Valek
The PR circus begins at seven.
And until then, we wait.
I've never been good at waiting. Waiting implies trust. Trust that things will unfold as planned, that variables have been accounted for, that the people around you won't do something catastrophically stupid in the interim.
Whiskey is in the room.
So.
The odds aren't great.
He's on the couch with his phone, scrolling with his thumb at a speed that suggests either superhuman visual processing or a complete absence of reading comprehension. Knowing him, it's both.
"Oh shit," he breathes.
Nobody responds.
"Oh SHIT."
"What," Plague says flatly from the other side of the couch, where he's been pretending to read something on his laptop for the last forty minutes. I know he's pretending because he hasn't scrolled once and he's been staring at the far wall.
Whiskey ignores him and angles his phone toward me instead.
I lean over from my armchair and glance at his screen.
Fan edit. Slow motion footage of me dismantling Wade Kelly on the ice, set to a bass-heavy Tchaikovsky remix with flashing lights and slow-motion effects. The timing is impeccable. Every hit lands on a beat. The knee goes on the drop.
"Three million views," Whiskey whispers reverently. "In sixteen hours."
"Turn it off," Plague says without looking up.
Whiskey keeps scrolling. "Oh, you're gonna love this one. Someone put the Wraith footage to—"
"Do not show that to Wraith," I say quietly.
Whiskey's thumb stops.
He glances over his shoulder. Wraith is sitting on the floor near the window with Ivy curled in his lap, her head against his chest as she reads a book on her phone, his massive arms around her like she's the only thing keeping his organs inside his body.
He hasn't signed anything in over an hour. His blue eyes are open but distant.
Dissociated.
Not fully. He responds when Ivy speaks to him, his hand automatically adjusting the blanket when it slips off her shoulder, his fingers occasionally drifting to his bandages and the scarf Plague gave him before redirecting to her hair instead.
But he's running on autopilot. The alpha equivalent of a screensaver.
"Yeah," Whiskey mutters, lowering his phone. "No, you're right. Bad idea."
He keeps scrolling in silence.
"Okay but look at this one, Val. We're neck and neck."
He shoves the phone at me again. It's a fan poll. Rate the Ghosts pack: who would you most want as your alpha?
Valek: 38%
Whiskey: 36%
Plague: 23%
Wraith: 2%
Thane: 1%
"ONE PERCENT," Whiskey cackles, slapping his knee. "Thane got one percent."
From the kitchen doorway, Thane clears his throat.
Whiskey's phone vanishes so fast I'm genuinely impressed. I don't even know where he put it. Between his legs, maybe.
"What?" Whiskey asks innocently.
Thane's dark eyes move between us with the exhausted suspicion of an older brother who walked in on his idiot siblings doing something he'll regret investigating.
I would know from experience. He holds a mug of coffee in one hand and a sandwich in the other.
His third in an hour. Stress-eating, which I've gathered is his default coping mechanism.
"Nothing," Thane says.
His gaze lingers on me a beat longer than on Whiskey.
I haven't decided about you yet.
I incline my head.
Fair.
He disappears back into the kitchen.
Whiskey retrieves his phone the second Thane's gone but doesn't show me anything this time.
He's scrolling quietly, his thumb moving fast, his brow furrowed in rare concentration.
Plague hasn't moved from his laptop. The house settles into the kind of heavy afternoon stillness that makes minutes feel like hours.
Across the room, Wraith's eyes have finally closed. His breathing has gone deep and slow against Ivy's neck, his scarred hand slack on her waist. She hasn't moved. She's still reading.
The room is quiet.
Too quiet for my liking.
I look around the room to occupy my eyes, but my gaze keeps getting drawn back to Ivy. The armchair is a perfectly acceptable distance between us. Close enough to be present, far enough to maintain the boundary I've kept since the first night I sat against that wall and didn't join the nest.
Ivy turns a page on her phone. The blue light catches the curve of her cheekbone and the dark reddish fan of her lashes.
I pick up my tea and cross the room to settle on the floor near the window, my back against the wall perpendicular to hers. If she stretched her leg out fully, her foot might reach my knee.
She doesn't look up.
But the corner of her mouth curves.
"Subtle," she murmurs.
"I have no idea what you're referring to."
"You moved closer."
"The light is better here."
"You're not reading."
She's right. I take a sip of tea instead and stare off at the far wall as silence settles between us.
It's deeply uncomfortable.
I don't do comfortable silence. Comfortable silence implies familiarity. Ease. The sort of unspoken understanding that develops between people who have chosen each other, and choosing people is not something I do.
My family chose me.
I merely failed to leave.
Ivy scrolls another page.
"What are you reading?" I ask, because apparently I've lost control of my own mouth.
"Fanfiction."
I pause mid-sip. "Of?"
"Us."
The tea burns the roof of my mouth. I swallow it anyway because I refuse to give her the satisfaction of a visible reaction.
"Whiskey sent me a link," she continues, her voice light and innocent in a way that is absolutely neither. "Apparently there's a whole tag. Want to know your character archetype? You already have one."
"No."
"Brooding antihero with a dark past."
"That's offensively reductive."
"You snuck into a hospital last night to threaten another alpha. For me." She glances at me over her phone. Those blue-green eyes catch the light differently than they do in daylight. They're warmer and softer and glittering with amusement. "The shoe fits, Valek."
I open my mouth.
Close it.
Her smile widens, and she goes back to her phone.
I stare at the wall again instead of at her. Wraith shifts in his sleep, his scarred fingers tightening briefly on Ivy's shirt before relaxing again. She adjusts the blanket wrapped around them both like a cocoon without looking away from her screen.
