Chapter 4: The Alpha's Target

I had been invisible before. Wolfless girls learned that skill early because the alternative was worse. You kept your head down, you didn't challenge anyone's rank, you stayed out of pack politics, and most of the time the world returned the favor by leaving you alone.

Mooncrest Academy did not leave you alone.

The stares started before I made it through the front entrance. A group of girls near the steps stopped talking the moment they saw me, their attention shifting the way pack wolves shifted when something unfamiliar entered their territory. Heads turning, Scents being processed, Social calculations running.

I kept walking.

By second period I had already heard three different versions of who I was. The wolfless girl from a nobody pack. The outsider Evelyn Ashford had dragged into Blackwood territory through a convenient marriage. The girl living in the Alpha's mansion with no rank, no wolf, and no business being there.

None of them were kind. None of them were entirely wrong about the facts.

What none of them could explain, and what I noticed in the looks I got, was something else underneath the contempt. Something that wasn't quite contempt at all. Some of the wolves I passed in the hallway reacted to me the way they reacted to pack members. A slight deference. An almost-step-back. Small things. The kind of things wolves did without knowing they were doing them.

It didn't make sense. I had no wolf. I had no rank. I was nobody's pack member.

I filed it away and kept moving. I was between second and third period, arms full of books I hadn't found a locker for yet, navigating a corridor that still didn't feel familiar, when the shoulder check came.

Hard, Deliberate and Engineered to look like a collision if anyone was watching. My books went everywhere. Someone nearby laughed.

I already knew before I looked up.

Jaxon walked past me without breaking stride. Eyes forward. Expression bored. Like the impact hadn't even registered.

"Watch where you're going, Omega."

He said it without looking back. Almost an afterthought. The most devastating part was how little it cost him.

Three people near their lockers heard it. One repeated it immediately. A second picked it up. By lunch it had spread the way things spread in pack schools, fast and complete and impossible to pull back.

Omega.

I heard it in the lunch line. I heard it at the table where I sat alone with my tray and stared at a wall and told myself it didn't matter. I heard it from a group of boys who said it just loud enough to make sure it reached me. I heard it from a girl who said it while looking directly at me so I understood it was intentional.

The word had weight in werewolf culture. It wasn't just an insult. It was a ranking. The bottom of the pack, Less than, Beneath notice.

He had named me on my first day, and the school had adopted it before lunch. After lunch I took a wrong turn and ended up near the hockey locker rooms. I was already turning back when the four of them cut off my path.

Pack girls. The kind who wore their status like a second skin. The one in front had a Blackwood crest on her jacket and the particular confidence of someone who had never once wondered if she belonged.

"You're lost," she said pleasantly.

"Wrong turn," I said. "I was just heading back."

She moved sideways, blocking my path without making it look like blocking. The girls behind her spread slightly, Practiced and Deliberate.

"I heard you moved into the mansion," she said. "Victor Blackwood's house. That's bold, for someone with no wolf and no rank."

"His son's new stepsister," one of the others said. "Imagine thinking that makes you something."

"I don't think I'm anything," I said. "I'd just like to get to class."

The girl in front reached out and knocked my bag off my shoulder. It hit the floor and my things scattered. I crouched to pick them up because the alternative was standing there while they stood over me, and I wouldn't do that.

"Your mother must be something special," she said while I gathered my things from the floor. "Landing Victor Blackwood. Really something. I'm just curious what she had to offer that was worth overlooking the whole wolfless daughter situation."

I stood up, My hands were steady, which surprised me more than it should have. "Don't talk about my mother."

"Or what?" She leaned forward slightly. Her eyes flicked over me with open contempt. "You'll growl at me? Oh, right." A slow smile. "You can't."

A growl rolled through the hallway.

Real and low and carrying that particular frequency that hit wolves somewhere beneath conscious thought and made them go still.

All four girls turned at once.

Jaxon rounded the corner with his bag over one shoulder, pace unhurried, expression unreadable. His eyes moved across the group, landed on me for exactly one second, then moved back to the girls. The Alpha aura around him wasn't subtle right now. It pressed into the hallway like something physical.

The girls straightened instinctively. Even the one who had been leaning toward me pulled back half a step.

He looked at me.

"You can't even handle a few girls?" he said flatly.

The burn hit immediately. Hot and sharp, straight to my chest. One of the girls exhaled, reassured. The leader's smile came back.

She turned back to me, newly confident, and put her hand flat on my shoulder.

She shoved me hard into the locker. The metal rang out. My shoulder took the impact and I stayed upright by grabbing the locker door.

Jaxon moved.

I didn't process it until it was already done. His hand closed around the girl's throat. Not her collar. Her throat. Her feet lifted slightly off the floor and her hands flew up to grab his wrist and she made a small, shocked sound.

The hallway froze.

His eyes were glowing. Steady green, full and bright and not flickering the way eyes did when wolves were holding themselves back. He wasn't holding himself back. He was completely controlled, which was somehow so much more terrifying than if he hadn't been.

Not one person in that hallway moved.

His voice came out low and absolute.

"Nobody touches what's mine."