My Alpha’s Scent Was My Dead Mate’s

The forest was ours in the hour before dawn. That's what I told myself every time we slipped past the territory markers, Miles running beside me in wolf form while I stayed human, my hand occasionally brushing the thick fur of his flank. He'd been with me for three weeks now. Three weeks of quiet mornings and quieter nights, of watching him remember how to be a wolf even if he couldn't remember being himself.

We shouldn't have been this far out. I knew it. But Miles—my Miles, the one I'd named in my Omega cabin—loved the border runs. Loved the way the pre-dawn light filtered through the pines, the way the air tasted different this close to neutral ground.

"We should head back," I said softly, even though I didn't want to. Even though every minute with him felt borrowed, and I was greedy enough to steal a few more.

He shifted back to human form in one fluid motion, standing naked in the half-light without self-consciousness. That was another thing about amnesia—it had stripped away whatever social conditioning he'd had before. He smiled at me, that gentle, uncomplicated smile that made my chest ache.

"Five more minutes," he said. "Please?"

I should have said no. I should have heard the wrongness in how quiet the forest had gone, should have noticed the absence of birdsong. But I was looking at Miles, at the way the emerging sunlight caught in his dark hair, and I was thinking about Francis—about how Francis had never asked, only demanded, and how Miles's please felt like a gift I didn't deserve.

"Five minutes," I agreed.

The crack came from above.

I looked up in time to see the massive branch—thick as my torso, heavy with rain-soaked wood—plummeting directly toward me. There was no time to move, no time to shift, no time for anything but the sudden, crystalline certainty that this was how I died.

Then Miles slammed into me.

We hit the ground hard, my shoulder taking the brunt of the fall, and the branch—the goddamn branch that should have crushed my skull—crashed down onto Miles's back instead. The sound it made was wrong. Wet and cracking and final.

Miles screamed.

It wasn't a human sound. It was something deeper, more primal, torn from a place I didn't know existed. His body convulsed once, twice, and then he was shifting—not the smooth, controlled shift I'd watched him do a hundred times, but something violent and involuntary. Bones snapping into new configurations, muscle tearing and reforming, his human cry morphing into a wolf's roar that shook the trees.

But this wasn't the wolf I knew.

This wolf was bigger. Darker. Its aura hit me like a physical force, pressing down on my lungs until I couldn't breathe. Alpha aura. Undeniable and overwhelming and nothing like the gentle presence I'd grown used to.

The wolf's eyes opened—still amber, but different now. Focused. Aware. Ancient.

It looked at me, and there was no recognition in that gaze. None. Just confusion and pain and something that might have been irritation that I was still kneeling there, staring.

From the direction of pack territory, I heard shouts. Running footsteps. The guards had heard the roar.

"Miles," I whispered. My voice cracked on his name. "Miles, it's me. It's Kylee."

The wolf's lip curled back from its teeth. Not a snarl, exactly. More like... dismissal.

Then the guards burst through the tree line, and everything became noise and movement. Someone was pulling me back, away from the massive Alpha wolf that was struggling to its feet despite the branch still partially pinning it. Someone else was shouting orders, calling for the healer, calling for—

"The Alpha heir," one of them breathed, and my stomach dropped through the forest floor. "It's Miles Matthews. He's alive."

They surrounded him, these Delta warriors who suddenly looked small and inadequate next to his wolf. Someone managed to shift the branch. Someone else was trying to get him to shift back to human form, speaking in the careful, deferential tones you used with an Alpha.

I stood there in the dirt, my shoulder screaming, my heart screaming louder, and watched them take him away.

Not once did he look back.

The formal summons came the next morning, delivered by a stiff-backed Delta who wouldn't meet my eyes. I was to present myself at the Alpha's office at ten o'clock sharp. No explanation. No context. Just the time and the place and the unspoken weight of a command I couldn't refuse.

I showed up five minutes early, because that's what Omegas did. The pack house loomed above me, all stone and timber and old money, the kind of building that made you feel small just by existing near it. The Alpha's office was on the third floor, behind a door of dark oak that probably cost more than everything I owned.

I knocked once.

"Enter."

The voice was familiar and completely foreign at the same time. I pushed the door open.

Miles sat behind a massive desk, dressed in clothes I'd never seen him wear—tailored, expensive, the kind of casual that cost a fortune. His hair was styled. His posture was different, straighter, commanding in a way that had nothing to do with his size and everything to do with the authority radiating from every line of his body.

And standing beside him, one perfectly manicured hand resting possessively on the back of his chair, was the most beautiful she-wolf I'd ever seen.

She smiled at me. It didn't reach her eyes.

"You must be Kylee," she said, her voice honey-sweet and sharp as glass. "I'm Celeste Mitchell. Miles's Luna candidate."

Miles looked at me with those amber eyes—Francis's scent, a stranger's gaze—and said, absolutely nothing at all.