Loving the Enemy Alpha

POV: Selene Ashgrove

“Cross that line, Ashgrove, and I will not be the one who stops what happens to you next.” I had heard that warning a hundred times, from a hundred different mouths, and it had never once made me turn around. It did not make me turn around now. The Thornline lay ahead of me in the dark, a ragged seam of dead trees and old blood that split Ashveil land from Duskmoor land the way a scar splits skin. Frost silvered the underbrush. My breath came out in ribbons. Somewhere behind me, Garrick, the patrol leader, was already regretting letting me walk point tonight, and somewhere ahead of me, past the tree line, something was moving that did not belong to either pack. I caught the scent first. Gun oil and something sharper underneath it, something that made every hair on my arms lift before my mind had even named it. Silver. “Hold,” I said, low, and lifted two fingers. Behind me the patrol slowed, four wolves and one human patrol leader, all of them watching my back like I was something worth watching. I had spent three years earning that. I was not about to waste it on a bad guess. I was not guessing. Garrick’s radio crackled once against his hip, static swallowing whatever the border sensors upriver were trying to report, and he cursed under his breath, thumbing it silent rather than risk the noise carrying. Ashveil had lost two sentries to a similar malfunction eight months earlier, a coincidence the council had never fully explained to its own patrols. I filed the detail away the way I filed everything lately, quietly, without trusting anyone enough yet to say it out loud. The shape came out of the trees fast and low, human shaped but wrong in the shoulders, a rifle already up, and I did not think, I moved, closing the distance before the shot could find anyone slower than I was. The crack of the rifle went past my ear close enough to burn. I hit the shooter’s arm hard enough to feel the bone give, heard the weapon clatter into the frost, and had my forearm against a stranger’s throat before my patrol had finished shouting my name. That was when the second scent hit me, and this one had nothing to do with silver at all. It came in underneath everything else, warm where the night was cold, and my whole body reacted to it like a held breath finally let out. My heart slammed once, hard, wrong, like it belonged to someone else for half a second. I knew, with a certainty that had no evidence behind it and needed none, that whatever this was, it was not on my side of the Thornline. I turned my head, and across the dead trees, through smoke that had not been there a second ago, I saw him. He was already looking at me. Tall, dark haired, dressed like a man who had left a war council to come running the second his own patrol scented trouble, and his eyes, when they found mine, were the exact amber gold that every Ashveil child was raised on stories to fear. Duskmoor. An Alpha’s mark sat plain on his collar, the kind you did not fake and did not earn by accident. “Let him go,” the Duskmoor Alpha said, voice low, even, and utterly unshaken, as if he had not just felt the same impossible thing I had. “He is not yours to punish.” I did not let go. My hand was still locked around a Hollow Fang hunter’s throat, my heart was doing something it had never done before in my life, and the only man on either side of the Thornline who could tell me what was happening to me was the last man I would ever ask. “He shot at my patrol on Ashveil ground,” I said. “That makes him mine.” “He is Hollow Fang,” the Alpha said. “He is not Ashveil’s problem or Duskmoor’s. He is everyone’s problem.” A beat, and something shifted behind his eyes, something that looked almost like recognition, almost like fear. “You feel it too.” It was not a question. I hated that it was not a question. “I don’t feel anything,” I said, “except like I want to break your jaw for standing on my land.” “You’re the one holding my border’s problem by the throat,” he said, and something in his mouth almost, almost curved. “Technically you’re on mine.” Garrick’s voice cracked across the clearing, sharp with warning. “Selene. Fall back.” I should have. Every instinct that had kept me alive for twenty three years told me to drop the hunter, retreat behind my own line, and let the patrol leader handle whatever came next. Instead I stood there with my hand still locked and my heart still doing that terrible, traitorous thing, staring across a border my brothers had died defending at a man whose pack had killed them. The wrongness of wanting to keep looking at him was worse than anything the hunter’s rifle had almost done to me. “Fall back,” Garrick said again, closer now, and this time I heard the fear under the order. He had scented it too. Everyone had scented it. Whatever had happened in the half second our eyes met had a smell, apparently, and it was not one either pack had a polite word for. I shoved the hunter toward my own people, hard enough that he stumbled, and made myself step back into the trees without looking away from the Duskmoor Alpha until the dark finally swallowed him whole. I did not sleep that night. I lay in the dark of my room in the Ashgrove house with my heart still doing the wrong rhythm, replaying the half second our eyes had met until the memory wore smooth from handling, and somewhere past the Thornline, though I would have died before admitting I believed it, I was certain he was lying awake too. I tried, at one point, to talk myself out of the whole night entirely, to decide the pull I had felt was adrenaline, or the cold, or the particular disorientation of nearly losing a patrol member to a silver round. It was a comforting theory for exactly as long as it took my body to remember, unbidden, the exact warmth of that stranger’s scent cutting through frost and gun oil, and after that the theory did not survive another minute. By morning, Garrick had already gone to my father. I was still lacing my boots when Thane Ashgrove’s voice came through the house like weather. “Selene. My study. Now.” I had faced worse men than my father. I had never once, in twenty three years, been afraid to walk into his study. I was afraid now, and I did not understand why, and that frightened me more than the fear itself. At the door, I stopped, hand on the frame, and made myself breathe before I went in. “Tell me,” my father said the moment I crossed the threshold, not looking up from the map spread across his desk, “exactly what you felt out there last night. And do not lie to me, Selene. I will know.”

POV: Selene Ashgrove

“Say his name out loud, Selene, and you make it real. So I’m asking you not to say it.” My father’s study smelled like cedar and old paper and, faintly, like the same fear I had carried home with me. Thane Ashgrove was not a large man, but he filled a room the way weather filled a valley, and right now the pressure in the air told me he already knew more than he wanted to. “I felt a Hollow Fang hunter try to put a silver round through Garrick’s chest,” I said carefully. “I stopped him.” “That is not what I asked you.” I said nothing. Silence, in the Ashgrove house, had always been safer than half truths, but my father had built his entire life on reading the space between his daughter’s words, and he read it now. He set down the pen he had been turning between his fingers, and for the first time since I had walked in, he looked at me directly. “Kane Duskmoor was on that border last night,” he said. “You didn’t mention him.” “He wasn’t relevant to the rep