Chapter 9 - Tessa
The dress isn’t mine, and it makes me feel a bit ridiculous. Someone made sure that it fits, but it doesn’t feel like it belongs to me.
It’s simple and cream colored, like the kind most girls would dream about when they have the luxury to do that. Instead, I stand in front of the mirror in the spare room and look at the stranger wearing it, trying to name what I’m feeling.
But try as I might, I find mostly static and a different kind of numbness I’ve never felt before.
The ceremony is in three hours, and I only know because someone knocked on the door this morning and told me. It wasn’t exactly said with care, but it got the message across.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, I press my palms flat against my thighs and breathe.
Outside the window, I can hear the pack moving around, along with the usual sounds of preparation, indicative of a community organizing itself around an occasion.
It would almost feel normal if I didn’t know, with absolute certainty, that half the people making those sounds resent that the occasion exists at all.
Growing up in Pine Ridge would’ve been easier if it weren’t for the one night that has plagued me ever since.
I likely would’ve still been an outcast, given the status my parents had from the start, but the one terrible choice they made changed everything.
It deepened the isolation in ways they never anticipated.
Regardless of all the ways they tried to rise in the pack ranks, nothing seemed to work, and because of that, they didn’t report the rogue wolves they spotted attempting to cross our territory lines.
They hesitated when they should’ve said something, and because of that, a planned ambush snowballed into something irreversible.
They overwhelmed Hunter’s father before backup could arrive, and as strong as he was, it was too much even for him.
My parents died in the same attack, but that is the part the pack edits out.
They were killed in the ambush they’d inadvertently enabled, caught in the crossfire of consequences they hadn’t fully understood they were setting in motion.
I lost them as a child, and in the same event that claimed Daniel Reed.
Somehow, in the accounting of grief that followed, my loss was never accepted.
Their deaths were tangled up with their culpability, and when everyone needed someone to blame, they were right there. After the fact, I took their place. When it was all said and done, I was the convenient target.
I don’t know if they would have made a different choice if given time and options they didn’t have.
I don’t know if they were good people who did a terrible thing or something more complicated than that, but I know they smelled like home.
That my mother used to sing slightly off-key in the mornings, and that my father kept every drawing I ever made, including the bad ones.
I have cried for them in private more times than I can count because doing it in front of the pack felt like a right I was never granted.
To them, I didn’t have the right to my own grief because theirs overshadowed mine.
The ceremony is brief and to the point, leaving me backed into a corner I never wanted to be in.
I expected something more elaborate, like the usual rituals designed to impress upon everyone watching the significance of the occasion, including me.
What I get instead is Hunter standing at the front of the gathered pack with his eyes on my face, speaking the words Cole tells him to, and I barely hear because the roaring in my ears drowns everything out.
I say what I’m told to say when I’m told to say it, and while my voice comes out steady, I feel anything but.
Even agreeing in the slightest feels like a betrayal to myself, all while the pack watches.
There are a few who look genuinely neutral, and a small handful who look something closer to curious, but more so, the others seem like they can’t understand why this is happening at all. I wish I had that answer for myself.
Hunter’s mother, Clara, stands near the back and keeps her face very still. She looks at me exactly once, for just a moment, and her expression is complicated enough that I can’t reduce it to a single emotion.
It doesn’t seem like hatred, but it isn’t acceptance either. I’m not sure that makes it easier.
When it’s done, Hunter’s hand closes around mine, brief and deliberate, and I let him, because my capacity for resistance has been completely depleted.
There, it’s done. It happened. I think to myself, waiting for the nightmare to be lifted and for everything to feel normal again. But as I wait, nothing comes, and it all becomes far too permanent.
***
The drive to the isolated cabin takes less than twenty minutes, yet it somehow feels like the longest I’ve ever experienced.
Hunter doesn’t force conversation, which is the only mercy the evening offers.
Instead, I watch the terrain gradually change through the passenger window, shifting from a treed-in landscape to something hillier, then the hills give way to real elevation.
