My Alpha Chose My Sister

Ian announced the border patrol on a Wednesday morning, and something in my chest went tight the moment he read out the route.

The frozen mountain pass. The north ridge section. The narrowest stretch of the territory boundary, where the path ran along a crumbling limestone edge with a forty-foot drop on one side and dense tree cover on the other — exactly the kind of terrain that made retreat complicated and ambush easy.

I waited until after the briefing, then found Rowe, the Ironridge Gamma, in the corridor outside the war room.

"The north ridge," I said. "The eastern section is unstable. The freeze-thaw cycle this month has been bad — I've seen the cracks from the tree line. If we're moving a full patrol group through there, we should take the lower path."

Rowe looked at me the way people in this pack had always looked at me — not unkindly, just with the particular blankness of someone who had never quite figured out what category I belonged in. The healer. The Alpha's mate. The woman who had been here three years and still somehow felt like a guest.

"I'll mention it to Alpha Carter," he said.

He didn't. Or if he did, Ian didn't change the route.

Melody decided to come.

She announced it at breakfast with that bright, carrying energy she had, the one that filled rooms and made people smile without knowing why. "I want to see the territory," she said. "I've been cooped up inside for weeks."

Ian looked up from his coffee and said, "Dress warm."

That was it. No mention that she had no patrol training. No mention that the north ridge in February was not a scenic walk. I looked at my plate and said nothing, because I had learned that saying things in this house produced very little except the particular exhaustion of being ignored.

We set out at first light — Ian, Melody, four Ironridge warriors, and me. The cold was the kind that gets into your joints and stays there. The mountain pass was beautiful in the way that dangerous things sometimes are: ice-glazed rock faces catching the early light, the tree line dark and still, the path ahead white and clean and unmarked.

I stayed toward the back of the group. My wolf was restless in a way she hadn't been in months, pacing the edges of my consciousness, her attention fixed on the tree line to the east. I kept my eyes moving.

We were forty minutes in when we hit the narrow section.

The path compressed to maybe six feet wide here, the drop on the right side falling away into gray nothing, the trees pressing close on the left. The limestone under the snow was visibly fractured in places — I could see the dark lines running through it, the way the surface had heaved and settled unevenly. I stepped carefully, testing each footfall.

Melody was laughing at something Ian had said. The sound carried sharp and clear in the cold air.

The first rogue came out of the trees without any warning at all.

Not one. Six.

They hit the patrol from both sides simultaneously, which meant they had been watching us, which meant they had known the route, which meant someone had made it very easy for them. The warriors reacted fast — I heard the sounds of shifting, the wet crack of bones restructuring, snarls cutting through the cold — but the rogues had split us deliberately, two engaging the warriors at the front, two at the rear, and two driving straight for the center of the group.

For Ian.

I saw him assess it in under a second. His eyes swept the ridge, the drop, the rogues, the tree line. His hand shot out and closed around Melody's arm.

And he ran.

Not toward the warriors. Not toward me. He turned and he ran back the way we'd come, pulling Melody with him, and the two rogues that had been driving toward him peeled off and let him go — because they hadn't been after him at all.

They turned toward me.

Three of them. The two from the center push and one that had broken off from the rear engagement. They moved to cut me off from the retreating group with the kind of coordinated efficiency that told me this wasn't random. This was planned.

I backed up. The limestone cracked under my left foot and I shifted my weight fast, my heart slamming against my ribs. The drop was behind me now. Maybe four feet of solid path left between me and the edge.

I was not a warrior. I had never been a warrior. But I had spent three years studying anatomy in precise, exhaustive detail, and I knew exactly where a wolf's joints were weakest, where a strike would cause maximum disruption, where to hit to buy myself three seconds.

The first one lunged.

I dropped under it and drove my elbow into the joint of its foreleg as it passed over me — felt the satisfying wrongness of the impact, heard it yelp and stumble. I came up already moving, but the second one was faster. Its teeth caught my left shoulder and the pain was white and total, the kind that empties your mind of everything except the immediate fact of it.

I wrenched away. Lost some of my coat. Kept moving.

The third one feinted left and I blocked with my forearm — wrong choice, I knew it the moment I did it — and its jaws closed on my forearm hard enough that I felt something give. I went down on one knee.

The limestone at the edge crumbled under my right foot. Small pieces of it fell away into the gray below, and I heard them hit nothing for a long time.

Three wolves. One knee on a breaking ridge. My left arm not working right and my right hand braced against the ground, the cold of it burning through my palm.

I looked up at the three of them closing in, and I understood — with the particular clarity that comes when your body already knows something your mind is still catching up to — that Ian was not coming back.

He had made his choice in under a second. He hadn't hesitated. Hadn't looked back.

My wolf went absolutely still inside me.

Not afraid. Not desperate. Just — still. The way she had gone still the afternoon Melody arrived, the way she had been going still for three years, each time I told myself it was fine, each time I organized my supplies and did my work and did not let myself think too hard.

She had known before I did.

The largest rogue lowered its head and took a step toward me, and I tightened my grip on the frozen ground and thought, with strange, distant calm: so this is where it ends.