Chapter 2 - Alanis
She was seven years old again and back in the forest, which was darker than usual. Her bare feet were on the cold ground as she ran hard, her breath coming out raggedly, branches catching at her hair, clothes and skin.
Behind her, she could hear it—the low, unhurried laughter of people who knew there was nowhere for her to go.
She knew that laughter. She grew up hearing that laughter.
It belonged to people who had decided, long before she'd done anything to deserve it, that she was lesser than them. That she didn’t belong there.
Her foot caught on a root, and the ground rushed up. She hit it hard and lay there, winded. The laughter got closer until she gasped, waking up.
She was back in her hotel, staring at the ceiling, her heart going at a pace that made her ribs feel too small. The sheets were twisted around her legs, the sun was just starting to rise, peaking through the gap in the curtains, while the dream replayed itself over and over again in her head.
She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes.
“It was just a dream.” She whispered to herself.
She’d had multiple versions of the same dream for most of her life, and every time it was the same forest and the same cruel laughter.
The details changed depending on how recently she'd thought about where she came from, but the core details never changed.
She knew exactly what had brought it up this time.
Last night at the bar, with the man with the blue-green eyes—and how he made her feel small. It reminded her of her pack. About being small and shiftless in a world that had no use for small and shiftless, a world that had made sure she understood that every single day.
Alanis had grown up in the Caldwell pack and had a terrible experience.
Caldwell pack operated on a hierarchy as rigid and merciless as anything Alanis had seen.
Alphas were at the top, Betas next, then Deltas.
Omegas were extinct, and at the very bottom—below the margins, the category that didn't even merit a name—were people like Alanis. Children who had reached the shifting age but didn’t shift.
Children who continued to grow older but still didn’t shift.
Shiftless—that’s what they were called. It was a slur in the pack. She had been called it before she'd understood what it meant. By the time she understood it, she'd heard it enough that it had become a fact, rather than an insult. She was shiftless and defective.
The bullying was constant, and the so-called adults looked the other way.
She was twelve the first time someone held her head underwater in the river at the pack's east border, just long enough that she'd understood what they were capable of.
Fourteen, when she'd started waking early to avoid the group that gathered near the training ground in the mornings.
Fifteen when she'd realized the adults weren't looking away—they were watching, approving, and occasionally participating. And then she'd turned sixteen.
If you still weren’t able to shift at sixteen, the pack sold you—its shiftless females. Buyers came, girls who hadn't shifted were handed over, and what happened to them afterward was not discussed.
She'd left the night before her sixteenth birthday, with nothing but the clothes she was wearing, and a head start of approximately four hours before anyone would notice she was gone.
She'd run for two days through the forest, the highway margin, and then the edge of a city she didn't know the name of.
She'd been sitting behind a gas station at three in the morning, exhausted and frightened, when a woman had crouched down in front of her and asked, “You're from a pack. Which one?”
Her name was Deva. She was an outcast herself, exiled from a different pack a decade earlier.
She'd built something after the exile. She gathered people who'd been through similar things and were done running from them.
She built an organization that operated in the grey space between the paranormal world and the human one, pulling people out of situations exactly like the one Alanis had run from.
They'd tried to find the Caldwell pack. They followed every lead Alanis could give them and came up empty. The pack had packed up and completely fallen off the face of the earth.
Deva's organization, The Lumen, was the first place she could remember where her inability to shift had not been the first and most important thing anyone wanted to know about her.
They fed her, trained her, and gave her tools that had nothing to do with claws or wolf speed—tools she could use in her actual body, which proved far more capable than the Caldwell pack had ever bothered to assess.
She'd been with them for eight years. She thought of them as family. She had not gone back to anything resembling a pack community. She didn’t want to, and that was a fact she lived with quietly and did not examine too closely on most days.
Today was not most days. She untangled herself from the sheets and went to shower.
***
The café was called Birch and not later, because by eight o'clock the line stretched out the door and the last available table was the small one near the bathroom that wobbled and always smelled faintly of cleaning solution.
She pushed through the door at seven forty-three and, as usual, the smell of coffee and cinnamon hit her.
"Alanis." The woman behind the counter—Priya, who owned the place, looked up and pointed at her without looking away from the espresso machine. "The usual?"
