After My Alpha Traded Me for Territory

Thornwall didn't welcome me. It assessed me.

Alpha Garrett Vance met me at the gate with his arms crossed and his jaw set like a man who'd already decided I wasn't worth his time. He was broad through the shoulders, scarred across the knuckles, and when his eyes dropped to my bare collarbone, he didn't look away quickly the way the Lycan guards had.

"Thornwall doesn't house passengers," he said. "You train with my warriors at dawn, or you go."

I nodded. He didn't nod back.

They put me in a bunk at the end of the warriors' barracks, nearest the drafty window. The straw mattress smelled like old sweat and gun oil. The other she-wolves watched me as I unrolled my single blanket. None of them spoke. One of them — tall, auburn-haired, muscled like a middle-weight fighter — glanced at my throat and then away, like she was embarrassed for me.

I didn't sleep. I sat on the edge of the bunk and listened to the wind rattle the shutters and felt the empty place in my chest where the bond with Devon still smoldered, faint and poisoned.

At dawn I was in the yard.

The first week nearly killed me.

I couldn't keep up. The unmated she-wolves lapped me on the running track. The Deltas took me to the mat and dropped me within seconds. My lungs burned. My arms shook. By the third day, I was coughing blood into the snow behind the shed where no one could see.

But I didn't leave the yard.

I stayed until every other trainee had filed inside for their meal, and then I stayed longer, running the forms Garrett's second had shown me, over and over, until my legs gave out and I dropped to the frozen dirt. Garrett watched me from the fence with his hands folded on the top rail. He never offered a word. Never offered a hand up. But he was there every evening, and every evening he stayed until I stood.

On the ninth night, I crawled back to the barracks and collapsed on my bunk and felt something shift inside my ribs — a slow, deep uncoiling, like a muscle I'd forgotten I had. The silver thing beneath my skin stirred, pressed once against my sternum, and settled.

Listening.

It was that same night that the dreams began.

They weren't dreams, exactly. They were leakage. The unsevered bond with Devon was a cracked pipe in my chest, and whatever he felt dripped through to me whether I wanted it or not. I'd close my eyes and smell my own scent — wild lavender and frost — in a room I wasn't standing in. I'd feel his hands clutching fabric that smelled like me. I'd hear him pacing.

One night I woke with the taste of his despair in my mouth and a flash of memory that wasn't mine: Devon standing in the pines in human form, his Deltas watching, his wolf refusing to come when he called.

I pressed my palm flat over my collarbone and whispered into the dark: good.

—

Thornwall had a network. Rumors came in on the backs of trade caravans and border scouts, and Garrett's Beta funneled the useful ones through a weekly briefing I was permitted to attend after my third week.

That was how I heard about Paisley.

"Roger Martinez threw her off Ironridge grounds the day Devon brought her home." The Beta's voice was flat, factual. "Scented her rogue blood under the jasmine. Had his Gamma drag her to the territory line. Told Devon the Moon Goddess doesn't bless a wolf who trades his fated mate for a rogue's daughter."

Someone at the table made a low noise of satisfaction. The Beta kept reading.

"Devon stood in the elder hall and took it in front of the whole council. Roger limped out and tapped his signet ring on the doorframe on his way through. Twice. People are calling it the sound of a bloodline closing."

I didn't react. I'd stopped reacting to news of Devon weeks ago. But I felt my wolf tilt her head inside me, interested.

The second report came a week later.

Paisley had surfaced near Crestfall territory, offering stolen Ironridge pack-meeting transcripts in exchange for provisional sanctuary. She was selling herself as an intelligence asset. The Crestfall Alpha was reportedly considering it.

I set down my water cup.

"May I use the courier?" I asked.

Garrett looked at me from the head of the table. It was the first time he'd met my eyes since I arrived.

"Depends who you're writing," he said.

"The Lycan Council's territorial office."

Something shifted in his expression. Not a smile. Something harder.

"Granted," he said.

That night I sat at the barracks' single lamp and wrote.

I kept it short. I attached a sealed copy of Devon's blood-pact scroll — the one with my name listed as collateral, his seal pressed in red wax at the bottom. I noted that the rogue operative Paisley Gordon was currently circulating pack intelligence obtained in the course of Devon Martinez's blood crime, and that the intelligence itself was fruit of that crime.

I didn't ask the Council for anything. I didn't need to. The paper would do the work.

I sealed the envelope with wax from a plain tallow candle and handed it to the courier at dawn.

When I walked back toward the yard, the wind off the pines smelled like cedar and ozone — not here, not real, but somewhere, carried on the thin thread still running through my chest.

I pressed my hand over my collarbone and smiled, just once, where no one could see.

Then I went to train.