The Alpha’s Other Daughter

The kitchen was already loud by the time Ava came down, and none of the noise was for her.

“Mother, tell her to move the vases before the guests arrive,” Bree was saying, arms crossed over a robe that cost more than anything in Ava’s closet. “She always puts them where people trip.”

“I didn’t put them anywhere,” Ava said. “I haven’t touched the front room since yesterday.”

Bree didn’t look at her. She never looked at her when she talked about her, only around her, like Ava was furniture that occasionally made noise.

“Well, someone did,” Bree said. “And it wasn’t me.”

Their stepmother, Delia, came in wiping her hands on a towel, already dressed for the day though it wasn’t yet seven. She glanced at Ava the way she always did, quick and assessing, checking for something to correct.

“Your hair,” Delia said. “Fix it before your father comes down. He has the Hendrick meeting this morning and I won’t have him distracted by you looking like you slept in a hedge.”

“I did sleep fine,” Ava said. “I just haven’t brushed it yet.”

“Then brush it.”

There was no venom in Delia’s voice. That was almost worse. Venom would have meant Ava mattered enough to provoke it. This was just management, the way you’d speak to staff, or to a dog that occasionally needed reminding of the rules.

Ava took the comb from the drawer without being told twice and worked it through her hair standing at the counter, because there wasn’t a mirror down here that was hers to use without someone complaining she was hogging it.

“Where’s Colt?” Delia asked, meaning her eldest stepson, meaning the one whose opinion of the morning actually mattered to her.

“Still asleep,” Bree said. “He was out late with the patrol.”

“Don’t wake him. Let him rest.” Delia’s whole posture softened just saying his name, the way it never did for Ava, the way it barely did for Bree unless Bree had done something to be praised for.

Ava kept combing.

She’d stopped expecting the softness a long time ago. It wasn’t dramatic anymore, the not-expecting. It used to ache, when she was younger, watching her father’s face light up for Colt’s grades or Bree’s dress or the twins’ latest mischief, and go flat and careful whenever it landed on her, like he was working out how to get through the interaction without either of them saying something they’d regret. Now it was just weather. You didn’t rage at the rain. You just remembered your coat.

Colt came down halfway through, hair still damp, pulling a shirt over his head as he walked. He was the only one of her stepsiblings who didn’t bother being cruel to her, mostly because he didn’t bother noticing her at all. He grabbed bread off the counter, said something about the patrol route needing to shift east because of fresh tracks near the old mill, and was halfway back out the door before he even registered Ava standing there.

“Morning,” he said to her, absent, already gone in his head to whatever the patrol had found.

“Morning,” she said back, and meant it more than she meant most of the mornings in this house, because at least his indifference wasn’t dressed up as anything else. He wasn’t managing her. He just didn’t see her, which after years of being managed felt almost like relief.

Her father came down at seven fifteen exactly, the way he always did, dressed for the council meeting, already reading something on a folded paper as he crossed into the kitchen. Delia had coffee in his hand before he asked for it. Bree had his schedule memorized well enough to recite it back to him if he forgot a name.

“Morning,” he said, to the room. Not to anyone.

“Morning, Dad,” Bree said, bright, easy.

Ava said nothing. She’d learned that if she said it, sometimes he answered, and sometimes he just kept reading, and the second option stung worse than silence did. Silence she could control. His silence back at her, she couldn’t.

He looked up once, briefly, and his eyes moved over her the way they always did, quick, unreadable, already elsewhere before they’d fully landed. He didn’t ask about her hair, or her sleep, or anything at all. He never had many questions for her. Just orders, sometimes, when the pack needed extra hands and she was the easiest one to spare.

“I need the east storeroom cleared today,” he said, still to the room, though she understood it was for her. “The Hendrick alliance talks might run into a second day and I want the space usable if we need it.”

“I can do that,” Ava said.

He nodded once, already moving on, already halfway into the next thought. That was the whole conversation. That was most of their conversations she got to have with him in a given week, and she’d long since stopped counting how few words made up her share of his attention.

The east storeroom hadn’t been cleared in months, maybe longer. It was where things went when nobody wanted to decide what to do with them: broken furniture waiting on repairs that never happened, crates of old ceremonial linens, a stack of chairs missing legs. Ava started at the shelf nearest the door and worked backward, hauling crates into the hallway two at a time, sorting as she went. Keep. Fix. Burn.

