All Chapters of TORN BETWEEN ALPHA BROTHERS: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Breakfast at Blackwood Hall was not what I expected, and I had prepared myself for a great deal. I'd imagined something ceremonial, stiff with hierarchy, all formal introductions and scrutinizing gazes. What I walked into instead was controlled chaos: a dining room that could seat fifty doing exactly that, voices overlapping, the smell of coffee and bacon and something woodsy and wild underneath it all, children racing between the legs of adults who were too deep in conversation to notice.It was, undeniably, a family. A large, complicated, clearly power-structured family—I could see the deferences in how people moved, the way conversations quieted when Dominic entered, the subtle shifts in posture—but a family nonetheless. The recognition was disorienting. I had spent so long imagining the pack as something imposing, something to be navigated cautiously, that the sheer domesticity of it landed like a punch.Dominic guided me to a seat near the head of the long central table with a ha

My rooms were in the east wing, third floor: a bedroom, a sitting room, a bathroom, and a narrow balcony that looked out over the back gardens and the tree line beyond. Someone had stocked the bathroom with toiletries, the wardrobe with clothes that fit me with an accuracy that should have been unnerving but mostly just confirmed that the Ironveil Pack had resources and had known I was coming long enough to prepare. The clothes were good quality—practical, fitted, the kind you could move in. I appreciated that, at least.I spent the first hour alone unpacking and thinking, which is how I process most things: methodically, turning each piece of information over until I understand which side has the useful edge. My mother had been pack-born. She had fled a controlling Alpha—Dominic and Rafe's father. She had spent my entire childhood hiding me from a world she knew I was built for, and she had done it, I was beginning to understand, out of genuine love and genuine fear in equal, insepar

I woke before dawn on my third day at Blackwood Hall to the sound of raised voices somewhere in the lower floors—controlled, not shouting, but with the particular tension of two people who are choosing their words very carefully because otherwise the words would become something else. I lay in the dark and listened and distinguished two frequencies: Dominic's voice, low and clipped, stripped of its usual ambient authority, something rawer underneath. And Rafe's, shorter responses, the warmth compressed into something flint-edged.I didn't go downstairs. It wasn't my fight. Not yet.But I didn't sleep either.By the time I came down at seven, the hall was functioning with its usual morning energy—breakfast preparation, children running, the senior wolves moving through their established routines—and neither brother was anywhere visible. Mara handed me a coffee at the kitchen counter with the efficiency of someone who had also been awake, and said nothing, which told me everything."How

On Sunday morning, Fen the healer knocked on my door at nine with a cup of something that smelled medicinal and a request that he phrased as a question but delivered with the energy of a foregone conclusion. "I'd like to run some basic tests, if you're agreeable. Blood work, sensory calibration—we haven't had a half-dormant wolf arrive in my tenure and I'd like to understand your baseline."I was agreeable. Partly because Fen had the reassuring quality of someone who was interested in you as a phenomenon rather than a resource, and partly because I wanted to know too. Every strange thing about my body, every anomaly I'd spent years explaining away—I wanted to know what it actually was.The healer's wing occupied the entire ground floor of the hall's west extension: clean, organized, smelling of herbs and antiseptic in a combination that should have been wrong and wasn't. Fen had me sit at a broad worktable and proceeded to run what he called basic tests with the quiet, concentrated pl

Fen had warned me. He'd said the wolf instinct didn't go away, that it accumulated, and I'd filed this under understood in the intellectual sense without fully processing what it meant in the physical one. Two weeks into Blackwood Hall, I started waking at three in the morning with my skin feeling too small for what was inside it. Not painful—not exactly—but pressurized, the sensation of something that needed to move being held still. I'd lie in the dark with my hand on my sternum and breathe through it and wait for it to pass, and it would pass, but it was taking longer each time.On the night it peaked, I did what the instinct wanted and went outside.Two in the morning, the grounds quiet except for the perimeter patrol I'd learned to track without thinking about it. The night air was cold and sharp and hit my system like a correction—something settling, realigning. I walked through the garden and past the training ground and into the forest without making a conscious decision to do