Stolen Hours

Trishelle's POV

The laundry room was off limits. No permission, no entry. Simple as that.

It was one of those quiet cruelties that made sense if you didn't think about it too hard. Four omega women ran the laundry, all ranked just above her, and they'd made it clear without ever saying a word that anyone crossing into their space was challenging their spot in the pecking order. In a hierarchy this rigid, rank was all anyone really owned. The gap between their position and hers was the only high ground any of them had.

She got it. She didn't even blame them, not really. What she understood, and what none of them ever seemed to think about, was that she had nowhere left to fall from. There was no rank under hers to protect.

The warriors wouldn't be down for another hour. Training still had forty minutes left by her count, and the senior omegas slept until they heard boots on the porch. The training clothes were about to show up. If she timed it right, she had a window.

She took it.

Her sheet, her blanket, and the small handful of clothes she owned all fit in one load. She used the least detergent she could get away with and ran the quick cycle, standing in the doorway the whole time with one ear turned toward the stairs. The washer was an old front loader that ran quiet, and for once something in this house worked in her favor.

When it finished, she pulled everything out still damp and carried it down to the basement. The dryer was too loud, too risky, too likely to still be running when someone came looking for her. So she strung her things across whatever the basement had to offer. Exposed pipes. The edge of a shelf. The back of a wooden chair that had been sitting in the corner for as long as she could remember, for reasons nobody had ever explained. By tonight it would all be dry. The basement ran warm enough for that, even in winter. One small thing the universe handed her with one hand while it took everything else with the other.

She ate her saved dinner plate standing at the little table in the corner. Cold mashed potatoes, gravy gone stiff at the edges, but still decent. She ate the salad first since it would wilt fastest. Quick, no ceremony, the way she did most things that were only for herself.

Then she brushed her teeth at the half bath off the utility hall, the one bathroom she was allowed to use, changed into dry clothes, and went back upstairs to clear the dining room.

The morning moved through its usual stages. Dishes cleared. Surfaces wiped. The dining room reset for lunch. The kitchen brought back to the precise, clean order she kept because a messy kitchen meant mistakes, and she understood exactly what mistakes cost in this house.

She was at the sink finishing the last of the breakfast pans when she caught voices in the hallway just outside the kitchen door. Not loud. Not aimed at her. Just there, the way conversation always drifted through this house, mostly nothing to do with her, except when it was.

She kept her eyes down and her hands in the water.

"Has he decided yet?" a woman asked. Lena, she thought, one of the ranked females who lived on the third floor. "About the Summit?"

"He'll go," Marcus said. The Beta. His voice always had a certain weight to it, slower and heavier than the warriors'. "He doesn't have a choice. Three packs asking for a meeting isn't something you turn down."

"He could send someone in his place."

"He could. He won't."

A pause. Someone leaning against the wall right outside the door.

"He's getting worse. More volatile. The warriors feel it," Lena said, and there was something in her voice that could have been worry if you were feeling generous, or could have been something sharper if you weren't.

"The warriors will manage. That's what they're for," Marcus said flatly.

Their voices faded down the hall. Trishelle went back to the pan in her hands, scrubbing in slow, even circles.

Volatile. That was one word for it.

She had been watching James Black for most of her life, from exactly the kind of distance you kept from anything that could close the gap without warning. She'd watched him grow from a boy who yanked her hair and called her names because nobody stopped him, into a teenager who sharpened his cruelty on purpose, the way some people practiced an instrument. And then into the man who had stood at the head of the table that morning and told her she smelled like the floor, quiet enough that the words had room to settle deep.

The thing about James was that he was never messy about it. Other pack members were loud. They performed. Jack, with his bucket, wanted to see her flinch. The kitchen omegas who reported her wanted the little rush of power that came with being the one who told. Even his father, old Alpha Drew, had been a showman about his cruelty. Sharp voice. Public humiliation. Speeches about pack order that were really just speeches about his own power.

James wasn't like that. James was precise. That was what made him so hard to prepare for, so hard to read, so hard to move around. You could see loud coming from a mile off. You could see a performance building. Precision arrived exactly where and when it intended to, and never a second before.

She didn't let herself dwell on it. Thinking about James Black too long wasn't something she allowed herself, for the same reason she didn't stand too close to an open flame. Whatever pull it had wasn't worth what it might cost.

She finished the pans, dried her hands, and started on lunch.

By midmorning the pack house had settled into its daytime rhythm, that particular hum a house full of people made when everyone had somewhere to be. Training ended, the warriors came through for a second round of food, then scattered. Some to their rooms. Some outside. Some to whatever job the Beta had put on the rotation.

