chapter 30

Talis’s POV

The lake sparkled under the mild afternoon sun as I sat beside Regan, the gentle breeze tugging at my hair. She’d returned from town after a dog she’d nursed through a difficult birth recovered, earning her an extra day off from the quiet vet clinic.

When she suggested a trip to the lake, I seized the chance to escape the farmhouse and Dayne. The memory of last night’s tension lingered, and I wasn’t ready to face his anger, especially if Luka had spilled about my probing questions.

Still, with Regan as a friend and us far from the pack, I saw an opening to dig into Dayne his wolf tattoo, his role as alpha. But I decided to steer clear of asking if he and Savannah were an item. Too risky.

Regan, though, clammed up the moment I brought him up. “He’s cool,” she mumbled, her discomfort obvious.

“But that doesn’t tell me anything. What is he really like? I mean, I don’t think he can be all that cool after what he did to me at the meeting, do you?” I tried to keep my voice even, masking the fury still simmering from Dayne’s treatment at the pack meeting, but Regan’s quick glance and wide eyes told me I hadn’t succeeded.

Her cheeks flushed as she looked away. “I can’t talk about it.”

“What do you mean you can’t ”

“I just can’t.”

“Not even about his tattoo? Surely you can ”

“Please, Talis,” she said, her eyes pleading. “Don’t ask me about that.”

I held her gaze for a long moment, then sighed and turned to the water. “Okay, fine.”

We sat in silence, the lake’s gentle ripples filling the quiet.

“About your pack,” Regan said, breaking the stillness with a question that felt like it had been burning in her for a while. “Weren’t your parents…”

“The pack alphas? Yes. They were,” I said.

My history made me curious, an anomaly among shifters. Uncle Glynn had kept me isolated from other packs, and I was grateful for it now it spared me from explaining myself constantly.

“But shouldn’t you be…” Regan trailed off, unable to voice the question she clearly wanted answered.

I finished it for her. “Higher up in the pack hierarchy?”

She cleared her throat, avoiding my raised eyebrow. “Well, yeah. I mean I thought it was genetic, being an alpha.”

I pulled my knees to my chest, resting my chin on them as I stared across the lake. The breeze played with my loose hair, and I knew I’d regret not tying it up later when it became a tangled mess. But the sensation was soothing, so I let it be. “Not always,” I said.

Regan was right alpha traits often passed from parent to child, especially when both parents were alphas. The odds were high. But I was the exception, the glitch in the rule. At ten, a couple of years after my parents went for a run and never returned, I turned into a wildfire of rage. I fought everyone, desperate to prove I wasn’t the submissive Uncle Glynn claimed I was. I was certain I was an alpha, that he was wrong about my place in the pack.

It started then. He took me deep into the forest, far from the pack, to “tell me the way things really were, away from prying ears.”

He said my wolf was just acting out, like any pre-shift kid’s wolf did. It was normal except for one thing. The only alpha part of me was my parents, and they were gone. Even though I hadn’t shifted yet my wolf wouldn’t emerge until I was sixteen I felt her bristling inside, hating his words.

Before I could stop myself, I lunged at him, clawless fingers swinging. But I was a scrawny ten-year-old, and Uncle Glynn was a full-grown shifter. His blow knocked me out cold. When I came to, he loomed over me, waiting.

He asked if I’d learned my lesson. I said yes, but his eyes told me he didn’t believe it. “You may not be the lowest of the low,” he growled, “but you are no alpha or beta, or anything near it.”

“And how would you know,” I snapped, “when I haven’t had my first shift yet.”

He grabbed me by the hair, holding me until I felt helpless, my scalp burning and tears stinging my eyes. I refused to let them fall.

“I know,” he said.

I still had a fight in me then, and he was right to doubt me. Scrambling to my feet, I glared through tear-blurred eyes. “I am Alpha. And when I change, my wolf is going to kill you.”

Threatening the new pack alpha my guardian wasn’t my brightest move. He pinned me down in a heartbeat, sneering. “You forget, niece. I see your wolf, and she is nothing. Weak. Pathetic. You think I don’t know an alpha when I see one?”

His absolute certainty planted the first seed of doubt in me. “You’re lying,” I said.

He smiled, a cruel twist that warned of worse to come. “Did you know Maria was much the same as you?”

I shook my head, refusing to believe it. “No. No, she wasn’t. She couldn’t be.”

“Believe me. Don’t believe me. But go ask her. Go see what she tells you,” he said, releasing me.

So I went to Maria, near the bottom of the pack but not quite the lowest. She confirmed it before her first shift, her wolf had acted out, sparking fights, just like mine. It was normal, even for submissives.

I believed her, but my wolf didn’t. She refused to accept that I was like Maria. I kept fighting Uncle Glynn, clawing for a place I was sure was mine.

Then the punishments began. Every fight, every attempt to assert dominance, brought swift consequences for daring to rise above my station. I was disrespecting the pack, he said, by acting better than my packmates.

It started small isolating me from the others. No play, no learning, just solitude. For a social wolf, it was brutal. As I grew older, his punishments turned crueler, more vicious. Nothing satisfied him. Eventually, he enlisted the pack in his cruel games, turning them against me.

It went on for years. Then, on my sixteenth birthday, my first shift came. Everyone saw it me, my reflection, the pack. Talis Merrick, pack submissive. A dud.