Cast Out, Claimed By The Silver Alpha

CHAPTER 3 THE BAR FIGHT

Wren Hale POV

I yanked my hand back so fast I knocked over a stack of clean glasses. Two of them shattered on the floor, and the sound seemed impossibly loud in my own ears, though nobody else in the tavern even glanced our way.

"Sorry sorry, I'll clean that up" I dropped to my knees, sweeping shards into my apron with shaking fingers, using the mess as an excuse not to look at him. My heart was still pounding from wherever that warmth had come from, that impossible fullness where an empty ache had lived for three weeks straight.

What are you. Not who. What.

He knew. Somehow, in one touch, he'd felt something in me that even I didn't understand, something I'd spent three years being told I didn't have. Omegas weren't supposed to have power. Omegas were supposed to pour drinks and keep quiet and be grateful for whatever scraps of kindness came their way. Damian used to say it like a joke, ruffling my hair the way you'd pat a dog: you don't need muscle, Wren, you've got me. I hadn't understood, back then, how much that sentence was a cage disguised as a compliment.

"Ren!" Mabel snapped from the other end of the bar. "Table nine's about to start something, go break it up before I have to."

I nearly sobbed with relief. Anything to get away from those gold eyes and the questions I couldn't answer.

Table nine was two logging crews who'd clearly had one drink too many, squared off with their chests puffed out the way men do right before they throw the first punch. Chairs scraped back. Someone's tankard hit the floor. I stepped between them without thinking three weeks of tavern work had taught me that a firm voice usually cooled things faster than fists, and Mabel didn't pay me to hide in the back room every time voices got loud.

"Gentlemen," I said, sliding between the two biggest ones, hands raised, "why don't we"

The bigger one shoved his friend. His friend swung back, wild and clumsy with drink. And somehow, in the space of one blink, I was standing directly in the middle of it, close enough to feel the wind of the fist as it passed.

A fist came at my face.

I didn't decide to move. My body simply moved faster than I'd ever moved in my life, faster than any omega should be able to move. I caught his wrist mid-swing, twisted, and had him face-down on the table before I even understood what my own hands had done. His tankard rolled off the edge and clattered against the floorboards.

The room went dead silent. Somewhere behind me a chair leg scraped against the floorboards as someone stood, and I could feel every eye in the Rusty Fang fixed on the two of us the bartender and the man twice his size, pinned like he weighed nothing at all.

I stared down at the man pinned under my grip, at my own fingers locked around his wrist like iron, and panic clawed up my throat. Omegas don't do this. Omegas are the weakest rank in any pack, bottom of every hierarchy, first to be pushed aside in a fight and last to be trained in one. I had spent my whole life being told exactly how weak I was, had believed it so completely I'd never once tried to test it. I'd never sparred, never trained, never so much as thrown a proper punch in twenty-two years of life.

So why did that feel like nothing at all? Why had my body known exactly what to do a full second before my mind caught up, like the movement had been waiting inside me my whole life for permission?

"Let him go," a low voice said behind me.

I spun around, and there he was the man with the gold eyes, standing far too close, watching me with an expression I couldn't read at all. Not fear. Not disgust. Something closer to fascination.

I let go immediately, stepping back so fast I nearly tripped over an overturned chair. The logger scrambled up, rubbing his wrist, throwing me a look somewhere between fear and confusion before stumbling back to his friends, muttering something about witches and cursed border towns while his crewmates laughed uneasily behind him.

"I he was going to fight, I just" I started, the words tumbling out too fast.

"You just moved faster than any omega I have ever seen," the stranger said quietly, low enough that only I could hear it over the murmur that had started up around the room, watching me the way you'd watch something rare and unexpected, "including trained fighters three times your size."

My blood went cold. "I'm not"

"Don't." His voice was gentle, but it stopped the lie in my throat anyway, the way a hand closing over a candle stops a flame. I had spent three weeks perfecting that lie, saying it so often it almost felt true. It took him one sentence to unravel all of it. "I can smell a wolf, Ren. What I can't figure out is why yours feels like nothing I've ever met before."

Before I could answer, one of the loggers the one I'd pinned shoved back to his feet, face red with humiliation in front of his crew, and swung wildly, not at me this time, but at the stranger beside me.

I don't know why I did it. Instinct, maybe. Or something deeper, something that had woken up the moment his hand touched mine.

I threw myself between them.

The fist connected with my shoulder instead of his jaw, spinning me sideways, pain blooming bright and sharp across my collarbone, sharp enough to steal the breath out of me, and I would have hit the floor if a hand hadn't shot out and caught my wrist to steady me.

His hand. Bare skin against bare skin.

And this time, the warmth wasn't gentle at all.

It slammed through me like a lightning strike, so strong my knees buckled, so strong the whole room seemed to tilt sideways around us, chairs and lantern light blurring into streaks, and somewhere far away I heard him make a sound not quite a groan, not quite a growl, something caught between disbelief and pain.

"Mate," he breathed, staring down at our joined hands like they'd betrayed him, like the word had been ripped out of him against his will. "You're my"

The tavern door banged open.