It was hard, unglamorous work, the kind nobody thanked you for because nobody was meant to see it happen, only to notice the room looked presentable once it was done. She didn’t mind the labor itself. There was something almost peaceful about it, the clean physical logic of a messy room becoming a clear one, the ache in her shoulders by midmorning a kind of proof that she’d done something real with her hands, something nobody could take credit for or manage her out of.

Her sister Mira found her an hour in, hauling crates off the low shelf so she could get to the ones stacked behind them.

“You want help?” Mira asked, already reaching for one before Ava answered.

“You don’t have to.”

“I know I don’t have to.” Mira picked the crate up anyway, hip cocked, unimpressed with the argument. “Doesn’t mean I won’t.”

They worked in a rhythm they’d built over years, quiet and efficient, the kind of quiet that didn’t need filling. Mira was the only one of them who talked to Ava like she was a person and not a task to be managed or an embarrassment to be minimized. She was two years younger, still soft in the way you were soft before the pack finished teaching you who counted and who didn’t, and Ava sometimes wondered, guiltily, how long that softness would survive contact with their mother and their older siblings.

“They’re saying Dad might promise the Hendrick alliance a marriage,” Mira said, setting a crate down harder than it needed. “Bree’s already picking out dresses like it’s decided.”

“It probably is decided,” Ava said. “Dad doesn’t bring things up at the table unless they’re basically done.”

“You’d think they’d ask her first.”

“They will ask her. After they’ve already told the Hendricks yes.”

Mira huffed something that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Must be nice. Being wanted enough to get married off.”

Ava didn’t answer that one. There wasn’t a version of that sentence that wasn’t going to hurt one of them, and she’d rather swallow it than watch Mira realize what she’d said.

“Sorry,” Mira said, a beat too late, catching it herself. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“I know.”

“You’re not nothing, Ava.”

“I know that too.” She didn’t, not really, not in the marrow-deep way you were supposed to know it, but she’d gotten good at saying the sentence like she believed it. Good enough that Mira dropped it, satisfied, and went back to hauling crates.

They cleared the rest of the room by early afternoon, and when Mira finally left to get cleaned up for lunch, Ava stayed behind a few extra minutes, sitting on an overturned crate in the empty, swept space, letting herself feel, just for a moment, the particular quiet of a room that asked nothing of her.

On her way back from the woodpile that evening, arms full of kindling for the kitchen fire, Ava passed the training yard where the pack’s warriors were finishing drills for the day. She didn’t usually look. There was no reason to. But something made her glance over, and she caught sight of Rowan mid-strike, sparring with two others at once and holding his own without much visible effort, the kind of easy competence that made people go quiet when they talked about him. He was going to be named beta before the year was out, everyone said so, the pack’s best warrior stepping into the pack’s second-highest seat like it had always been waiting for him.

He didn’t notice her watching. Nobody in that yard would have thought to look for her among the evening shadows, and she didn’t linger long enough to risk it. She had never spoken to him beyond the ordinary courtesies pack members owed each other in passing, and she had no particular reason to think about him now beyond the plain, uncomplicated fact that he was easy to look at and she rarely let herself look at easy things. She adjusted her grip on the kindling and kept walking before the moment could turn into anything worth examining.

That night, from her room at the end of the hall, the one that had been her mother’s before it was hers, the one nobody else in the house had ever wanted, Ava heard her father’s voice carrying up from the study below. Low, even, the tone he used when he thought no one else could hear.

“…it has to be Bree,” he was saying, to someone, maybe Delia, maybe the beta. “She’s the eldest. The Hendricks will expect the eldest.”

A pause. Then, quieter, almost like it cost him something to say it at all:

“Ava isn’t part of this conversation.”

She sat very still on the edge of her bed, the comb from that morning still sitting untouched on the dresser, and told herself that hearing it out loud didn’t feel any different than already knowing it.

It did. It always did. She just didn’t let herself flinch anymore where anyone could see.

She thought, briefly, of asking why. Of going down there and standing in the doorway and making him say it to her face instead of to the air, whatever the real reason was, whether it was her mother’s death or her own unremarkable place in the pack’s eyes or simply that she’d never learned how to make herself matter to him. She thought about it the way she thought about a lot of things she never did. It stayed a thought. She stayed in her room.

Outside, far off toward the treeline, a wolf howled once at the rising moon, and Ava thought, not for the first time, that whatever the moon goddess had planned for the rest of the pack, she’d probably forgotten this house existed a long time ago.