My Alpha Planned to Murder Our Pup to Save His Heir

The wolf inside me was a storm.

She pressed against the inside of my chest like something trying to claw its way out — enormous and furious and ancient — and every instinct she carried was screaming one word: Jayden.

I pressed my back against the alley wall, out of sight, and I breathed.

Not yet.

The thought came from somewhere deeper than panic. Somewhere cold and deliberate that I hadn't known I possessed until about three minutes ago.

If I shifted now — if I let her out, if I let the aura crackling at the edges of my skin break through — they would know. Silas would know. Davis would know. And Jayden would disappear again, this time somewhere I'd never find him.

Not yet, I thought again, and I pushed.

It was like trying to hold back a tide with my bare hands. She fought me — God, she fought me — and I felt the pressure of her behind my eyes, behind my teeth, a low vibration in my bones that wanted to become a howl. I pressed my palms flat against the brick wall and breathed through it, one breath at a time, until the storm quieted to a growl.

Fine, she said. The word landed in my mind like a stone dropped in still water. But I remember everything.

So did I.

I looked down at myself. The clothes I was wearing were already worn — I'd dressed for a courthouse, not a fight — but they were too clean. Too intact. I grabbed the hem of my shirt and tore it. Found a patch of dirt near the alley's edge and pressed my palms into it, then dragged them across my face, my neck, the back of my hands. I pulled my hair loose from its tie and let it fall in tangles.

Then I walked back to the packhouse.

---

Beta Silas was standing at the service entrance when I arrived, clipboard in hand, looking like a man who had never once questioned whether he was on the right side of anything.

He looked at me the way you look at something you've already decided is worthless.

"Katelyn Wallace." He said my name like it tasted bad. "You've got nerve, showing up here."

I kept my eyes down. I let my shoulders curve inward. I let my voice come out small and cracked, which wasn't entirely a performance. "I have nowhere else to go. I'll do anything. Clean, cook, carry — I just need—" I stopped. Let the silence do the work. "Please."

He looked at me for a long moment. I felt his gaze moving over me — the torn clothes, the dirt, the hollow eyes — and I watched him decide that I was exactly what I appeared to be: a broken, wolfless Omega with nothing left.

"Floor cleaning," he said finally. "Lower levels only. You stay out of the Alpha's wing, the council rooms, and the east corridor. You're paid in meals and a cot in the Omega quarters. You cause trouble, you're out."

"Yes, Beta Silas." I kept my voice flat. Grateful. Defeated.

He handed me a mop and walked away without another word.

---

The lower levels of the packhouse were a map I had once known as Luna. Now I learned them again as a ghost.

I moved through the corridors with my head down and my hands busy, and I watched everything. The guard rotation near the east stairwell — every forty minutes, a gap of about three. The camera blind spot in the hallway outside the records room, where the wall sconce had been broken for what looked like weeks. The way the night staff clustered near the kitchen between ten and eleven, leaving the lower west wing essentially unwatched.

Good, Sera murmured. She had stopped demanding blood, for now. She was watching too.

I scrubbed floors and memorized patterns and let myself be invisible, which was the one thing this pack had always been very good at making me.

---

The communal kitchen smelled like coffee and leftover stew when I slipped in to clean the tile near the back wall. Three she-wolves were clustered around the counter, voices low and animated in the way that meant gossip rather than crisis.

I kept my back to them. Kept the mop moving.

"— swear it was her scent," Judith Salazar was saying. I recognized her voice — she'd always been the kind of woman who collected information the way others collected jewelry. "That floral-musk thing she has. Right near the western border, by the restricted trail."

"Camilla?" one of the others said.

"Who else smells like a garden in February?" Judith laughed softly. "And there were extra guards posted near the old wing of the pack hospital. Rogue guards, not pack regulars. I noticed because Remy was supposed to be on kitchen duty and he wasn't."

The mop handle was slick in my grip.

The old wing, Sera said quietly. That's where they'd keep him.

My hands didn't shake. I didn't look up. I kept scrubbing the same square of tile until the women moved on, taking their voices with them.

Then I stood up slowly, wrung out the mop, and let the information settle into the cold, deliberate place inside me where my plan was beginning to take shape.

Camilla was back. And wherever Camilla was, Jayden was close.

I just had to get to the old wing before anyone realized the ghost they'd let through the door still had teeth.