The Wolf Queen & The Alpha Brat

( Elena)

The skirmish starts at the northwest fence.

Not where we expected it — we expected the eastern approach, have had the eastern patrol doubled for three days, which means either Marcus’s intelligence is outdated or he adjusted specifically to hit where we weren’t looking. I’m at the war table when Petra’s runner comes in, and I’m moving before the runner finishes the sentence.

Brennan’s voice behind me: "Elena—"

"Hold the eastern line," I say. "This might be a split push."

I don’t hear what he says after that because I’m already through the door.

---

The northwest fence section is a three-minute run at full pace. I make it in two and a half. The cold air comes in hard, the kind of cold that’s all edge, that gets into your lungs and reminds you they’re there.

Three Shadowpine wolves at the fence line. They’ve come through the section that backs onto the gorge tributary — terrain we patrol but don’t fortify the same way because the approach is difficult and we assumed the difficulty was deterrent enough.

We assumed wrong.

Two Pack wolves are already engaged. Mira, from the southern guard rotation, holding position at the fence post. One of Brennan’s senior fighters — Olan — with a cut across his forearm that he’s ignoring.

I don’t slow down.

The first engagement is fast. The wolf coming at Olan’s unprotected left doesn’t see me until I’m already inside his guard, and then it doesn’t matter much that he sees me. I’m not going to describe what happens because there isn’t time for description and also because the part of me that does this, that has always been able to do this when it’s required, has stopped needing to narrate itself. It just happens.

He goes down.

The second one is harder. She’s good — fast and low and smart about angles, and she’s been watching the fight rather than jumping into it, which means she’s had time to see how I move. I catch a strike on my forearm that I don’t get out of the way of completely, and the impact vibrates up to my shoulder and my arm goes briefly unreliable.

I switch hands.

Viktor’s training master taught me that. Ambidexterity as a fallback, not a preference, for exactly this kind of situation. I haven’t needed it in two years but the muscle memory doesn’t care about the gap.

She’s good for another forty seconds.

Then she isn’t.

The third one runs. I let him. Not because I can’t catch him — I probably can, but I’m three minutes from the war table and there’s a split push possibly happening and chasing a retreating wolf into the gorge tributary at dawn is not the best use of the next ten minutes.

I check Mira. She’s shaken and has a gash on her cheek but she’s upright and talking.

I check Olan. The arm is worse than he was showing. I tell him to go to Senna and he starts to argue and I give him the look and he goes.

Then I stand at the northwest fence for a moment.

Just — stand. Let the engagement settle out of my system. The particular wired-down feeling after a fight where your body takes a minute to believe it’s finished.

The dawn is fully up now. Grey and cold and present.

I think about Rhydian in the bed with his wrists loosely tied and the look he gave me before I turned off the lamp. *Fine. Four days.*

He said it too easily.

I’ve been with him long enough to know when he agrees to something because he means it and when he agrees to something because the conversation needs to be over.

I start running back.

---

The Pack house is quiet when I come through the door. That’s not unusual — the main body of the fight, if it’s coming, hasn’t materialized yet. The war table is still active, Brennan visible at the far end of the corridor, eastern patrol holding.

I take the stairs to our room.

The door is open.

I stop.

I know I closed that door. I closed it specifically. I have a clear memory of the latch clicking.

I step through it.

The cloth strips are on the floor. Unwound, not cut or torn — unwound carefully, which means he spent some time on them, which means he had to be deliberate about it, which means he was awake for a while before he decided to do it.

The room is empty.

I’m not surprised. I’m the opposite of surprised. What I am is — tired. And something else that doesn’t have a clean name, some combination of relief-that-he’s-upright and frustration-that-he’s-upright-in-a-different-location-than-agreed.

I turn around.

He’s in the doorway.

He must have heard me come up the stairs. He’s in his training clothes, not armor — that’s something, he didn’t go to the line, which means he found the line between what I said and what he needed and stayed on the right side of it. Barely. Probably barely.

There’s a smear of blood on his right hand that isn’t his. Or if it is his, it’s not from the wound, it’s from something that happened in the last twenty minutes, and his jaw is set in a way that tells me some kind of engagement happened that I wasn’t present for.

