Alpha’s Divine Claim (Shattered Loyalties #5)

Prologue

Valen

The pack knows I’m here.

They’ve known for weeks. Longer, if the Drakorian is as sharp as his perimeter reads suggest, and he is.

They’ve sent three wolves to the treeline in the past ten days.

Good wolves, all of them. Quiet, patient, he kind of pack members an alpha builds a perimeter around rather than just putting on it.

None of them came close enough to matter. Even though I’m not hiding. I stopped hiding from this pack two sightings ago. What I’m doing is harder to name.

The compound sits below me in the dark, the lodge throwing warm light across the yard.

This late, the activity has pulled inward.

Fewer wolves move between buildings, the patrol rotation settles into its overnight rhythm.

I’ve mapped it, it’s an old habit. I know the gap between the eastern cabin row and the treeline, the angle of the bell tower’s shadow at this hour, the quiet that means the pack is resting rather than gone to ground.

I know which cabin is hers.

What I can’t explain is that I’ve left this ridge four times in the past month.

Got as far as the Drakoria portal twice.

Stood at the threshold both times with no reason I could name to turn back and turned back anyway.

I’m not a man who does things without reasons.

I’ve survived one hundred and eighty years on the discipline of knowing exactly why I make every choice I do.

The wolf packs that raised me had no patience for instinct without explanation.

Neither do I. They’re all gone now, those packs.

Every wolf who taught me that lesson aged and died while I stayed the same. I stopped asking why a long time ago.

And yet.

The door to her cabin opens. I go still, not the stillness I use in a fight but every muscle held for a different reason entirely.

I watch her step onto the small porch. She’s not looking toward the treeline.

She’s looking up at the sky, the way she sometimes does late in the evenings, like she’s reading something in the stars that the rest of them can’t see.

Her silver-white hair is loose, catching what little light there is.

I’ve noticed it before. I notice it again.

Once, at dusk, three weeks ago, she was standing at the edge of the property, looking out at nothing in particular.

Then a shape pressed through at her back, there and gone in less than a second.

Too large to be shadow, too deliberate to be wind.

She locked it down fast and was just a woman standing at the edge of a yard in the evening light.

She felt me. I watched it move through her, that half second of reaction, before she locked it down and went still again.

After one hundred and eighty years there’s not much I can’t categorize. She’s the exception. I don’t know what to do with that. So, I come back to this ridge, look at the light in her window, wait for it to make sense.

She wraps her arms around herself, not from cold, the night is mild.

This is just the gesture of someone settling into a thought.

Whatever she is, she reads the world differently than anyone I’ve encountered.

Standing this far from her in the dark, I can feel it, some kind of pressure against the back of my skull, like a sound pitched just outside hearing.

I’ve had it since the first time I saw her. I still don’t know what it is.

I’ve stopped counting the things about myself I can’t explain.

She turns her head. Not toward the treeline but forty feet left of where I’m standing.

I should leave. I’ve been telling myself this for weeks with the stubbornness of a man who’ s made a decision and keeps finding reasons the decision doesn’t apply tonight.

It always applies. I always find a reason.

She tilts her head, listening or reading whatever frequency she reads off the dark, the ease in her shoulders, the particular stillness of a person who has made peace with carrying heavy things, stops me the way very few things do.

Then she does something that has nothing to do with magic, power or the pressure at the back of my skull.

She exhales, slowly, quietly, the breath of someone who’s tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep, tipping her chin up to the stars.

A pull moves through my chest that I don’t have a category for.

It isn’t hunger, at least not the kind I know.

It’s something older and less manageable than want.

It’s the pull of the light in the lodge windows, the sound of the pack settling into its overnight rhythm, the particular quality of this place that I’ve been standing outside of for weeks without letting myself understand why I keep coming back to look at it.

Every pack I’ve ever known had a price. Not the same price — different packs want different things — but always a price, always higher than the one before.

Be more useful, more certain, more of whatever keeps them from deciding they’re better off without you.

Ash Hollow just asks you to pull your weight.

That’s it. The rest doesn’t matter. Fae, wolf, half-blood, something that doesn’t have a name yet - they’ve let them all in - they’ve kept them all.

I can’t shift, never have, not in any pack I’ve ever known, that’s the end of the sentence. Here, I’m not sure it would be.

She’s standing on that porch like someone who knows exactly where she belongs.

The hunger hits before I can manage it; sudden, complete, nothing I have a name for.

I want to know what that feels like - to stand somewhere, not waiting for the moment they realize what you can’t do.

To be known, fully, and not lose the room.

I hold that for one breath longer than I should. Then I push it back.

She drops her chin. Looks at the ground for a moment, then goes back inside.

The porch is empty now, the compound settles deeper into its overnight quiet. I stay where I am.

My hand is against the bark of the pine to my left. I don’t remember putting it there. The wood is solid under my palm; cold, real, the kind of thing that doesn’t ask questions. I press my fingers in. Ground myself.

The answer to every question I’ve stopped asking about myself is connected to this place. To her. I’ve known it for weeks and haven’t done anything about it. I’m running out of reasons to keep managing it.

Below me the lodge settles into its overnight rhythm.

A light on in the kitchen. The patrol rotation completing its first pass.

I stay until the cold settles in properly.

Until the patrol rotation completes and starts again.

Until I’ve run out of reasons to be here that have nothing to do with why I’m actually here. Then I step back from the treeline.

Tomorrow night I’ll be back. I already know this. I’ve stopped pretending otherwise.