Alpha's Forbidden Frequency

What I Am

He woke with my name on his lips.

"Iskra."

I had not moved from my position near the fireplace. Hours had passed. Moonlight had shifted across the shredded furs and claw-marked stone. Frost had gathered thick on the window's edges, forming patterns that resembled the silver marks spreading across my forearms. I had watched him sleep because I did not know what else to do, because my body refused to move, because the hum inside my chest had finally fallen quiet for the first time in nine years.

Silence felt wrong. Silence felt like a held breath waiting for something terrible to follow.

"I am here."

Caspian pushed himself upright. His ruined shirt hung in tatters across his shoulders. Silver hair fell across his forehead in disarray. His eyes had returned to pale blue, and the tremor in his hands was barely visible now, just a faint vibration at his fingertips. He looked at me as if seeing me for the first time. Not the clinical assessment from the auction hall. Not the cold calculation from the carriage. Something rawer. Something closer to disbelief.

"You stayed."

"You collapsed. Leaving seemed unwise given that I do not know my way back to my room."

"Leaving seemed unwise." He repeated my words with an expression that might have been amusement on a face less severe. "Most people flee when I lose control. You sang."

"The hum demanded release. I did not plan it."

"Song-Wolves never plan it. That is what makes them dangerous."

I crossed my arms against the freezing air. My breath misted in front of my face. "You used that term before you collapsed. Song-Wolf. Explain what it means."

He rose, his movements stiff and careful, and crossed to a cabinet built into the frost-veined stone wall. He withdrew a wool coat and pulled it over his ruined shirt. His back remained turned to me as he spoke.

"It means you are the heir to a pack that was erased from history over a century ago. The Thirteenth Pack. Thirteen original clockmakers created the First Pendulum in 1848. Twelve merged with wolf spirits and became the Great Packs. The thirteenth refused. His name was Alaric Finch. He was my ancestor."

He turned. His pale eyes burned with an intensity that made the hair on my arms rise.

"Alaric believed the Constant Era would become a cage. He built a fail safe into the Pendulum's design, a frequency that could unmake everything his colleagues created. He encoded that frequency into his own bloodline. His daughters. His granddaughters. Every woman born to his lineage carried a fragment of the counter-song. They were called Song-Wolves. Female shifters whose wolf forms manifested as sound rather than physical transformation. They could sing notes that stabilized or shattered temporal magic."

"And the other packs allowed this?"

"The other packs slaughtered them." His voice dropped, rougher now. "A century ago, the Synchrony Council declared the Song-Wolves a threat to the Constant Era. They hunted your bloodline to extinction. Men, women, children, all erased. My own grandfather led the raid that burned Alaric's last daughter alive."

Silence swallowed the room. The frost on the window seemed to thicken. I felt my heart beating in my throat, in my wrists, in the silver marks that were still spreading across my skin like a song writing itself into my flesh.

"Your family murdered my family," I said slowly, each word a stone dropped into still water. "You purchased me knowing this. You bound me with silver knowing this. You threatened my sister's care knowing this."

"Yes."

"Why should I not let your curse consume you right now?"

"Because my curse consuming me will not stop the Synchrony." He stepped closer, and I saw genuine exhaustion in his face now, the exhaustion of a man who had been fighting a losing battle for fourteen years. "The packs are preparing something called the Grand Escapement. A final Correction that will permanently seal the Constant Era. No more free will. No more deviation. No more Song-Wolves hidden in Low District slums humming forbidden frequencies in their sleep. Your survival, your sister's survival, the survival of every person who has ever questioned the Synchrony's rule, all of it depends on stopping that ritual. I cannot stop it alone. My curse is killing me. You felt it. You saw what I become."

"A pup. A limping ancient. A man who cannot control his own form."

"A man who cannot protect anyone." He stopped three feet from where I stood. Close enough that I could see the faint silver stubble along his jaw. Close enough that his scent, pine and cold stone and something metallic beneath, filled my lungs. "You are a Song-Wolf, Iskra. The last one. Your frequency stabilized me for hours tonight. No medicine has ever achieved that. No physician. No ritual. Only you."

