edge of the tree line already shifted back to his human form and he was just watching with an expression on his face that I had never seen before and hope I never see on another person's face as long as I live. He had brought me here. He had planned this. I didn't have time to fall apart because the first one lunged at me and survival pushed everything else down to somewhere deep and unreachable. I fought with everything I had but there were too many of them and something caught me hard near the ridge where the trees thinned out and the ground dropped away into nothing. I looked back once. Varek hadn't moved. Then I turned and I jumped. The river was far below and the rocks at the bottom were not something I let myself think about. I just jumped because the alternative was letting them finish what my husband had started and that was something I refused to give him. The cold hit me like a wall and then everything went dark. I woke up on a riverbank with mud everywhere and no idea where I was. Every part of my body hurt in ways I didn't have names for and for a long moment I just lay there staring up at the sky through the tree canopy and trying to remember how to breathe properly. Then it hit me. Not a memory but a feeling, like something had been ripped out of my chest and the wound was still fresh and bleeding even though there was nothing to see on the outside. The bond was gone. I had heard elders talk about it in low voices when they thought the younger ones weren't listening. How it felt when a bond was severed. They said some wolves didn't survive it, that the pain was so complete it just shut the body down from the inside. I understood that now in a way I hadn't before. It wasn't just pain I felt. I felt his absence as well. Like a sound you had gotten so used to that you stopped noticing it until suddenly it wasn't there anymore and the silence it left behind was the loudest thing you had ever heard. I curled up on that riverbank and I cried for a long time. I cried for the marriage I had tried so hard to make work. I cried for every morning meal I had left out for a man who wasn't coming home. I cried for the hope I had felt in those golden trees just before everything fell apart. I cried because I had smiled at him. I had actually smiled at him and followed him into those woods believing that maybe he was finally choosing me. When I had nothing left I wiped my face and sat up and looked around. Nothing was familiar. The trees were different from the ones I had grown up around. The smell of the air carried no traces of anyone I knew, no clan scent, no recognisable markers, nothing. The river had carried me somewhere far from everything I had ever known and I had no way of knowing how far that was. I got up because staying on the ground wasn't going to help me. The bond pain didn't leave. It stayed with me for weeks like a bruise that kept getting pressed, some days worse than others, some mornings so bad I had to stop walking and just sit against a tree and breathe through it until it eased enough to move again. I had heard that it could last a long time and that some wolves never fully stopped feeling it even years later. I believ)ed that now. But I kept moving. I hunted for my food and slept in the hollows of large trees or under thick brush when the nights got cold. I tried to track my way back toward anything familiar, any scent on the wind that might point me in the right direction, but weeks turned into more weeks and nothing changed. Every direction looked the same. Every trail led nowhere I recognised. The river had taken me further than I could have imagined and I was beginning to understand that finding my way home on my own might not be possible. I grew sick with each passing day, a horrible feeling. I wanted to be in my mother's arms. I wanted to take her from that place and keep her somewhere safe. Then one morning I woke up and knew before I even fully opened my eyes that something was different. I lay very still and placed my hand flat against my stomach and just breathed. I was not alone in my body anymore. I don't know how long I sat with that knowledge before I could move again. A child. Varek's child growing inside me while I was lost in a forest with nothing and no one and a body still aching from a bond he had chosen to destroy. I wanted to be angry and I was, somewhere underneath everything else I was furious, but mostly I just held my stomach and talked to the gods for a very long time. I asked them if this was part of the plan they had for me. I chose to believe that it was. So I kept going, but more carefully now. I ate more and pushed myself less and when the bond pain came I breathed through it slowly instead of trying to walk through it. I found a pack after about two months of wandering, a small one tucked into a valley between two hills, and I approached with my hands open and my head slightly bowed to show I meant no harm. They took one look at me and turned me away. The elder who came to the border was not unkind about it but he was firm. A strange pregnant female with no clan, no mate and no explanation they could verify was a risk they were not willing to take. I understood it even if it stung. I thanked him and walked away and didn't let myself cry until I was far enough that they couldn't hear me. I was completely on my own. By the time my stomach had grown so large that moving through the undergrowth had become slow and uncomfortable I had accepted that I was not going to find my way back before this baby came into the world. I focused on finding clean water and enough food and I talked to my unborn child while I walked, telling my child about their grandmother who would have loved them fiercely and about Gaelan who would have taught them everything worth knowing and about the clan they came from even if that clan had tried to have its mother killed. I tried to avoid rogue territories because I could smell them from a distance and I had enough sense left to know that in my condition I was not in a position to defend myself the way I normally could. But the forest had its own ideas about where I was going and one grey morning I walked right into the middle of one before I even realised it. I stopped when I heard them. There were wolves watching from the trees, too many to count, and before I could decide which direction to back away toward he stepped out in front of me and I knew immediately what he was. Big, scarred and with eyes that had no intention behind them except appetite. He looked at my stomach and then at me and smiled in a way that made every instinct I had stand up at once. I told him I was just passing through. He didn't care. He came at me fast and I moved sideways and got my footing even with the weight of my stomach throwing my balance off. He was stronger than me and faster and we both knew it, but I had something he didn't have and that was a reason that went beyond myself. Every time he pushed me back I thought about the child I was carrying and I found another step forward. He caught me eventually and threw me hard onto the ground and the impact knocked the breath out of me completely. I lay there for a split second with the world spinning and my hand found something in the dirt beside me, a branch that had broken off somewhere and left a point as sharp as anything I could have hoped for. He jumped. I drove it upward with everything I had left. He was dead before either of us fully understood what had happened. I lay on the ground under the weight of him and stared up at the grey sky and breathed. Just breathed. Around me the forest had gone completely quiet and then slowly figures began to emerge from the trees, wolves with hollow faces and cautious eyes who looked at the man on the ground and then at me with expressions I couldn't quite read. Then one of them, a woman with a long scar across her jaw, knelt down beside me and touched my arm gently. Then the pain hit me and it had nothing to do with the fight. I looked at her and she looked at me and she called over her shoulder for help in a voice that carried no hesitation in it at all. They moved around me quickly, more gently than I would have expected from people who had just watched me kill their leader, and I let them because I had no choice left in the matter. My son came into the world in that grey forest surrounded by strangers with nothing above him but open sky and tree branches and he announced himself with a cry so fierce and indignant that even through my exhaustion I almost laughed. He was so small. I held him against my chest and looked at his face for a long time while the woman with the scar cleaned him up and the others stood around us in a quiet circle like they were guarding something sacred. I thought about everything that had been taken from me and everything I had survived to get to this moment and I looked down at my son and I made him a promise without words, just the feeling of it passing between us. Then I gave him his name. “Azran.”