Claimed by Professor Alpha

Author's Note:

This story is a work of fiction. All characters, packs, and events are products of imagination, and any resemblance to real people or places is purely coincidental.

P.S. — English isn't my first language, so please bear with me if a phrase here and there doesn't land quite the way native speakers might say it. I'm doing my best to tell this story with heart, even if the wording isn't always perfect. Thank you for reading, and for your patience!

Third Person POV

The pack elders always said that a mate-bond couldn't be forced….and Kane had spent eleven years believing this meant it would never find him at all.

He stood at the edge of the clearing, hissing silver lines of moonlight through the trees, listening to the pack's voices as they spoke over him….not about him, not really. Rurik was talking about alliances again, the Ashwood pack's daughter and how a match between their packs would secure the territory lines and all of that Kane had heard a dozen times before, in a dozen variations, over a dozen years. He stopped trying to feign interest some time ago.

“You're not listening," Rurik said, finally cutting through.

“I'm always listening." Kane didn't turn. "I'm simply not agreeing."

The circle around them shifted…the particular unease of wolves who wanted to challenge and knew better than to try. It was young for him to hold so much territory. It was young for him to carry so much silence in a room and have it respected. It was young for him to build that silence with his hands, and everyone here remembered how.

“An alpha without a mate is a liability," Rurik said. "You know this. The council knows this."

“Then the council can wait." Kane's voice didn't rise. It never needed to. "I won't take a mate to satisfy a ledger."

And then he felt it…not for the first time that week, but sharper than before. A pull, low in his chest, a hook set behind the sternum and drawn taut from somewhere far away. He had felt the threads of it for days now, faint enough to dismiss as exhaustion, as old blood-magic superstition, as nothing. This time it did not feel like nothing.

He went still. The clearing noticed his stillness before he did.

“Kane?"

He didn't answer. He was listening to something none of them could hear…a pulse that wasn't his own, threading itself into his awareness like it had always been there and he'd simply never turned to look. Human. It was unmistakably, impossibly human. And close. Closer than it should have been able to reach him at all.

The old stories had a word for this kind of pull. He knew the word. He hated the word, because the word came with a hundred years of pack law telling him exactly what he was supposed to do about it, and none of those laws had ever imagined the word landing on a human.

“It's nothing," he said, when he could trust his voice again. "Continue."

Rurik didn't believe him. Kane didn't care.

He left before the meeting ended, walked until the pack's territory gave way to the tree line that bordered the human world, stood there a long time, breathing air that smelled, absurdly, like nothing at all…and yet he could still feel her, whoever she was, wherever she was, like a hand closing slowly around something he had never agreed to give away.

Not possible, he told himself.

The pull didn't care what he believed.

Somewhere on the other side of that tree line stood the lecture hall that had known his voice for longer than he cared to count, the same worn podium, the same rows of restless human faces, semester after semester, none of them ever more than noise he tolerated for the sake of the work. Tomorrow's roster was already finalized. A new seminar. A handful of new names he hadn't yet bothered to learn.

He didn't know, yet, that one of them would matter.

His body already did