"You want me to cure you."

"I want you to help me burn down the system that murdered your ancestors and cursed my bloodline. After that, you may despise me all you wish. You may leave. You may never speak my name again. But until the Grand Escapement is stopped, we need each other."

I searched his face for deception. His pale eyes held mine without flinching. The cold mask he had worn since the auction hall had cracked somewhere during the night, and beneath it was not the monster I had expected. Just a man. Exhausted. Desperate. Carrying the weight of a century of guilt that was not personally his but that he had inherited regardless.

"My sister," I said. "Mila. Her illness. You said it was not random."

"The temporal sickness afflicting your sister is not a natural disease. It is a targeted attack. Someone in the Synchrony discovered your mother's bloodline before she was erased. They have been trying to flush out surviving Song-Wolves ever since. Mila was exposed to a concentrated temporal toxin designed to trigger supernatural abilities in dormant carriers. If she has your bloodline, the toxin will either kill her or awaken her powers. Either outcome exposes her to the packs."

My legs nearly gave out. I locked my knees and forced myself to remain upright. "You are telling me my sister is lying in a hospital bed because someone poisoned her to see if she would sing."

"I am telling you that Saint Verena's Infirmary is no longer safe. My people are arranging her transfer to a private facility within Finch Spire as we speak. She will be here by morning."

"You did not ask my permission."

"You were standing on an auction block. Asking your permission would have required explaining what you are in a hall filled with rival Alphas who would have killed you on the spot." His jaw tightened. "I have made a hundred decisions in the past three weeks that should have been yours. Every single one was made to keep you breathing long enough for this conversation to happen."

I wanted to argue. I wanted to scream at him for purchasing me, for binding me, for knowing everything about my bloodline while I knew nothing. But the image of Mila in her narrow hospital bed, coughing blood onto thin pillows, silenced me.

"If my sister is harmed," I said quietly, "I will not sing for you again. I will swallow my frequency until it chokes me. I will let your curse consume you and your pack and everything your ancestors built. Do you understand?"

"I understand." His voice was equally quiet. "I would expect nothing less."

A knock at the door interrupted us. Lena's voice carried through the iron. "My lord. Madame Flux has arrived. She is waiting in the eastern parlor."

Caspian straightened. The cold mask slid back into place, but it was thinner now, less convincing. "We will continue this conversation later. Madame Flux was my father's seer and his father's before that. She knew Alaric personally before he erased himself. She has waited over a century to meet you."

"To meet the last Song-Wolf."

"To meet the woman who might finally complete what Alaric started." He extended his hand. Not the commanding gesture of an Alpha demanding obedience. An offering. "Please. Whatever you decide afterward, you deserve to know the full truth first."

I looked at his outstretched palm. The same hand that had bid five thousand chrono-marks. The same hand that had gripped my chin in the training hall. The same hand that had, hours ago, convulsed against cold stone while his wolf tried to tear him apart.

I did not take it. But I walked beside him through the freezing corridors of the north wing, down staircases that wound through the Spire's ancient heart. Frost gave way to cold stone. Cold stone gave way to warmer corridors lit by chronostatic lamps. The eastern wing emerged around us, older than the rest, its walls lined with tapestries I had not noticed before. Wolves and humans seated together at long tables. Clockmakers bent over intricate devices. Women with silver hair singing to audiences of rapt shifters.

"Song-Wolves," I murmured, pausing before a tapestry depicting a woman whose mouth was open in song while wolves bowed at her feet. "My ancestors walked these halls once."

"They built these halls. The eastern wing was Alaric's domain before the m******e. The other packs destroyed everything they could find, but some remnants survived." Caspian stopped beside me. "I have kept them hidden for years. I did not know why until my seer told me about a woman humming in the Low District."

We continued walking. The parlor doors appeared ahead, pale wood inlaid with silver filigree. Caspian pushed them open.