I wish it were me holding her like that.
Gods, I despise myself.
"Thank you," I mutter.
Ivy looks up from her screen. "For what?"
"For claiming me. At the arena."
The amusement fades from her expression. She holds my gaze the same way she held it when she stood in my doorway and said let's start over.
"You earned it," she says simply.
She goes back to her book.
I stay where I am.
The silence returns, and this time, I don't try to escape it.
Whiskey's sharp inhale from the couch yanks me back.
"Is this you?" he asks, holding the phone out to show me the screen. It's another fan thread.
This one's titled: Who IS Valek?
I didn’t want to look at this, but I look anyway.
The top posts are harmless. Stats from my single Demons season. Speculation about my nationality. A blurry candid of me signing a fan's jersey at an airport, looking like I'd rather be anywhere else.
Then a photo I've never seen.
It's from the Northwyke Gazette, scanned and uploaded by someone with too much time. A puff piece about the Carters from a decade ago. The image is grainy, the kind of small-town newspaper photo that no one should have noticed.
I'm sixteen, leaning against the Carters' porch railing in a battered leather jacket with the collar popped and one combat boot braced against the post behind me. My hair is cropped shorter than I wear it now, and I’m sporting a yellow-green fading black eye that hadn't fully healed when the photographer showed up.
The Carters didn't ask me to hide it or cover it with makeup.
David has his hand on my shoulder, firm and squeezing, the way you'd touch a wild animal you were proving you wouldn't hurt. Caleb is on my other side, fourteen and grinning so wide his eyes are practically closed, leaning into me as I lean away.
David and Olivia Carter with their children, including newest family member Valek, 16.
I don't read the piles of fan comments underneath.
"Delete that from your history," I mutter to Whiskey.
He looks at me. Looks at the screen. Back at me.
Then he deletes it without argument.
The next thread is about Wraith. The old Belmont Brothers article has been dredged up and reposted.
The backyard rink photo, the two of them as teenagers.
I've seen it before. It circulated when I first researched this pack.
Wraith in his gaiter, head turned away from the camera, hands shoved in his pocket. Thane beside him, younger, lankier.
Before last night, it was a curiosity. A footnote in a sports article about a captain and his mysterious foster brother.
Now it's a forensic exhibit.
The comments have tripled since the game.
People are dissecting the photo with new eyes, comparing teenage Wraith to the footage of him unmasked, arguing about whether Wraith is his real name, the timeline of his injuries, speculating about who did it and when and why was he already wearing the mask as a teenager, what happened to his face, someone find the police report—
Strangers building a case file out of a boy who just wanted to turn away from the camera.
There are more threads and posts about Wraith. Many more.
The comments are... not what I expected.
The top responses are the usual garbage. Monster. Freak. Ban him. Muzzle him. Disgusting. Nightmare fuel.
But further down…
honestly he's kind of hot in a terrifying way???
the way he protected his omega though. THAT is an alpha.
unpopular opinion but wraith could get it
HIS EYES. have you SEEN his eyes. the face doesn't matter when the eyes are like THAT. so pretty omg
monsterfucker solidarity we ride at dawn
I blink.
Read them again.
Whiskey watches my reaction with barely contained glee. "Told you the monsterfucker thing was real."
"I didn't doubt you. I doubted the scale."
"Bro, there's fan art already. Not just the horny stuff." He scrolls to an illustration of Wraith in his jersey, eyes blazing blue. The artist didn't shy away from the detail of his disfigurement.
But he looks… noble.
"Don't show him," I say again, though this time my voice has less edge to it.
"Obviously not now." Whiskey pockets his phone. "But eventually, right? He should know not everyone thinks he's…" He trails off, gesturing vaguely.
"Yes," I mutter. "Eventually."
Whiskey stretches his arms above his head with a groan, his shirt riding up to expose a strip of padded stomach. I catch Plague's eyes locking on and snort. Whiskey doesn't notice. "Man, this waiting shit is killing me. I need to do something."
"You could clean your room," Plague offers dryly from the other side of the couch.
Whiskey hurls an IKEA shark at him. "Fuck off."
Plague catches it one-handed, but the tail knocks his laptop off his lap. He catches it with his other hand, somehow. "You fucking idiot—"
"Yo, that was sick!" Whiskey crows.
Plague glowers at him, pulling his laptop back into his lap and slinging the shark back at Whiskey.
It bounces off him and hits Wraith's arm. The feral alpha's eyes snap open. He stares at the shark, blinks, then looks up at us with a perplexed crease between his eyebrows. Ivy doesn't notice. She's too engrossed in her fanfiction.
Whiskey "rescues" his shark with a cry of despair and flings himself back onto the couch, landing half on top of Plague, who snarls and shoves uselessly at him.
"You're fucking crushing me! Get off!"
They scuffle. Elbows and knees and Plague's hand pressing against Whiskey's face while Whiskey tries to wedge himself into a nonexistent gap between Plague and the armrest.
"Foreplay looks different in every culture, I suppose," I say.
The scuffling stops.
From across the room, Ivy laughs, and Wraith's distant eyes refocus for a moment, tracking the sound to its source, his scarred hand tightening gently on her waist.
She catches my eye when she laughs. Just for a second. And her laugh softens into a smile that lingers in her eyes long after the smile fades and she goes back to her book.
Plague is seething. His eyes bore into the side of my skull for another ten seconds before returning to his screen with a sharp exhale through his nostrils.
But I made her laugh.
Worth it.
The seething, and the fact it was at Plague and Whiskey's expense, is just the icing on top.