"The usual," Alanis confirmed, leaning against the counter. "How's the sourdough situation?"
"Catastrophic. The starter did something weird on Friday, and I had to throw half of it out. Don't ask. The croissants are excellent, though. Luis came in at four-thirty to do them himself."
"I know." Alanis gave her a cheeky little smile. "That's why I'm here."
From further down the counter, Luis himself appeared from the back, a man in his fifties with flour on his forearms and salt and pepper hair. He spotted her and pointed.
"You're going to tell me they're good," he said.
"I haven't had one yet."
"You will, and then you're going to tell me."
Alanis chuckled. "Luis, I tell you every single Monday."
"And every single Monday it is correct." He smiled as he disappeared back into the kitchen.
Priya slid her coffee across the counter and added the croissant to a small plate—golden, layered, and just perfect.
"Table's free," Priya said, nodding toward the window.
Her table. The small round one in the corner that caught the morning light and was far enough from the door to muffle the entrance noise. It was unoccupied, which on a Monday at seven forty-five felt like the universe choosing to be kind, and she took it as her due.
Behind her, from the direction of the door, came a low whistle. “Damn. Look at that hot piece of ass.”
Alanis rolled her eyes, settled in, and took the first sip of her coffee. It was dark, slightly bitter, and balanced by whatever Priya did to the milk that Alanis had tried to replicate at home with consistent failure.
Then she reached for the croissant and took a bite. It was buttery and crisp on the outside, soft and layered within. Nothing could ruin her day. Well, nothing except the thoughts in her head about the mission.
She'd been with the Lumen for eight years, and for most of that time her work had been rescues from immediate situations, intelligence gathering in known locations, support operations for people higher up the chain.
Useful work. Work, she was good. It all changed six weeks ago when Deva called her in.
There was a network. Had been for a while—a trafficking operation running across multiple cities, using shifter resources to move human women through an infrastructure that left almost no traceable evidence. The Lumen had been on their tail for years, and they had
finally assembled enough information to send someone in. Not to rescue; the network was too large and too well-protected for a targeted extraction to accomplish anything—but to gather evidence. Go inside. See how it worked from within.
Deva had looked at her across the table, looking as serious as ever when she told her, "I want to send you."
Alanis jumped at it.
It was the most significant mission she'd ever been given, and she'd spent the last six weeks preparing for it. She understood exactly what was at stake. She was lucky enough to escape her pack and find a home with Deva. The women moving through this network had none of those things.
So yes. She was ready. She was prepared. She had the cover story memorized, the skills needed, and the compartmentalization that eight years of field training had built into her.
What she did not have, and had not planned for, was Rael.
She took another bite of croissant, and her brain, treacherous and evidently bored with being useful, decided that now was the moment to revisit last night in detail.
His hands had been—God, his hands. She'd noticed them at the bar.
They were huge and did ungodly things to her.
She remembered how he thrust his thumb into her mouth as he rammed into her endlessly.
She remembered how he felt too thick and perfect inside her.
She remembered how he made her come multiple times throughout the night, almost making her pass out.
She remembered how he slid his finger in her back hole—She choked on the croissant.
A piece of buttery pastry went down the wrong pipe, causing her to cough hard and hurriedly reach for her coffee. At the table nearest to hers, a man in a suit looked over. She held up a hand.
"Fine," she said. "I'm fine."
He went back to his laptop. She set down her coffee, pressed two fingers to her sternum, and murmured to herself: “He was a one-night stand who was an asshole. You are not going to think about him anymore.”
Sighing low, she groaned, “But the sex was so good though.”
That was an understatement. The sex had been the best of her life, and those sensations she felt.... Alanis shook her head, cleared her throat, and physically straightened in her chair.
This was not useful. She was two days out from the most important mission she'd ever been given, and she was sitting in her favorite café, choking on a croissant while thinking about a man whose last name she didn't even know.
The Lumen was counting on her. More importantly, there were women somewhere in this city who were going to end up at an auction in forty-eight hours, and she was the only person positioned to do something about it.
She finished the croissant and drained her coffee.
“Compartmentalize,” she told herself, in Deva's voice.
She stacked her plate on the edge of the table for clearing, pulled her jacket on, and stood.
The mission was in two days. She had things to do.