A woman sat in the chair closest to the fire. Iron-grey hair braided tightly around her head. Brass-colored eyes that had witnessed over a century of pack politics. Her gnarled hands rested on the head of a carved wooden cane. She looked at me with an intensity that made the hum stir beneath my ribs.

"So you are the one," she said. Her voice was rough with pipe smoke and decades of hard living. "Four point seven seconds. I timed it from three pruned timelines away. Rattled my best glasses right off their shelf. Sit down, girl. We have a great deal to discuss."

I sat. Madame Flux poured tea with hands that did not tremble and pushed a cup toward me.

"You have told her the basics," she said to Caspian. "The bloodline. The m******e. The Grand Escapement."

"Enough for tonight," Caspian replied. "The rest can wait until her sister arrives and she has slept."

"The rest cannot wait." Madame Flux fixed her brass eyes on me. "The Synchrony knows a Song-Wolf survived. They detected your frequency the night you fractured the Low District. Four point seven seconds was all they needed. Iterators are already searching. It is only a matter of days before they trace the signature to Finch Spire."

Caspian went rigid. "You did not tell me this."

"I am telling you now. The girl needed to understand what she is before she learned how little time she has." Madame Flux leaned forward, her gaze never leaving my face. "Alaric Finch built a fail safe into the Pendulum. You are that fail safe. But a fail safe requires activation. There are thirteen original cogs scattered across the Chronoclasts, dead pockets of pruned history. Each one must be retrieved and assembled into the Pendulum before you can sing the counter-frequency. The retrieval will require you and Caspian to work together. The bond between you will grow stronger with each cog you recover. By the time you hold all thirteen, the mating marks will be complete, and your choice will be upon you."

"What choice?"

"To destroy the Constant Era or to remake it. Alaric did not design the fail safe to annihilate everything. He designed it to offer a third option. Not the cage of perfect order. Not the chaos of total freedom. Something between. But that third option requires both halves of the frequency. The Song-Wolf and the Finch Alpha. Mated. Bonded. Unified."

I looked at Caspian. His expression was unreadable, but his hands had begun trembling again.

"You knew this too," I said. "You knew the bond was not merely a side effect of the contract."

"I knew there was a possibility." His voice was flat. "I did not know it was certain until tonight when your frequency stabilized me. The contract marks are evolving into mating marks. I felt it happen. So did you."

I looked down at my forearms. The silver lines had spread further, branching into delicate patterns that resembled musical notation. A song was being written on my skin, and I had not consented to a single note.

"I did not choose this," I said.

"Neither did I." Caspian's voice cracked, just slightly, the first genuine break in his composure I had witnessed. "But fate does not appear to care what either of us chose. It wrote this symphony before my great-grandfather erased himself from existence. We are merely the instruments."

Madame Flux sipped her tea. "Well said. Almost poetic. You should write that down."

Caspian shot her a look that could have frozen water. She ignored it entirely.

"The first Chronoclast is the Romanovs' final hour," she continued. "Alaric hid the first cog in the hand of their youngest daughter. I can open a door to that dead timeline tonight. But retrieval will require both of you. The Chronoclast will not release the cog to anyone else."

I stared into my teacup. The liquid was dark and fragrant and utterly still. Outside, dawn was beginning to lighten the sky beyond the frosted windows. Somewhere in the Low District, Mila was being transferred to a carriage that would bring her here. Somewhere in the city, Iterators were searching for a woman who hummed the wrong frequency. Somewhere in the Spire, an Alpha with a dying curse and a bloodstained inheritance was waiting for my answer.

"Tonight," I said. "I will enter the Chronoclast tonight. But I am doing this for Mila and for the truth. Not for you."

Caspian nodded. "Understood."

Madame Flux smiled, a slow, knowing expression that rearranged the lines of her weathered face. "Good. Then drink your tea, child. You will need your strength. Dead timelines are not kind to newcomers."

I drank my tea. The hum stirred beneath my ribs, no longer suppressed, no longer hidden. For the first time in nine years, I did not swallow it back.

I let it sing.