THE NIGHT MY ALPHA THREW ME OUT

Chapter 3

Nora POV

Finn was born on a freezing morning in March, in the back room of Ruth's shop because I was too scared of what a hospital blood test might reveal about what I was.

Ruth had offered the space without being asked, clearing out the storage room the week before my due date and lining it with clean blankets like she'd been planning for this all along. "Babies don't care about hospitals," she told me, folding a stack of towels with steady hands. "They care about warm and safe. We can give you both right here."

Talia held my hand through eleven hours of labor and never once flinched, even when my claws came out with the pain and I had to grit my teeth and force them back before she could see clearly what they were. She just kept talking, low and steady, telling me stupid stories about diner customers and Ruth's terrible taste in radio stations, anything to give my mind somewhere else to go. When they finally put my son in my arms, red-faced and already furious at the world, exhausted and aching in every part of my body, I looked down at him and saw Damian's exact grey eyes staring back up at me, wide and unblinking, like he was memorizing my face on sight.

"He's got his father's eyes," Talia said softly, brushing a curl off my forehead with the back of her hand. "Where is he? Does he know?"

"He knows nothing," I said. "And he never will."

I meant it as a promise to myself, a wall I was building brick by brick to keep my son safe from a pack that had never wanted either of us. I didn't know yet how hard walls like that are to keep standing, or how much they cost to maintain.

The first year blurred together the way I'm told first years always do feedings in the dark, the small shop humming along on Ruth's patience and my exhaustion, Talia showing up most evenings with leftovers from the diner because she said I "looked like I forgot food was a thing people ate." Finn grew fast. Too fast, if I was honest with myself, hitting milestones weeks ahead of where the library books said he should. He walked at nine months. He spoke in full sentences before he turned two. I told myself it was nothing, that some children were simply advanced, even as some quiet animal part of me recognized exactly what it meant.

"Mama, why do I have claws and the other kids don't?"

Finn asked me that on his fourth birthday, holding his small hand up in the porch light, staring at the tiny claws poking through his fingertips like he'd just discovered something wonderful and terrifying at the same time. I'd known this day was coming. Wolf children shift early sometimes, when their blood runs strong, and Finn's blood ran stronger than any child I'd ever heard of stronger even than mine, which told me exactly whose son he really was, in case the eyes hadn't already made it obvious to anyone who cared to look closely.

"You're special," I told him, kneeling down so we were eye to eye on the porch step, my heart hammering in a way I hoped didn't show on my face. "But it's a secret. A good secret, just between us. Can you keep a secret for Mama?"

He nodded so seriously it nearly broke my heart in half. Four years old, and already learning to hide part of himself, the exact way I'd been hiding parts of myself my whole life. I hated that he had to learn it so young. I hated more that I didn't have a better answer to give him.

That night, after he fell asleep, I sat at my sewing table for a long time with the lamp off, just listening to the house settle, thinking about how long I could really keep something like this contained. Claws were small. Claws could be explained away as a phase, a strange birthmark, anything a five-year-old's teacher wouldn't look at twice. But claws were rarely the last thing to show up in a child with blood as strong as his. I didn't let myself finish that thought. I went to bed instead, and in the morning I told myself, the way I told myself most things back then, that I would deal with the next problem when it actually arrived.

By the time Finn turned five, Millbrook had become a real home in every way that mattered. I had my own small shop now, Ruth having retired the year before and sold it to me for almost nothing, saying I'd "earned every stitch of it twice over" and waving off my protests with the same brisk hands that had once taught me to hem a straight line. Talia was practically family, dropping by most evenings with leftover pie from the diner, teasing Finn until he laughed so hard he hiccupped and had to be sent to bed still giggling, his small chest still shaking with it long after the lights went out. I had built something out of nothing with my own two hands. No pack watching me, no Alpha, no mate bond dragging me anywhere I hadn't chosen to go myself.

I told myself I was happy. Most days, I even believed it. I had a shop with my name over the door, a son who was clever and kind and quick to laugh, a friend who would have walked through fire for either of us without asking a single question. It was a smaller life than the one I might have had, but it was mine, built from nothing but stubbornness and forty-two dollars and a decision made on a gas station floor.

Then the attacks started.

The first one was just a rumor a hiker found dead at the edge of the county, throat torn out in a way the local paper called "an animal attack" and everyone else quietly called something worse over their morning coffee. I felt it the way only another wolf could: the specific, wrong shape of a kill made by claws, not teeth. Rogues. Close to Millbrook. Closer than rogues should ever get to a human town this deep from any pack border, this far from the kind of chaos that usually kept them contained.

I told myself it was one incident. Bad luck. Nothing at all to do with me.

The second attack happened four miles from Finn's school.

I stood in my shop that night with the radio murmuring the sheriff's warning to keep children indoors, and I felt the old bond-wound in my chest twist in a way it hadn't in years not grief this time, but warning, some deep animal instinct screaming that this wasn't random at all, that something was pushing rogues this close to human land on purpose, and that whatever it was, it was getting closer to the one thing in this world I couldn't afford to lose.

Talia found me an hour later, still standing frozen at the counter, staring at nothing.

"You know something," she said. It wasn't a question. Five years of friendship had taught her to read me better than almost anyone alive, better maybe than I read myself some days. "Whatever it is, Nora, you need to tell someone. There's a kid asleep upstairs who needs you to still be standing here tomorrow."

She didn't know how right she was, or how impossible her advice actually was for someone like me someone with nowhere safe left to turn except the one place I'd sworn on my son's life I would never take him.