Marked By The Alpha Who Buried My Old Pack

Chapter One: Into the Trees

Sienna Cole POV

I didn't stop running until the trees swallowed me whole. My chest burned. My legs shook so hard I nearly fell over roots I couldn't see in the dark. My wolf, Nova, snarled at me to turn back and make Ryder pay for what he'd just done in front of the whole pack.

I wouldn't let her. I made her promise, right there under the black pines, that we would not hunt him down. She hated me for it, but she carried us deeper into the woods anyway, and somewhere in that blur of trees and grief, I let her take the wheel completely. I couldn't hold my own head up. Not after watching Ryder's face light up the second his true mate walked into the room.

Hours passed. I barely noticed. When I finally came back to myself, soft grass pressed against my bare skin. The smell of basil and mint and lavender filled my nose before I even opened my eyes, a smell I hadn't breathed in years, yet my body remembered it instantly.

"Sienna, dear? Is that you?"

My heart jumped at the voice. I hadn't heard it since I was a little girl.

"You brought me here?" I asked Nova, stunned.

"We need her," Nova said, still simmering with anger. "We are not going back. Not ever."

I opened my eyes fully. The sun was just beginning to rise, painting soft orange light across a small stone cottage I remembered from childhood. Herb gardens swayed gently in the breeze around it.

"Grandma?" My voice cracked hard on the word.

My mother had kept me away from this cottage for years, ever since she rejected her own true mate and chose my father instead. Grandma never forgave her for throwing something so sacred away. I used to think Grandma was being harsh. Sitting there with my heart in pieces, I understood her better than ever.

Grandma rushed out in her nightgown, wrapped a blanket around my shoulders, and pulled me into a hug so fierce it broke something loose in my chest. I sobbed into her shoulder like I hadn't let myself do in years.

"I missed you," I cried, my words muffled against her.

She smelled exactly the way I remembered apples and every herb in her garden mixed together into something only she carried. She led me inside, sat me by the fireplace, and pressed a fresh set of clothes into my lap without asking a single question about why I'd shown up naked and shaking on her doorstep before sunrise.

"Tell me everything," she said, settling into the chair across from mine.

So I did. I told her about Ryder's eighteenth birthday, about his true mate walking through the door, about the way he looked at that girl like I had never existed. Grandma never once told me I had brought this on myself. Grandma just listened, quiet and steady, her hand resting warm over mine.

"I don't want to go back," I whispered when I finally finished. "I can't face any of them again."

"Then you won't," Grandma said simply, like it was the easiest decision in the world. "You'll stay here with me for as long as you need."

"What about Mom and Dad?"

"You let me handle your parents," she said, and the look on her face told me the conversation was already closed.

Grandma kept her word. My father quietly agreed to let me stay, though my mother raged about it for weeks. He called every week after that, never asking when I planned to come home.

One year later, I was somebody different.

"Good, Sienna, don't let me land a hit," Grady called out, breathing hard as I dodged around his swinging arm in the clearing behind Grandma's cottage.

"He's tired," Nova coached. "Now, Sienna. Now, before he catches his breath."

I dropped low, spun past his reach, and jumped onto his back before he could react, wrapping my arm around his neck the way he'd drilled into me a hundred times over the past year.

"Good work, kid," Grady grunted, tapping my forearm twice to signal I'd won this round.

I dropped down and grinned up at him, proud of myself in a way I hadn't felt in a long time. Grady rolled his eyes, but I caught the small smile he tried to hide.

"Don't get cocky. You still need more muscle on that frame."

"Let me have this one win," I laughed, wiping sweat from my forehead.

Grandma came out with lunch just as Grady headed off toward his own house next door. I'd been living with her for almost a full year now, calling my parents once a week. I stopped calling my mom after the first month she only wanted to talk about Ryder and his new mate, Paige. My dad was different. He never once made me feel guilty for leaving.

I spent my eighteenth birthday right here, picking apples and baking pies instead of celebrating back home with a pack that had already moved on without me. Grady, once one of the greatest warriors in werewolf history before he vanished from pack life, had looked at my small frame the first week I arrived and decided I needed real training whether I asked for it or not. I was small and fast, faster than most wolves twice my size. He taught me to use that instead of fighting the body I'd been given.

"Sienna, your brother's on the phone!" Grandma called from inside the house.

I frowned, wiping my hands on my shorts as I walked in from the garden. Kellan never called in the middle of the day. Something about that made my stomach tighten before I even lifted the receiver.

"Hello?" I said, still chewing on the last bite of my sandwich.

"Sienna. I need to tell you something." Kellan's voice sounded lower than I remembered, tighter too, like every word cost him something to say.

"What's wrong?" I asked, sitting slowly on the arm of the old couch.

There was a long pause on the line. "Mom's dead."

The words didn't fully land at first. My dad called every week without fail. Nothing in those calls had ever sounded wrong.

"What? How?" I demanded, my voice cracking on the last word.

"Just come home," Kellan said, his voice cracking now too. "I can't explain this over the phone. Dad needs you here right now."

I hung up slowly, my stomach twisting into painful knots. The last place on earth I wanted to go back to was Silverleaf. But my father needed me, and that alone was strong enough to pull me back through those trees.

I told Grandma everything, my voice shaking. Her face fell for just a moment before her voice steadied, the way it always seemed to in a crisis.

"Then I suppose we better start packing," she said, already moving toward the old closet by the door.

"You're coming too?"

She lifted her chin, eyes sharp with quiet determination. "No granddaughter of mine walks back into that pack without backup beside her."

I hugged her tight, grateful in a way I couldn't put into words. Whatever waited for us back home, I wasn't going to face it alone this time. But some nervous part of me already knew that nothing about Silverleaf was going to be the way I had left it.