Exiled to the Alpha's Mercy

Chapter 6

(Wren, POV)

The border alarm turned out to be a false one, a fence sensor triggered by a fallen branch, Otto told us that evening, though I noticed how carefully he said it, like he wasn't entirely convinced himself. Nobody in the house slept easily that night regardless.

A week passed slower than any week of my life. We weren't prisoners, exactly, but we weren't free either, confined to the small house and the yard around it while the pack council reviewed our case, watched at all times by warriors who were polite but never far away. I understood why. I would have done the same thing in their position. That didn't make it easier.

Cole spent most of that week pacing the small yard like a caged animal, muttering about how we should have brought weapons, how relying on a stranger's mercy was no better than relying on Vale's. My father spent it in quiet meetings with the council elders, answering the same questions over and over, building his case one careful sentence at a time. I spent it watching the tree line, waiting for something I couldn't name to happen.

I saw the Alpha exactly twice in that week, both times from a distance, both times brief enough that I couldn't be sure I hadn't imagined the way his eyes found mine across the yard before he turned deliberately away.

On the seventh day, a knock came at the door just after breakfast.

"Mandatory safety inspection," said the warrior standing on the porch, and behind him, unmistakably, stood the Alpha himself.

My grandmother let them in with the careful politeness of someone who'd learned a long time ago not to question pack protocol out loud. The warrior went through the house methodically, checking window latches, testing the door frame, while Alpha Rhett Ashwood stood near the entrance saying almost nothing.

"I'll check the back room," he said eventually, when the warrior moved toward the kitchen. "Window's been sticking, apparently."

Nobody had mentioned a sticking window to me. I followed him anyway, some instinct pulling me toward the small back bedroom before I'd even decided to move.

He was already at the window when I stepped in, testing the latch with more focus than the task required. The room was small enough that closing the door behind me put us less than six feet apart, and the second it clicked shut, the air in the room changed completely.

He went very still.

"The latch seems fine," I said, mostly because the silence had gotten too loud to bear.

"It's fine," he agreed, not looking at me. "It was fine before I got here."

"Then why..."

"I don't know." He said it low, almost to himself, like the admission cost him something. His hand was still resting on the window latch, knuckles white.

I studied him properly for the first time since the border, really looked, the way I hadn't let myself in front of witnesses. Up close, the exhaustion in his face was harder to hide. Dark circles under storm-blue eyes. A tightness around his jaw that looked like it had been there for years, not days.

There was a scar along his ribs, just visible where his shirt had shifted, old, jagged, the kind that doesn't come from training. I wondered what had made it, and some instinct told me not to ask, not yet, not until I understood him better than I did standing in a borrowed bedroom with my heart in my throat.

"You've barely looked at me since the gate," I said, before I could stop myself. "And when you do, you look at me like..." I searched for the right word and couldn't find one that wasn't too honest. "Like you're angry. And starving. At the same time."

His hand tightened on the latch until the metal creaked under his grip.

"Wren..."

It was the first time he'd said my name. It landed somewhere low in my chest, warm and unfamiliar, and I watched something c***k behind his eyes for just a second before he caught himself and shut it down again.

"There are things about pack law," he said carefully, each word measured like he was picking his way across ice, "that I can't explain to you yet. Not until the council review is finished. Not until I know you and your family are actually safe."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I can give you right now."

I wanted to push harder. I wanted to ask him directly what he felt when he looked at me, whether the strange warm pull in my own chest had a name, whether he felt it too or whether I was imagining the whole thing out of exhaustion and fear and eighteen years of never being looked at by anyone who wasn't deciding what to do with me.

I opened my mouth to ask exactly that.

The perimeter alarm tore through the quiet house before I could get a single word out, not the false alarm from a week ago, but something louder, more urgent, three long blasts followed by shouting outside that didn't sound like a drill at all.

Rhett's entire posture changed in half a second, the careful, guarded man disappearing completely, replaced by something harder and faster and fully alert.

"Stay in this room," he said, already moving for the door. "Bar it if you can. Don't come out until someone you trust tells you it's safe."

"What's happening?"

He paused at the door for just a second, hand on the frame, and looked back at me with an expression I hadn't seen from him yet, something close to fear, though I couldn't tell if it was fear for the pack, or fear for me, or both at once.

"Blackthorn colors," he said. "At the south fence. A lot of them."

Then he was gone, and I was alone in a stranger's back bedroom with my heart slamming against my ribs, staring at a window latch that had never actually needed fixing at all.