The Mate They Threw Away
The words landed differently than I expected.
An Alpha Pact was not a handshake. It was not a promise, not in any sense that the word carried in ordinary usage. It was an ancient rite threaded back to the founding wolf, the first of their kind, the original blood from which every Alpha line descended, and it had teeth. Real teeth. Breaking an Alpha Pact did not simply dissolve the agreement. It unraveled the wolf who had made it, slowly and without mercy, until there was nothing left but the echo of what they had sworn and failed to keep.