Trishelle had been awake for eight hours.

She made herself a cup of tea from the odds and ends in the back of the spice cabinet, dried ginger and the last of a chamomile packet she'd been rationing for weeks, and stood at the kitchen window with both hands wrapped around the mug, looking out over the pack's land.

She would admit it, if pressed. The Bloodmoon territory was beautiful. The house sat at the edge of a wide clearing that gave way to old growth forest, oak and pine that had been standing long before the pack ever claimed this ground. In the early morning, before the light went flat and full, mist sat low in the tree line and made the whole thing look like a painting instead of a place where real things happened to real people.

She knew, in a distant, almost academic way, that the world past that tree line was supposed to be where the story started for someone like her. She was twenty years old. She had never left pack grounds. Never been to school. Never had a friend. Never once walked into the small town twelve miles down the main road, with its ordinary shops and ordinary people and ordinary problems. She had no ID. No paperwork. No last name, because the pack had never given her one and there had never been anyone else to.

She'd been found in the woods around two or three years old, best guess from the pack doctor at the time. No note. No markings. No memory from before the basement, which was as far back as she could locate herself.

Whatever came before that was gone, and she had no way to reach it.

A few of the kinder omegas, over the years, not many, but a few, had floated theories. A lost pup from a pack that scattered. The child of a lone wolf who left her somewhere safe when they couldn't keep going. A deliberate drop off by someone who knew Bloodmoon would take her in, which, looking back, seemed like wishful thinking.

Trishelle had stopped engaging with the theories a long time ago. Theories didn't change anything. The cold mashed potatoes she'd eaten that morning were real. The burn scar on her right index finger, from an oil soaked rag a warrior lit for fun when she was twelve, was real. The bucket of water at four in the morning was real.

Everything else was just noise.

She finished her tea, rinsed the mug, and got started on the vegetables for lunch prep.

The afternoon brought its own demands.

One of the pregnant females, Sena, showed up at the kitchen door around two with the exact expression of someone sent as a messenger and not entirely happy about it. She was seven months along and had clearly stopped finding pregnancy charming a few weeks back.

"She wants sweet potato soup and cornbread," Sena said, no hello first.

"Which she?" Trishelle asked. Three pregnant females lived in the house right now, and their cravings didn't overlap.

"Mira."

Trishelle nodded and turned back to the counter. Sweet potato soup was simple enough. Mira had been craving it on and off for two weeks, which meant Trishelle had quietly kept the pantry stocked with sweet potatoes by asking the grocery run omega, twice, since the first request had been ignored.

"When does she want it?" Trishelle asked.

"Now, ideally."

"Forty minutes."

Sena's mouth pulled tight, but she wasn't cruel, not in the active way some of them were. Mostly just indifferent. "Fine," she said, and left.

Trishelle started peeling.

She was three potatoes in when she heard the footsteps again.

Different from the morning. Faster. Still that same measured quality underneath, but with something else riding on top of it now, a kind of pressure in the step she'd learned to connect with temper. She didn't stop moving. She kept the peeler going in long, even strokes, kept her eyes on the potato in her hand, and matched her breathing to the rhythm of long practice.

The kitchen door opened.

"Where is it?" James said.

She didn't look up from the potato. "Alpha James. I'm sorry, I'm not sure what you mean."

"The document. The land registry report Beta Marcus left on the kitchen table this morning."

"I cleared the table after breakfast. There were no papers. Just plates and serving dishes," she said.

The silence that followed had a texture to it. She could feel him working through it, deciding whether she was lying, whether he believed her, whether it mattered either way.

"If there had been papers I would have put them on the hallway table by the door. That's where anything left behind goes," she added.

Another pause. Then, no word at all, he was gone.

She heard him cross the hall. A beat. Then footsteps heading back toward the stairs, a little less loaded than before.

She set down the peeler, pressed her fingertips flat against the cold granite, and let out a slow breath through her nose.

He unsettled her in a way she couldn't fully explain and had stopped trying to. It wasn't only the fear, though the fear was real and built on years of specific, documented reasons. There was something else underneath it, something she had no word for and no interest in examining, an awareness that flicked on like a switch the second he walked into a room and refused to shut off until he left again.

She picked the peeler back up and got back to work.

The soup was ready in thirty eight minutes. She sent it up with Sena, cornbread wrapped in a clean cloth to keep it warm, and stood at the window for exactly one more minute before starting the evening prep.