Page 4 of Dark Auctioned Mate

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 & Co., and it occupied the ground floor of a converted brownstone three blocks from her apartment, with what Alanis considered a criminal level of charm.

It had exposed brick, small round tables, and a menu written on a chalkboard in handwriting so perfect it looked designed, which it probably was.

She had a standing appointment at this café every Monday morning at seven forty-five.

Not earlier, because she valued sleep too much to sacrifice more of it than strictly necessary; 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.