Page 6 of The Forbidden Alpha

The voice was kind, but unfamiliar. I panicked. Everything was too bright, too loud, and my body ached in places I didn’t have names for. When my fingers brushed plastic, I yanked. I spluttered and coughed as the tubes slid up my throat—a raw tearing that tasted like blood and sanitation.

Every breath was a serrated blade in my chest. Tears blurred the world into smears of color, but I didn’t care. Where was my father? Where was Ava?

The nurse was there in a heartbeat, pinning my shaking hands.

“Where’s my mom?” I croaked, the words barely mine.

I saw only pity; she didn’t have to say the words. It was reflected in her eyes.

“Honey… they died on impact. You’re the only one who survived.”

I was too cold for tears. A wolf without a pack, without family. I reached out with my mind the way I had a thousand times before—for my mother first, then my father, then Ava. The warmth that should have been there wasn’t. Not dimmed, not distant. Gone. Nothing to mark that anything had ever burned there at all. I thrashed. I screamed for people who would never answer, until the prick of a needle sent a heavy peace through my veins.

I slumped back into the cold, crisp sheets of a room that smelled too much of bleach and not enough of the earth.

“The accident happened on Half Moon territory,” she whispered as I drifted. “Alpha Jaxon has taken care of everything.”

“What’s going to happen now?” I asked groggily.

“Alpha Jaxon has informed us you’re to be cared for as a pack member. He’s paid the bill and you’re to go home with him.”

Her eyes fogged over—the white-out of a mind-link. A private bridge I was no longer allowed to access. Seeing that telepathic flicker in a stranger made the lump in my throat impossible to swallow. The worst part wasn’t being locked out. It was knowing how the inside of a pack bond felt. Not from the outside looking in, but from the center of it, surrounded by it. And having it severed.

Then came the sun.

Mavy burst in, all black hair and silver eyes. She was dimpled and bright, and she spoke to me as if my life wasn’t shattering. I didn’t need to talk. She did all of that. She filled the quiet with details of her big home, Lycan Academy, and the boy named Trent who was “prettier than her.”

I didn’t follow half of what she said. I didn’t need to. Her voice was a window thrown open in a room that had been sealed shut—I just sat in it and breathed. It was the closest I’d been to someone since we lost our pack.

She squeezed my fingers, her dimples flashing with hope. I forced a smile, the muscles of my face aching with the weight of the lie. Her warmth was a mercy.

I looked past her, toward the door. I knew what the nurse wouldn’t say. I felt a flicker of relief that I wasn’t alone, but deep down, beneath the hole in my chest, I knew the truth.

I wasn’t being rescued.

Chapter 3

Adea

Present Day

I slowed to a stop before the towering obsidian gates of Lycan Academy.

A sea of charcoal blazers and mini skirts that screamed prestige walked through them. I pulled out my phone and tapped Mavy’s name.

Me: Made it. Where are you?

Mavy: In the quad with Trent. Come over!

I sighed. Even at the edge of the world, she was tethered to him. I stepped onto the grounds, passing the Founder’s Monument—a massive, silver-tipped Lycan carved from black marble. The statue watched me the way it always did, its bi-pedal form and stone cloak frozen mid-wind. I’d always found it unsettling, but it wasn’t until this year that I understood why. He was too lifelike to be a symbol. You half-expected to hear him growl.

Everyone knew the story of the founder. Our great Academy had once been his home and the land his territory. Hundreds of years ago, he’d taken over the nearby territories, adding to his numbers and strength, but his jealousy was his downfall. He refused to let anyone look upon his Luna. She never left the castle. There were no paintings or drawings left of her, but the pity echoed over the centuries.

I kept my eyes forward as I crossed the grounds. This was the part I’d never gotten used to and probably never would—the way the air changed when I walked through it. I faintly registered a conversation near the fountain. Two girls from the Eastern border didn’t move, but the space between us widened without either of them appearing to try. People refused to look at me. They didn’t have to. They could smell what I was—or rather, what I wasn’t. No wolf meant no rank. No rank meant I existed in the negative space of every room I entered—like a ghost.

I spotted Mavy standing on a low stone ledge, her black hair a dark halo in the morning mist. She waved with her fingers, her silver eyes bright with a cheerfulness that read as sacrilege in a place this dead.

I nodded to Trent as I approached. He looked every bit the Beta-heir—too polished, too watchful, too judgmental with the way his lip curled. “Morning,” I muttered.