Fated to the Alpha who killed my sister

Zara's POV

The High Mage's voice came to me from somewhere far away,"The procedure is complete."

I was on my knees on the stone floor of The Covenant's ritual chamber, and I knew this because my kneecaps were screaming and the cold had worked its way through the thin fabric of my training pants an hour ago. 

My palms were pressed flat against the ground to keep me upright. My arms were shaking so badly I could see them trembling in the low candlelight — this violent, uncontrollable shaking that had nothing to do with cold and everything to do with what they had just done to my body.

I did a slow inventory, the way Commander Voss had taught me: start at the top, work down, report damage.

My eyes were the worst of it. There was pressure behind them like something had been pushed in behind the sockets — a persistent, pulsing weight that hadn't been there this morning. The implanted recognition signals, they'd called it. My nervous system had been taught to respond to one specific biological signature as though it were the other half of something I was born missing. Every time I blinked, the pressure shifted, and I had to breathe through my teeth to keep steady.

My chest was worse in a different way. They'd altered my scent at the source — rewired it, the mage had said, clinically, like he was describing maintenance on a machine. What that looked like in practice was forty minutes of agony so precise and so deep that I had screamed until my voice gave out and then continued screaming in silence. The burning was still there now, settled into my sternum like I'd swallowed an ember that hadn't gone cold yet.

And then there was the other thing. The thing that disturbed me more than the pain did.

A warmth. Threaded through my whole body like a second pulse, running alongside my own heartbeat but not quite matching it — slightly out of sync, slightly foreign, the way a translation is always one beat behind the original language. 

The mate bond, artificial as it was, had been installed like a parasite, and my body hadn't decided yet whether to fight it or accept it.

I had almost broken twice during the procedure.

The first time was during the scent alteration, when the pain became so total and so specific that my mind had gone somewhere very white and very quiet, and some instinct older than training had told me to say stop. I had locked my jaw instead.

The second time was near the end, when the foreign warmth first threaded in and I'd felt, for one disorienting second, a pull toward something that didn't exist yet. A presence that wasn't there. The suggestion of a person I hadn't met and intended to kill. That was the moment I'd almost stopped it — not from pain, but from something closer to fear.

I hadn't asked them to stop. Not once.

I sat back on my heels, slowly, and let myself breathe.

And then, because I had earned it after three hours of being remade into a weapon, I let myself think about Mia.

She came back the way she always did — not all at once, but in pieces. 

Mia, who laughed too loudly in quiet places and had never once been embarrassed about it. 

Who had collected stray cats the whole year we were sixteen and named every single one of them after planets — Saturn, who had three legs and a mean streak, and little Mercury who slept on Mia's pillow and purred like an engine. 

Mia, who used to press her forehead against mine on the hard mornings, when grief or fear or just the weight of being alive felt like too much, and say the same thing every time: we're the same, you and me. Nothing can split us.

She'd been wrong, as it turned out. It hadn't taken much to split us. 

One Alpha. One territorial border. 

One night when I was forty miles away on a Covenant training exercise, unreachable, while the worst thing that had ever happened to me was happening without me there to stop it.

I had grown up resenting werewolves in the way children grow up resenting anything they're taught to resent — with a kind of inherited suspicion, a low background anger at the arrogance of them, the way they treated strength as a birthright and territory as something sacred only their kind were allowed to possess. 

After Mia died, that resentment stopped being a feeling. It stopped being anything as small as a feeling. It became the architecture I lived inside. It became the reason I kept getting up in the morning and working toward the day I would finally be close enough.

Not distant from them. Close. Unbearably close.

Commander Voss's footsteps crossed the chamber floor toward me, and I pulled myself to my feet before he reached me. My legs nearly gave. I kept them locked and stayed standing.

He looked for a few seconds before speaking.

"Final briefing," he said. "Tomorrow morning. Eastern border of Bloodmoon territory, where the patrol rotation has the longest gap between sweeps. You go in on foot, alone, and you stay below the tree line until you're close enough. Then you go down." He paused. "The bond will activate the moment he's within range. You won't need to do anything. It will do it for you."

"And if he doesn't come himself?"

"He will," Voss said. "He's been sending out his own patrols for weeks, personally extending the search radius. Every intelligence report we have says the same thing — Ryker Bloodmoon believes his mate is somewhere nearby, and he is not sending subordinates to retrieve her." He said it without inflection, the way he said everything. "Once he finds you, you play frightened. Play overwhelmed. Ask the questions that sound like nothing and remember everything. You know what you're there for."

I knew what I was there for.

When he left, the chamber was empty except for the two junior mages cleaning up the ritual materials and me. I reached into the front pocket of my jacket and took out the photograph.

It was a small thing. Worn soft at the edges from handling. Mia and I at twenty-two, a year before everything changed, standing in front of the terrible secondhand car we'd bought together and shared for three months before it died dramatically on the highway and we'd walked four miles to the nearest gas station laughing the entire way. In the photograph she was grinning, head tilted toward mine, and I was looking at the camera with a half-smile that looked like her.

We're the same, you and me.

I pressed the photograph against the burning place in my chest, against the ember that hadn't gone cold and wouldn't until this was finished.

For you, I thought. All of it, from the beginning to the end, is for you.

Tomorrow I would walk into Bloodmoon territory and become something I'd never been before — bait, a lie wearing a mate bond like a costume, a weapon dressed as a woman. 

And when the moment came, I would not hesitate.

I owed Mia at least that much. I owed her a steady hand and a silver blade and the certainty that the thing she died for — the thing she became, the hunter she hardened herself into being — would not go unanswered.

I folded the photograph back into my pocket, pressed my hand flat over it once, and walked out of the chamber.