Tyrannized By The Alpha

||Mira||

The train was late.

I know how that sounds. But standing on that platform at eleven at night with a cold coffee in my hand and nobody who knew exactly where I was, the delay felt like a gift. Every extra minute was another minute of being nobody. No last name. No pack. No brother steering me through a room like I couldn't cross it on my own.

Here I was just Mira, a girl in the city. That was it. That was enough.

Dunmore Central was quiet at this hour. The last commuters were heading for the exits, heads down, wrung out. Somewhere below the platform a busker was playing violin, slow and low, the music drifting up through the gaps in the floor. The fluorescent light above Gate 7 kept cutting in and out. Everything felt a little worn down, a little tired. I fit right in.

Six months at Moonstone University. It was long enough that the city had started to feel like mine, long enough that I'd stopped flinching when a stranger walked up behind me, and long enough that I was finally sleeping through the night without lying awake listening to every sound the building made.

I was standing at the edge of the platform, watching the tracks, when the feeling hit.

My hand tightened around my coffee cup and the air stalled. The back of my neck went cold and my skin pulled tight. Someone was watching me.

Anya moved inside me before I could think. This was not the quick surge she makes when something startles us. Neither was she defensive. This was different. This was slow and hesitant and afraid, and Anya was never afraid. That was the thing that stopped me cold.

Don't turn around yet.

I didn't. I stood still and watched the platform in the dark reflection of the board across the tracks. Counted to ten. Breathed in and out severally.

Then I turned.

Nothing was out of place. A woman wrestling an oversized suitcase. Two students sharing earphones, talking over each other. An old man reading a folded newspaper like he had nowhere else to be. They were just ordinary people on an ordinary Thursday night.

I let out a ragged breath. Then the light above Gate 7 went out.

In the dark, I saw him, his eyes glowing yellow or amber. I wasn’t sure.

He was at the far end of the platform, past the crowd, standing in the strip of shadow beyond the last working light. He was tall and completely still. He was looking straight at me and when he saw me notice him, he tilted his head slowly, like he was daring me to run.

The light came back on.

He was gone.

My coffee hit the platform. I hadn't felt my hand open.

Anya violently shoved forward inside me, pressed against my ribs, staring through my eyes. I could feel her shaking. In six years of awakening, I had never felt her shake.

That undid me more than anything else. Not the man or the glowing eyes, or his vanishing tricks. The fact that the part of me that was built for exactly this kind of thing was terrified.

This wasn't the first time.

Six months ago I was running along the path behind the east campus when something moved at the edge of the trees. It was gone the second I looked directly at it. I told myself it was a dog or a shadow. I made myself believe it.

Four months ago the smell of pine hit me in the stairwell of the humanities building. Not the thin chemical smell of the trees outside. Something darker and alive. A shifter's scent. I stood there for a full minute looking for a source and found nothing.

Two weeks ago, walking back from the library, I heard footsteps behind me that matched mine exactly. I sped up, they sped up. I slowed, they slowed. When I turned around the street was empty.

Every time I found a reason. I blamed it on my Lycan instincts running hot in cities, or too much stimulus, too many people. That was all it was.

I had said it so many times I had almost started to believe it.

But the real reason I hadn't told anyone was simpler and less flattering.

If I called Zander, he would be here by morning. I knew that without question. He would get in the car the second the call ended and drive through the night and by the time the sun came up, this life I had spent six months building from scratch would be over. Packed up and taken apart. Everything I had fought for to get here, gone.

I thought about what it had cost to get here. Not money, though that was part of it. It was the months of arguments. Doors slammed hard enough to shake the walls. Zane going silent on me for two weeks, which was worse than anything he could have shouted. Zander's face the day he finally said yes, that look that said he hated this but he loved me more than he hated it.

I thought about what it felt like to love brothers like mine. Some days it was the best thing in my life. Some days it was a hand around my throat, gentle but very much there.

Here I was Mira. A biomedical science student who took the late train and drank cold coffee and decided for herself what she was afraid of. Not Mirabel Sloan, the Alpha's sister. Not the girl who needed an escort to cross her own campus.

Just Mira.

My phone buzzed.

I didn't have to look. I knew it was Zander. He always knew. Not through the pack bond, which had softened with the distance over these months. Just that thing he had, the way he could tell when something was wrong with me from across a city, across a country, across whatever distance I put between us.

I stared at the screen. I couldn't lie to him right now. I didn't have it in me.

I hit decline.

Below the platform the violin had stopped. The silence it left behind was heavier than the music had been.

I looked toward the far end of the platform. It was empty. Just the crowd and the ordinary light and the ordinary Thursday night carrying on without him in it.

Then the pine smell came back.

Closer than before.

He hadn't left. He had moved somewhere on this platform, just out of sight, he was close enough that his scent was in my lungs.

Anya growled low and didn't stop. She was pacing, restless, and she wasn't pushing me to shift. Because underneath the fear there was something else she couldn't make sense of. Something pulling toward him that neither of us had asked for.

My phone buzzed again. Zander. I put it in my pocket.

"One more night," I said out loud to the platform, to the dark and whoever was standing in it close enough to hear me.

The train came in. I got on. I took the window seat and watched the station disappear into the dark behind the glass.

The pine smell stayed with me for three stops. I kept my eyes forward. I didn't look at the window because I didn't want to know what I'd see reflected in it.

By the fourth stop the scent was gone.

I told myself I could breathe now. That it was over. That tomorrow I would think clearly and figure out what to do.

Anya didn't believe me.

She stayed alert and afraid all the way home, and she was right to, because whatever had just happened on that platform wasn't finished.

It was only starting.