The Curvy Human Behind The Alpha's Survivor

Recognition

Nina's POV

The night before the gathering, I stood in my kitchen at eleven at night, ingredients laid out in careful rows across the counter, recipe notes scrawled in three different colors of ink, and my hands would not stop shaking.

I told myself I was nervous about cooking. Six months out of real professional kitchens, six months of backyard parties and small potlucks, and tomorrow I'd be cooking for an entire territory of werewolves who could smell fear the way humans smelled smoke.

But some other part of me wondered if the shaking wasn't dreadful at all.

The Next Day…

I hadn't felt this awake in longer than I wanted to admit.

The kitchen they'd set me up with was bigger than anything I'd worked in for two years, gleaming steel counters, six burners, a full team already waiting when I walked in that morning.

"You're Nina?" A tall guy with flour already on his sleeves stuck out a hand. "Marco.” He introduced himself. “We're your team for tonight. Cass said you actually know what you're doing, which is more than I can say for the last three caterers this territory's hired."

"I know what I'm doing." I shook his hand, already scanning the space and I could feel the tension ease away from my shoulders. "Let's get to work, shall we?”

The morning moved fast. By early afternoon we had three sauces going, a dozen trays of appetizers prepped, and Marco kept sneaking tastes off every spoon he could reach.

"Okay, this," he said mouth full, pointing at the braised short rib, "this is genuinely the best thing I've had in this kitchen all year. What is that, is that a fig reduction?"

"Fig and red wine,” I replied. “With a little bit of rosemary."

"You need to teach me that." He moaned with delight as he chewed in some meat. “Omg, you have to teach me this pronto.”

I laughed at the faces he was making. "I need you to stop eating my inventory."

He grinned and went back to plating. Across the counter, one of the younger prep cooks, a woman named Maya, kept glancing over every time I called out a direction.

"You know," she said eventually, "most head chefs just yell at people. You actually explain why. It's kind of nice not spending the whole shift terrified."

"I've worked under yellers and I can tell you gor a fact that it didn't love it."

"Well, it's working. Everyone's actually having fun back here, which never happens on setup day."

I felt something warm settle in my chest at that. It had been so long since anyone described anything about me as ‘working’.

Then, of course, the sauce broke.

"No, no, no—" I lunged for the pan just as it started to separate, oil pooling ugly and wrong at the surface. "Who turned this up?"

"It was on medium the whole time.” Maya replied, already reaching for a wipe.

"It's splitting, someone get me an ice cube, now—"

"Here."

A hand appeared beside mine, dropping ice directly into the pan and whisking fast. I looked up to find a man I didn't recognize, sleeves pushed up, completely calm, like he hadn't just saved a sauce that was thirty seconds from being garbage.

"You're welcome," he said, still whisking.

"I didn't ask for help."

"You looked like you needed it."

"I had it handled."

"Sure you did." He kept whisking and the sauce came back together smooth and glossy under his hands like it had never split at all. He handed the whisk back to me. "There, the crisis was averted."

I stared at the pan, then at him. "You've done that before?"

"Once or twice." He shrugged. “Not much of a chef though.”

"That's not an answer."

"No," he agreed, something amused flickering across his face, "it isn't."

Marco, watching this whole exchange with barely concealed delight, cleared his throat. "That's Griffin, by the way. He owns the place we're currently standing in."

Heat crawled up my neck. "You could've led with that."

"You seemed to be handling him fine on your own," Griffin said and I caught the edge of a smile before he turned it into something more neutral.

"I was handling my sauce."

"I noticed and I also noticed you run a kitchen like someone who's done this a long time. Your whole team's smiling. That's rare, in my experience."

"They're smiling because I feed them."

"That'll do it." He picked up a spoon off the counter, dipped it into the short rib sauce before I could stop him and tasted it. "Okay, that's genuinely excellent."

"You don't have to say that." I muttered under my breath.

"I don't say things I don't mean. Occupational hazard of running a territory full of wolves who can smell a lie." He set the spoon down. "You should be proud of that. Not many people can make food taste like that and make a whole kitchen feel calm doing it."

I didn't have a smart response ready for that one. Something about the way he said it caught me off guard more than I wanted to admit.

He got called out of the kitchen and by the time the event was in full swing, I'd mostly convinced myself the kitchen encounter had just been a strange, charged blip, easily explained by exhaustion and adrenaline.

I slipped out to the edge of the terrace for air, plates still clattering behind me through the open doors, laughter and music drifting out into the cool night.

"You disappear like that a lot?"

My heart skipped a bit. I didn't expect to find anyone here.

Griffin, leaning against the railing a few feet away, two glasses of something in his hands, holding one out toward me.

"I just needed air."

"Fair." He didn't push the drink further when I didn't take it, just held it easy at his side instead. "You're good at this. The cooking. Running a whole kitchen without raising your voice once. I noticed."

"You said that already."

"I know. I'm saying it again because I don't think you believed me the first time."

I looked at him properly then, and something needled at the back of my mind that I couldn't place.

"Have we met before?" I asked, half joking. "You're being unusually friendly for someone who just met a caterer six hours ago."

Something shifted in his face. "We have, actually," he said. " A long time ago."

I arched my brow, confused. "We have? I don't remember that."

"I didn't think you would. You weren't exactly focused on my face at the time." He set the glass down on the railing, turned to face me fully. "I was bleeding out on the side of the road. You didn't ask my name. You didn't take anything for it. You just gave me your blood and left before I even woke up."

I stilled.

"I've spent years wondering who you were," he said, and his eyes held mine like he'd been waiting a long time to say exactly this, to her. "Turns out you've been standing in my kitchen all day cooking for my pack and my allies.”

My pulse was roaring in my ears. My whole body had gone hot and unsteady, some instinct screaming at me to run before I even underst

ood what I was running from.

"I have to go check on the desserts," I said, my voice shaky and before he could say a word, I rushed out.

How could that be? How did he remember me?