I came back to consciousness the way you come back from somewhere you weren't sure you'd return from slowly, in pieces, each one heavier than the last.
The ceiling was the first thing I saw. White. Still. Unfamiliar.
Not my room.
I lay there for a moment and let that register before I let anything else in. The ceiling. The stillness. The ache that had settled into my bones like it had unpacked and made itself at home. I took one careful breath, then another, the way you do when you're testing whether your body still belongs to you.
It did. Mostly.
The rest came back in fragments the way bad things always do.
His mate.
I closed my eyes again.
I had spent my whole life not knowing where I came from. That was the part people always forgot or maybe the part they never thought mattered that before I was the wolfless omega, before I was the girl Sophia hated, before I was anything this pack had decided to make me, I was just a baby someone had left on the water. Floating. Alone. Wrapped in cloth that held no name, no pack, no origin. Just a child the river decided to keep.
Alpha Damien had taken me in. Not many alphas would. Not many would look at a foundling with no wolf scent and see anything worth keeping. But he had, and I had grown up in the margins of this pack grateful for it, ashamed of needing to be grateful, never quite belonging to any of it.
I had always told myself that was why. That the reason I had no wolf, no rank, no place was because I had no origin. No bloodline anyone could trace. That whatever I was supposed to be had been lost somewhere on that water before I was old enough to know it.
And now the moon, in its infinite and terrible wisdom, had decided to make me the fated mate of the Alpha's son.
Of course it had.
It almost made me want to laugh. Almost.
Because here was the thing that sat in my chest like a stone Cael had known. He had looked at whatever bond the moon drew between us and had chosen, on some quiet ordinary day I would never be able to identify, to fold that knowledge away and say nothing. To stand beside Sophia. To let me keep living the way I had always lived small, invisible, grateful for the bare minimum.
Maybe he had looked at me no wolf, no origin, no bloodline worth claiming and decided I wasn't worth the complication.
Maybe a girl pulled from the water wasn't what an Alpha's son was supposed to bring home.
The thought didn't break me the way I expected it to. It settled instead cold and clarifying into something that felt less like grief and more like a decision forming quietly at the edges.
I need to know where I came from.
Not for him. Not to be worthy of a bond I never asked for. But because I was tired of being defined by the absence of answers I had never been given the chance to find. If I was going to keep living in the margins of everyone else's story, I at least wanted to understand why I had been placed there.
The door opened.
"You're awake."
Cael stood in the doorway. He was already dressed put together, composed, every inch the Alpha's son he had spent his whole life performing. He looked at me the way you look at a problem you have already decided how to handle.
Something in me went very still.
"Y-yes," I said.
He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. Didn't come closer. Just stood there with his arms crossed, watching me with an expression I couldn't quite read or maybe one I didn't want to.
"Good," he said. "The blood transfusion I gave you last night helped. You should be well enough to move around."
His blood. I looked down at my hands without meaning to. The bruising had faded not gone, but quieter. Yellowed at the edges like something already healing. I thought about what it meant, that he had done that. What he had given me without waking me to ask.
I thought about what else he had never told me.
I said nothing.
Cael exhaled short, controlled and unfolded his arms. "Nova." His voice shifted into something that was almost gentle. Almost. "I need you to stop provoking Sophia."
The room went very quiet.
I looked up at him slowly.
"I'm n-not " I started.
"I know you think you're not," he said, and there it was that measured, careful tone, like he was explaining something to someone who simply hadn't understood yet. "But you have to see how it looks. You need to stay out of her way. Stop putting yourself in situations where this keeps happening."
I stared at him.
This keeps happening.
As though I was the one making it happen. As though I was the one who chose it who woke up every morning and thought, yes, today I will walk into someone's fist. As though the bruises on my arms were the natural consequence of my own poor decisions and not the hands of the girl he had chosen to stand beside.
The girl he was still choosing.
Even now. Even after last night. Even standing in the room where he had watched me bleed, he was standing here telling me to be smaller. To disappear more completely. To make it easier for everyone for Sophia, for himself, for the careful life he had built on the foundation of pretending I didn't exist.
A week ago, I would have nodded. I would have pressed my lips together and looked at the floor and said yes, you're right, I'll try harder and I would have meant it, because somewhere underneath everything I had always believed that if I could just become invisible enough, the hits would stop.
But I had heard him last night.
She has me.
Three words he had said in the dark when he thought I was unconscious. Three words that meant something, even if he was standing here right now doing his very best to take them back without technically saying them.
"You should g-get ready," I said.
He blinked. "What?"
"The Blood Moon Alpha." I kept my voice as even as I could manage. "He arrives today. You're on duty." I moved to stand, and my legs held. "You should get ready."
Something crossed his face there and gone so fast I almost missed it. Surprise, maybe. Or something closer to recognition. Like he had expected tears, or apology, or the particular kind of silence I had always offered him before, and had gotten something else entirely.
He straightened. Cleared his throat. "Nova "
"Th-thank you," I said, "for the blood. I mean that."
And then I walked past him to the door.
I didn't look back. But I felt his eyes on me all the way across the room heavy, complicated, following me with something that had no clean name.
I stepped into the hallway and pulled the door shut behind me.
The corridor was quiet. Cold. Familiar in the way that things you have never chosen still become familiar because you have walked them enough times, because you have had no other direction to go.
I stood there for a moment with my hand still on the door handle.
I need to know where I came from.
The thought was quieter now. Steadier. Less like longing and more like the first step of something I hadn't named yet but already knew I wasn't going to put down.
Somewhere in this pack, the Blood Moon Alpha was arriving. Somewhere behind this door, Cael was standing in the room I had just left, being exactly who he had always chosen to be.
And somewhere in water I had never seen, in a past no one had ever explained to me there were answers that belonged to me.
I let go of the door handle.
I had taken exactly three steps down the corridor when I heard it Cael's voice, low and tight, coming through the door behind me. Not directed at me. He was on the phone. Or mind-linking. The words were clipped, controlled, the way he got when something had already gone wrong.
I stopped without meaning to.
" she's awake," he said. A pause. "Yes. She heard." Another pause, longer this time, and when he spoke again his voice had dropped so low I had to hold my breath to catch it. "I know what I said. That's not that's not what this is." Silence. Then, quieter still "Just make sure she doesn't get near him today."
Him.
The Blood Moon Alpha.
My hand found the wall.
Make sure she doesn't get near him.
Not make sure she's safe. Not make sure she's okay. Make sure she doesn't get near him. Like I was a problem to be managed. Like whatever was arriving today was something Cael needed to keep me away from specifically.
Like he already knew why.
The call ended. Footsteps moved away from the door.
I stood in the corridor alone, my hand flat against the cold wall, and felt the decision that had been forming quietly at my edges since I opened my eyes this morning shift into something sharper.
Something with teeth.
What is it about the Blood Moon Alpha that Cael doesn't want me to know?
And more importantly
Why does he think he still gets to decide what I find out?