Trees crowd in denser and darker until the road narrows to something that barely qualifies as a road.
Then the cabin comes into view, surrounded by rocks and a handful of old trees, as the sky darkens in the background.
It’s beautiful, but I don’t say that out loud.
The cabin is smaller than I expected. It isn’t crude, yet it has obviously been maintained with wood sealed against the weather.
It’s a real cabin, and not some alpha’s idea of roughing it in luxury.
There’s a porch that wraps around one side and disappears into darkness, and beyond it, even from the car, I can see the faint, pale glow and the rise of steam, which means the hot springs are exactly where everyone always said they’d be.
I bring my bag inside without being asked, and I don’t wait to be shown around.
The interior subtly smells of smoke and minerals from the water outside. There’s a single large room with a sleeping area at the far end, a fireplace already lit, and a kitchen that’s more functional than decorative. By all means, it’s nice, but not where I want to find myself.
Hunter sets his bag down and moves to the fireplace to maintain it with the practical efficiency of a man who has done it thousands of times, and I stand in the middle of the room looking at the space, trying to make my brain process the reality of what has happened.
I’m mated, officially, to Hunter Reed.
While a bond hasn’t exactly snapped into place yet, it’s official in the eyes of the pack, and that little snag is what this getaway is supposed to fix.
That thought alone fills me with so many complicated feelings that I can’t even begin to address them properly.
I’m in a cabin in the mountains with him, trapped in the enforced intimacy of a small space with no easy exits.
The numbness never leaves me, and even that doesn’t give me much to work with.
When my legs feel too weak to handle the pressure of this situation, I sit in the chair near the fire and watch Hunter work in complete silence.
He doesn’t say anything either, as he seems to understand, or at least to accept, that silence is the only thing I can digest right now.
He forced me into this. He didn’t give me a choice when it came to addressing the sinking feeling I got every time I looked at him, and it only feels worse now.
As much as I wanted to deny it, I knew he was right before. This thing between us… It has always existed to some extent. Like a quiet instinct in me that knew he was important beyond being the alpha-in-training.
I just didn’t want to acknowledge it.
The fire grows under Hunter’s care, and the room warms while steam from the hot springs drifts past the window in slow curls.
I think about my parents and the pack’s faces today, more so the performance of acceptance and the reality underneath it. I think about being a kid and learning that grief was something I wasn’t allowed to show in public.
The numbness doesn’t break yet, but it feels as if something moves beneath it.
Hunter has changed everything. He moved through my life like a catastrophic event. He made me his mate, put me at the center of the pack’s attention in the most exposing way possible, and stripped away the invisibility I’d built for myself.
Even if it was lonely, the careful smallness was mine and under my control. Now, it has been replaced with something loud and very, very public.
He did it without asking, and that feels like the farthest thing from protection.
I know his logic, since I’ve turned it over enough times to understand where it’s coming from. He thinks this bond will protect me from Hayes and anyone else, as if the Wraith Peak Alpha would bother coming back for someone like me.
But in ways, it feels more like a cruel joke, or his way of asserting his true dominance over me. Maybe in ways, he’s doing this to get back at me for what my parents did to his father.
The anger is coming back now. I can feel it from underneath the numbness.
He can claim me in front of them, he can speak the words, bring me to this cabin, and tell himself the bond is what makes everything right. But that doesn’t mean I’ll bend for him.
Even if it’s a small thing in the grand scheme of things, my thoughts are my own, and so are my choices and the version of myself I’ve been quietly building on the sidelines of a pack that never gave me much room.
Hunter thinks this is done because the ceremony happened, but when I look at the fire and let the anger take shape, a sense of clarity settles in deeply.
Hunter Reed is going to find out exactly how wrong he is.
He has made me visible, made me significant against my wishes, but in trying to take away my choices, he handed me a position I never had before.
I am the alpha’s mate now, and that means something.