All Chapters of Shattered By The Alpha : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

The three of us meet in the east courtyard on Saturday morning.It is unofficial — no scheduled session, no Commander Holt running drills from the edge of the field. Just Mira, Kade, and me, and the particular kind of quiet that settles over the compound on weekend mornings when most of the pack is still sleeping off the week.Mira arrived first, which I expected. She has this habit of showing up early to everything, not anxiously but deliberately — she likes to know the space before the people fill it. I find her stretching at the oak tree when I come through the gate, and she looks up and says nothing, just gives me the small nod that means: you okay? And I give her the one back that means: functional. We have built a language of nods. It is useful.Kade comes through the gate three minutes later in plain training gear. No rank markings, same as always when we are off the official record. He sees us both, acknowledges Mira with a brief nod, and then looks at me with the careful dire

I do not go to school on Tuesday.This is the first time in four years. I lie in bed at four fifty-eight watching the alarm clock reach five and then I reach out and turn it off and lie there for another ten minutes, and then I get up and put on my running shoes and go to the trail instead.I do not decide this. It just happens. My body makes the choice before my head does, which is usually what happens when I have been absorbing too much and the container gets full.The morning is cold and pale and entirely mine. No one else on the eastern trail at five-fifteen on a Tuesday — not even the early patrol, who run the western boundary first. I have the trees and the gravel and the particular silence of a forest that is still deciding to be morning.I run the first mile hard and the second harder and by the third something in my chest begins to ease. Not the Nia situation, not Bren's silence, not the story spreading through the school like water through cracks. Those things are still ther

My father is waiting in the kitchen when I get home. Not the office. The kitchen. That is the first signal — he uses his office for conversations he wants on record, conversations where he sits behind the desk and wears the Beta like armor. The kitchen means something else. It means he has not decided yet what this is going to be, which means he is angry enough that he could not wait for the office and its ceremony.I set my bag down by the door. I am still in my training clothes. My hair has wind in it from the patrol trail and I smell like the forest and the morning and the particular clarity that comes from doing something difficult and doing it right. I am not going to apologize for any of that.He is standing at the counter, his back half-turned, which is the posture he uses when he wants to seem casual and is not. His Beta uniform is still on. He came home and did not change, which means he heard before he even got here.You were at the eastern border, he says. He says it the wa

Mira does not knock on my classroom door — she appears in the doorway between third and fourth period with an expression that is trying to look neutral and is not quite managing it, and she says: East courtyard. Now if you can.I follow her.We go the long way around, through the corridor behind the science block. She waits until we are past the main student flow before she says it.Kade met with Holt this morning. Early, before training. They were in the administration block for about forty minutes.That's not unusual, I say.No. She pauses. But afterward, Petra — who was not supposed to be in the corridor outside Holt's office — caught the end of it. Kade came out and Holt came out after him and Holt said, in the corridor, not quietly: I've been waiting seven years to see someone put that on paper. She lets that sit for a moment. Petra thought it was about Bren. She told Jade. But I heard her tell Jade and the timeline does not fit Bren.I walk three steps without answering.He file

I have nothing to wear.This is a factual statement, not a dramatic one. The annual ranked blood assembly requires formal dress — not training clothes, not uniforms, not the comfortable, functional, invisible wardrobe I have built my entire life around. A dress or something equivalent. Something that says: I belong here and I know it.I own the yellow dress from my twelfth birthday, which I have not taken out of the back of my closet in five years. I am not going to wear the yellow dress from my twelfth birthday.Other than that, my options are limited.I tell myself it doesn't matter. That the assembly is a formality and the event is about rankings and pack hierarchy and has nothing to do with what I wear or how I look or whether anyone in that room sees me differently than they have always seen me.I am in the middle of this telling when my phone buzzes.Mira: I'm outside. Come down.I open my front door. She is standing on the step in her training jacket with a garment bag over one