All Chapters of Shattered By The Alpha : Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

Kade tells her on a Thursday morning before the session starts.He finds her at the east wall, which is not unusual, and his expression is the professional one, the evaluator's careful line, which is also not unusual. But underneath it is something she has learned to read in the weeks since he fixed her training wrap on a dark patrol trail. Something he is carrying at a different angle than he usually carries things.He says: "I've been called to the compound for a debrief. I'll be gone five days."She wraps her second hand. "When?""Tomorrow morning."She nods. She finishes the wrap and tightens the end. "Is this a routine debrief?""The evaluation is in its final phase. They want a progress report before the formal submission." He is quiet for a moment. "Reyes will run the sessions while I am away. The standard does not change.""I know," she says.She does know. The standard does not change because she is the one holding it, not him. That is the thing about being this far into the

Kade returns on a Friday, the same day the Pack Trials have become two weeks rather than three.The distinction matters in the way that countdowns matter when they have gotten close enough to be real. Two weeks is a number with texture. It is not an abstraction anymore. It is fourteen mornings, fourteen training sessions, a specific and finite amount of remaining preparation that either has been sufficient or has not. The work is done or it is not. She knows it is.She is at the east wall when the gate opens mid-morning. She is between drill sets, catching her breath after the third sequence, and she hears the familiar weight of his footfall before she registers the rest of it. Her body has been cataloguing the sounds of this training ground for three years. She added Kade's footfall to the list in his first week.He comes through the gate in his evaluation gear. Clipboard under his arm. Expression in its professional line.He walks straight to her."Cole," he says."Voss."He looks a

Three weeks to the Pack Trials. Kade returns the day before the timeline goes official and the compound adjusts itself around his presence the way it always does. The evaluation sessions resume at his standard, which is not Reyes's standard, not because Reyes runs them poorly but because Kade's standard has something in it that goes beyond precision. It has expectation. The particular quality of a person who looks at what is in front of them and sees what it could become as clearly as what it is.Zara is at the east wall when it happens.She is between repetitions, breathing down after the fourth sequence, when Kade calls for a free drill rotation. No assigned pairs, no sequence, just open work. She goes to the center of the field and she runs the redirect chain, the full version, and Raya is completely present alongside her, both of them at the pace they have not shown in front of anyone except Denn and the visiting warriors.She does not decide to run it at full. She just does. That

She tells him about Raya on the patrol trail.Not the public version, the version that has been assembling itself in the training group's knowledge since the drill where she stopped managing it and the word moved through the compound with the particular quiet efficiency of things that are finally confirmed rather than revealed. Not that version. The real one.They are two miles into the trail when she begins. The evening is cold and fully dark and the compound sounds have faded behind them, and beside her Kade runs at the pace she sets, steady and unhurried, the way he has run every mile of this trail since the first morning they went out together."She came at thirteen," Zara says.He does not interrupt. He does not ask clarifying questions. He runs."I was in the forest behind the eastern boundary. Four in the morning. I woke up and I needed to be outside, which had never happened before and which I understand now was her, Raya, needing the space she'd outgrown inside whatever I was

Nia comes alone.Zara hears her before she sees her. The heels have been gone for weeks, replaced by the kind of flat, quiet footwear that a person adopts when they have stopped needing the warning system to precede them. Without the heels, Nia's approach sounds like any other person. That is, Zara thinks, probably intentional.She is at the east courtyard. She is alone. Mira has a session with Reyes and Kade is reviewing the evaluation timeline in the administration block and the oak tree is the same oak tree it has always been, bare at the top now, the last of October doing its work on the outermost branches.Nia comes around the utility shed and stops.They look at each other.For a long moment neither of them speaks. Zara does not reach for a greeting and Nia does not perform entrance, the way she used to perform entrance into every room she occupied, the careful calibration of who she was making sure the room registered her presence on her terms before she acknowledged theirs.Sh