Claimed By The Alphas Who Betrayed Me

They did not blindfold me.I thought about that the entire walk through the forest. In my experience, when someone wanted to keep a location secret, they blindfolded you. The fact that Damien let me see every step of the path either meant he trusted me not to run, or he was so certain I could not escape that it did not matter.Given the four wolves surrounding me, it was probably the second thing.We walked for maybe twenty minutes through dense trees and rolling dark ground before the forest opened up and I saw the compound. That was the only word for it. A wide clearing ringed by tall pines, with a cluster of buildings at its centre that looked nothing like the crude dens I had read about in the hunter community forums. There were actual structures here. A large main lodge built from dark timber, warm light bleeding through its windows. Smaller cabins are arranged in a rough circle around it. A training ground off to the left, marked out in the earth. A watchtower at the northern ed

I asked Damien that evening.I had spent the rest of the afternoon turning Luka’s words over in my head like a stone I kept finding in my pocket. *So it is already starting.* Six words that explained nothing and implied everything. I had tried to get more out of Rafe during the afternoon patrol walk he had taken me on, framing it casually, slipping it into conversation the way I had learned to extract information from people who did not know they were giving it.Rafe had seen exactly what I was doing and answered none of it.So when Damien appeared at the door of my cabin just after sundown with no preamble and no explanation, just a quiet knock and those amber eyes waiting in the doorway, I stepped outside and looked at him directly and said, “What is happening to me?”He was quiet for a moment.Then he said, “Walk with me.”We went to the edge of the compound where the treeline began, far enough from the nearest cabin that our voices would not carry. The sky above the pines was a de

The name hung in the cold air and was gone.I stood on the path for another moment listening, but the voices near the lodge had dropped to nothing and the compound had settled back into its early evening rhythm like a stone dropped into still water, ripples smoothing out until there was no evidence anything had broken the surface at all.Bloodclaw.I knew the name. That was the thing. Every hunter in the network knew it the way sailors knew the names of storms. Not a pack you tracked. Not a bounty you took. A pack you heard about in low voices at the edges of conversations, the kind of story that got told as a warning rather than information. Brutal. Expansionist. A pack that did not operate by any of the codes that kept the werewolf world from spilling into the human one.I had been offered a Bloodclaw job once, eighteen months ago. Double the standard rate. I had turned it down without asking for details, because the broker who offered it had the particular look of a man who was afr

I spent the afternoon avoiding everyone.It was easier than I expected. The compound was large enough that if you knew the patrol schedules and the common gathering times, you could move through it without encountering anyone who wanted to have a conversation about mate bonds or luna responsibilities or the particular way you had looked at the alpha on the ridge path that morning.I was good at avoiding things. I had been doing it professionally for years.What I could not avoid was the mark on my wrist, which had been warm since the ridge and had not stopped. Not painful. Just present. Like a low hum under my skin that I could feel when I paid attention to it and sometimes when I did not.I sat in my cabin as the afternoon light went long and golden through the window and tried to think practically about my situation. The bond was real. The danger from Bloodclaw was real. My growing inability to imagine leaving this territory was becoming real faster than I was comfortable with. I ne

Damien found Silas an hour later in the weapons shed at the western edge of the compound.I was not supposed to be there. Damien had told me to stay in the main lodge with Maren while he handled it, which was reasonable and which I had agreed to right up until the moment he left and I decided that reasonable did not apply when someone I had started to care about was walking into a confrontation with a man who might be betraying everything.I followed at a distance. Stayed in the shadows between buildings. Moved the way I had moved on a hundred tracking jobs where being seen meant losing the advantage.Luka appeared beside me without warning halfway across the compound."You are terrible at following orders," he said quietly."I never agreed to follow them in the first place.""Fair point." He looked toward the weapons shed. "We should stay back. If this goes wrong and we are standing right there it will make it worse.""How much worse can it get than a trusted pack member selling info