Her Second Chance Alpha

FREYA "You're seriously not going to show up, are you?" I muttered, staring at the empty seat across from me. The chair had been empty for over an hour. The candle between us had burned down by at least half, and the waiter, bless his heart, had stopped asking if I wanted to order. I picked up my phone. There was nothing. No call, no text, not even one of those lazy voice notes Brian liked to send when he couldn't be bothered to type. I set the phone face-down on the table and looked around the restaurant. It was a nice place. Too nice, honestly. It had white tablecloths, soft music, and real candles. This was the kind of restaurant you booked two weeks in advance and wore heels for. I'd picked it on purpose because Brian hated anything that felt "too much," and some dumb, hopeful part of me had thought that maybe if I made tonight feel like an occasion, he'd actually show up for it. My birthday. That's what tonight was. Twenty-three years old, sitting alone at a table for two, wa

FREYAHe walked in the next morning like it was any other day.I was in the kitchen when I heard the front door, and for one second my whole body went still, the way it always did when I was deciding something without actually deciding it. Then I picked up my mug and kept drinking my tea.Brian came in and stopped when he saw me at the counter. He looked tired around the eyes, which could have meant anything. He ran a hand through his hair and gave me that particular smile of his, the one that was supposed to make things easier."Hey," he said."Hey," I said.He leaned against the doorframe and watched me for a moment. "Are you still upset about last night?"I looked at him over the rim of my mug. "You thought I was faking being attacked while it was actually happening.""Freya—""There are scrapes on my hands, Brian."He leaned away from the doorframe and came over, reaching for my wrist. I let him look. He frowned at my palms for a second, and something crossed his face. It might h

FREYAThe meeting was set for the following morning.Orin had booked a private room at the Lodge, which was the closest thing our pack had to a proper meeting venue. It was all exposed timber and stone hearths and the permanent smell of pine resin and old smoke. It wasn't the glass-and-steel corporate environment that the offer had suggested, but I'd specifically told Orin to keep it local. I wanted to see how they would adapt.I arrived thirty minutes early and they were already there. I pushed open the door and stopped.The room had one long table, and at the far end of it sat two people I didn't recognize, and one that I did.His scent hit me before I fully saw his face, then I realized I'd been holding onto it for years without meaning to. He smelled like night air, dark cedarwood, and something underneath it that I couldn’t even name. He was sitting with one arm over the back of the chair like he'd been comfortable here for hours, with his dark curls, bronze skin, and those blue

BRIANI got back from Ibiza on a Tuesday.I was tanned, tired, and carrying a suitcase I'd half-packed in a hurry because somewhere around day four of that trip I'd stopped being able to pretend that I was having a good time. Lena had taken about a hundred pictures of the two of us on the beach and I'd smiled in all of them even though I felt absolutely nothing.The house was quiet when I got back.I stood in the hallway for a second, just looking. Something felt off right away, but I couldn’t quite place what was different. I dropped my suitcase and walked slowly through the ground floor before I went upstairs.Freya’s closet was mostly empty. She'd left a few things that probably weren’t worth taking. But all her dresses were gone. Her shoes were mostly gone. The shelf by the window where she kept her books had a gap in it that was about a foot wide, and that gap somehow hit me harder than any of the rest of it.She'd taken the books she actually cared about and left the ones she’d

FREYAI moved out on a Thursday.I picked the middle of the afternoon on purpose, when I knew Brian would be in a pack council meeting. He had standing meetings every Tuesday from two to five, and he never missed them, because pack council meetings were the one place where Brian Norwood always showed up on time.I didn't take much.My clothes. The papers from my father's estate that I'd been keeping in the bottom drawer of the closet before I'd even admitted to myself that I was going to leave. A suitcase of small things that didn't mean anything to anyone except me.And the framed photo of my brother.I wrapped it in one of my old sweaters and put it face-down in the bottom of the last suitcase because I couldn't look at it yet. Not right now. Maybe not for a while. But I wasn't leaving it behind.My new apartment was small. It was plain and a little cold, and the kitchen had one cabinet that didn't close all the way. But it was right on the edge of the neutral zone, just past the bo