He looks at me.

Takes in the cut on my forearm. The state of my armor. Whatever my face is doing.

Something moves through his expression — not anger, not the defiant thing from the early weeks. Something more current than that. More raw.

He crosses the room.

Fast. Faster than I expect from someone with stitches in his side, and I take a step back automatically, and my back finds the wall, and then his hands are on either side of my head against the stone and he’s close, very close, his face a few inches from mine.

I hold still.

His breathing is fast. Not from exertion — or not only from exertion.

"You went to a skirmish alone," he says.

"I went to a skirmish."

"Without—" He stops. His jaw works. "I heard it. From the corridor. I heard it and I couldn’t—" He pushes off the wall, takes a step back, runs his hands through his hair. "I was in the corridor by the time Olan came through. He told me three wolves, northwest fence, you went ahead of support."

"Support arrived. Mira and Olan were already there."

"You were there first."

"I was the closest—"

"Elena." He turns back. His voice has come down from the heat of it into something lower. "You are ten weeks pregnant and you went into a skirmish ahead of your own support team."

"I’m the Alpha. That’s what being the Alpha—"

"I know what being the Alpha means." He steps closer again. Not the wall this time, just close, and his hands come up to my jaw, both of them, the way he holds my face when he’s saying something that he needs me to receive properly. "I know what it means. And I’m not asking you to stop being it. I’m saying—" He stops.

His forehead drops to mine.

"I was in the corridor," he says. Very quiet now. "Listening to your footsteps go away from me. And I couldn’t move fast enough, couldn’t get there in time, and all I could do was stand there and—"

He doesn’t finish.

He doesn’t need to.

I put my hands on his chest. Feel his heartbeat. Still too fast, the particular rhythm of someone whose body had a lot of adrenaline and nowhere to put it.

"Never lock me up again," he says. It comes out rough. Not a demand — something more honest than a demand. A request that knows it can’t be fully granted and is being made anyway. "I can’t do that. I can’t be in a room while you’re—" His hands tighten at my jaw. "Not this. Not whatever that was."

I look at him.

At everything his face is doing right now that he isn’t managing or containing — the fear that’s still there, the residual of standing in a corridor listening to footsteps and not being able to follow them.

"The cloth strips were a fair call," I say.

"The cloth strips were an excellent call," he says. "I still took them off."

"I know."

"I’m going to keep taking them off."

"I know that too."

We stand there, his hands at my face, mine on his chest, the door open behind him and the settlement’s morning sounds coming through it. The adrenaline in my own body is still settling, the particular aftermath of a fight where everything worked but might not have.

"Your side," I say.

"Fine."

"Senna is going to—"

"Senna will have things to say, yes." He pulls back slightly. Looks at my forearm where the strike landed. "Yours."

"Superficial."

"Let me see."

I let him see. He examines it with the hands that have gotten very good at careful — the hands that built the crib, that counted my pulse in the dark, that covered mine at the hot spring and haven’t fully stopped reaching for me since.

"Okay," he says. "Superficial."

"I told you."

He looks at me.

"Next time," he says, "you tell me before you go."

"I didn’t have time—"

"Then you make time." His jaw is set. "Thirty seconds. That’s all I need. Just — tell me." He holds my gaze. "I’m not asking to come. I’m asking to know."

I look at him for a long moment.

"Okay," I say.

"Okay?"

"Thirty seconds. Before I go." I hold his gaze. "And you stay in the room when Senna says to."

He makes the face. The one where he’s deciding whether this is worth the argument.

"We can negotiate," I say.

He almost smiles. "We’ll negotiate."

I step back. His hands fall. We’re both still standing in front of the wall he backed me into, the door open, the morning light harsh and ordinary on the floor between us.

I bend down and pick up the cloth strips.

He watches me fold them. Set them on the nightstand. Deliberate. Unhurried.

He looks at them. At me.

"Elena," he says.

"Mm."

"I love you."

I look at him.

"I know," I say.

He waits.

I put the last fold in the cloth strip. Set it down.

"I love you too," I say.

The words land between us, in the daylight, in the open.

He breathes out.

We stand there.

Outside the window, the morning keeps going.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!