All Chapters of Blood Of The Alpha.: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

The pan connected with something that felt like hitting a car door, and Mara's arms rang all the way to her shoulders.The creature in the window — Ronan's brother, though brother seemed like the wrong word for something with a voice like grinding rock and eyes the color of a struck match — barely flinched. He was already past the broken glass, already inside, filling the kitchen in a way that made the room feel suddenly much smaller than it had ten minutes ago.Ronan met him halfway.It was not a fight so much as a collision, two enormous bodies slamming into the kitchen island hard enough to crack the granite, and Mara had exactly one clear thought through the roar of it — get out of the way — before instinct took over and she was already moving, already hauling the knife block off the counter and backing toward the hallway, because whatever was happening here, it was not going to be settled by a woman with a cast-iron pan."Ronan!" The word tore out of her before she could stop it.

The door handle turned a second time, slower, almost lazy, like whoever stood on the other side already knew the outcome and was simply enjoying the wait.Ronan was on his feet before Mara had fully processed the sound, shirt forgotten on the floor, wound still weeping but his body already coiling toward the shift, amber bleeding fast into his eyes."Behind me," he said. "Now.""There's nowhere behind you, it's a one-room cabin—""Then behind the stove. Go."She went, because arguing with a man about to turn into something with claws felt like exactly the wrong hill to die on, and pressed herself into the narrow gap between the wood stove and the wall, duffel bag clutched to her chest like it might do anything at all against what was coming through that door.It didn't burst open the way Callum had come through the window. It opened slowly, almost politely, and the figure that stepped through was not the red-eyed nightmare from her kitchen.It was a woman.Tall, silver-haired despite

Sleep, when it came at all, came in thin, restless fragments, and Mara woke before first light to find Ronan already sitting up on the couch, staring into the dead ashes of last night's fire like it might tell him something."You should be resting," she said, voice rough with sleep."I've been resting. Now I'm thinking, which is worse." He didn't look at her, not yet, his jaw set in the particular stillness she'd learned meant he was working through something too large to say out loud all at once. "In a few hours I'm going to stand across from my brother in front of everyone who's ever known either of us, and I keep running through every version of how that goes, and none of them feel like enough.""Enough for what?""For her." He didn't have to say his mother's name for Mara to understand. "I keep thinking about what she'd say if she could see this. Her sons, tearing the thing she built in half to decide who gets to keep it."Mara moved to sit beside him, close enough that their shou

Three weeks after the challenge fight, Mara was starting to learn the particular rhythm of pack business — which was, she'd discovered, roughly ninety percent patience and ten percent someone showing up at Ronan's door at an ungodly hour with a problem that couldn't wait until morning.Tonight's problem arrived at eleven, in the shape of a wiry young wolf named Petra, barely into her twenties, standing on the porch of the house Ronan had inherited along with the pack's leadership, her jaw set in the particular stubborn line Mara had already learned to associate with trouble."There's a meeting," Petra said, without preamble, once Ronan had let her in out of the cold. "Tonight. Out past the old quarry. A dozen of the younger ones, maybe more. I only found out because my brother's one of them, and he got sloppy enough to leave the invitation where I could see it."Ronan's face didn't change, but Mara had learned to read the stillness that settled over him when something actually worried

Word of a fractured pack, it turned out, traveled faster and further than Mara had expected — and not just within Ronan's own territory.She learned this on a gray, unremarkable Tuesday, three weeks after the quarry, when Sable arrived at the house unannounced, her expression carrying none of its usual dry composure."We have a problem," Sable said, before Ronan had even finished opening the door. "The Thornwood pack sent a delegation. They're waiting at the northern boundary marker, and they didn't send it to exchange pleasantries."Ronan went still in the particular way Mara had learned meant something serious. "Thornwood hasn't tested this territory in fifteen years. Not since before my mother took the northern ridge in the border settlement.""Which is exactly why this matters. News travels between packs the same way it travels within them, Ronan — faster, if anything, because everyone outside your territory has an interest in knowing whether the wolf sitting on it just survived a