The Alpha Who Hunted Me First

The wine in Wren's sleeve was warm from her own skin, which was a problem. Wolfsbane worked best cold. She'd have maybe four seconds after it hit the goblet before the smell started to climb, and by then it needed to already be in his hand.

She kept her eyes down and her tray steady and walked the long way around the hall, past the fire pits and the trestle tables loaded with roast boar and the pack elders arguing about grain tithes like the world hadn't ended for someone in this room fifteen years ago.

Nobody looked twice at a healer's apprentice. That was the whole point of being one.

"You're new," said a woman refilling cups two tables over. Older, kind eyes, an apron stained the same rust brown as Wren's. "Marta's girl?"

"Cousin," Wren said, which was the story Iris had drilled into her for three months straight until it came out of her mouth without a single hitch. "From the coast. She wrote asking for help with the harvest fever."

"Mm. We could use the extra hands. You picked a bad night for your first one, though." The woman nodded toward the head table. "Full moon gathering. Every wolf in three territories under one roof. Gets loud."

"I noticed."

She had noticed. She'd counted forty-three wolves by the time she crossed the threshold, more since, and every single one of them could probably scent a lie at twenty paces if they were paying attention. They weren't. That was the gift of a room this crowded and this drunk on mead and pack pride. Attention was the one resource nobody spent on the girl carrying the tray.

Wren kept moving.

The head table sat on a raised dais at the far end of the hall, and that was where she needed to be, because that was where the Alpha of the Ashbourne pack was laughing at something his Beta had said, head tipped back, throat exposed in a way no cautious man would ever allow in a room full of strangers.

She had a name for him that wasn't his name. Iris had never let her use it. Say Alpha, she'd told Wren, over and over, in the cellar where they trained. Say Alpha and nothing else. Don't give him a name in your head. Names make people human, and he doesn't get to be human to you.

Wren had agreed with that logic for fifteen years.

She climbed the two shallow steps to the dais with her tray of drinks, murmured an apology to a lord she nearly bumped, and reached the end of the table where three empty cups sat waiting for a servant's attention. Her own cup, the one tucked against her hip, had gone from warm to cold. Good. The wolfsbane would hold its bite a little longer now.

One cup for the Beta. One for the visiting lord from the river packs. One for the Alpha, and this was the one that mattered, this was the one she'd cross an ocean and bury a childhood for.

She poured.

Her hand was steady. She'd practiced pouring liquid into a cup a thousand times blindfolded, underwater, with Iris screaming numbers at her to break her focus. Her hand did not shake now, in a hall full of werewolves, because her hand had forgotten how to be afraid a long time ago.

It was her wolf that moved first.

Not her hand. Not her mind. The animal under her skin, the part of her that had been quiet and obedient and perfectly leashed for fifteen years, suddenly reared up inside her chest like something had grabbed it by the scruff, and Wren looked up before she meant to, straight into the Alpha's eyes.

He was already looking at her.

The room didn't go quiet. Nobody else noticed anything happen at all. But for Wren the entire hall tilted sideways, sound rushing away from her like water pulled out before a wave, and every hair on her arms lifted at once. Her wolf pressed so hard against the inside of her ribs it hurt, and it wasn't fear driving it forward, it was recognition, blind animal joy, the kind of feeling she had never once let herself have in her whole guarded life.

Mate, something in her whispered, and Wren's whole plan came apart in her hands.

The Alpha's smile faltered. He set down the ale he'd been holding without looking at it, gaze locked on her, nostrils flaring once, twice, like he was trying to place a scent he already knew and couldn't quite believe.

Wren's fingers were still wrapped around the poisoned cup.

She had one heartbeat, maybe two, to decide. Every hour of training told her to finish the pour, set the cup down, walk away, let the wolfsbane do what it was bred to do. Fifteen years of Iris's voice in her skull, fifteen years of a burned pack and a dead mother and a promise made over ash. She had never once in all that time imagined a version of this night where her own body would betray the plan before her mind could.

She set the cup down. Not in front of him. Beside him, angled wrong, a servant's careless mistake, and she picked up the tray to leave before he could reach for it.

His hand closed around her wrist instead.

It happened too fast for the room to register as anything but an Alpha catching a clumsy girl before she dropped her tray, and that was exactly how it would look to everyone watching, except Wren felt the truth of it in her bones. He wasn't steadying her. He was holding on.

"You poured that wrong on purpose," he said, low, only for her.

His voice did something to her chest that she refused to name.

"I didn't mean to spill anything, my lord."

"That's not what I said." His thumb pressed once against the inside of her wrist, right over the pulse point, and Wren's traitor heart slammed against her ribs hard enough that she was certain he could hear it. "You picked that cup up like you'd rather set it down than hand it to me. Why."

"I don't know what you mean."

"I think you do." He hadn't raised his voice. He hadn't so much as shifted in his seat, and to anyone glancing over it would look like nothing at all, an Alpha exchanging a few idle words with a serving girl. But his grip on her wrist hadn't loosened, and his eyes hadn't left her face, and underneath the table she could feel the tension coiling through his whole body like a wolf gathering itself before a lunge. "You smell like fear and lavender oil and something underneath both of those that I have never smelled on a healer's apprentice in my life."

Wren's mouth went dry. Lavender oil covered most scents. It didn't cover all of them. It certainly didn't cover the raw bite of wolfsbane soaked into the hem of her sleeve, close enough now that if he really looked, if he really pulled that thread, he'd have her.

"I should get back to the kitchens," she said. "Marta will need help with the desserts."

"Marta doesn't have a cousin." He said it so quietly, so evenly, that it took Wren a full second to understand what he'd just told her. "I grew up in this pack. I know every family in it by name and blood going back three generations. There is no cousin from the coast."

Her stomach dropped through the floor.

"My lord-"

"Kian," he said. "Not lord. Kian." And then, softer, almost to himself, like the word had surprised him on its way out: "Say my name back to me."

She didn't. Couldn't. Every instinct she had was screaming at her to run, to fight, to do anything except stand frozen in front of an Alpha who had just caught her in a lie with his hand still wrapped around her wrist like he had no intention of ever letting go.

His grip tightened, not painfully, but with a purpose that left no room for argument.

"You're going to walk with me," he said, rising from his seat, pulling her up with him in one smooth motion that looked, to the rest of the hall, like a lord escorting a nervous servant girl somewhere quiet to apologize for startling her. "We're going to have a conversation, you and I. Somewhere private."

"I haven't done anything wrong."

"You poured wolfsbane into my cup." His voice dropped even lower, a growl underneath the words now, barely leashed. "I can smell it on your sleeve from here. So we're going to walk out of this hall together, and you're going to tell me exactly who sent you to kill me, and you're going to do it before anyone else in this room notices what I already know."

Wren's whole body went cold.

"And if I don't?"

Kian's eyes, gold-brown and terrifyingly steady, held hers for one long moment.

"Then I suppose," he said, "we'll find out what happens to an assassin caught in an Alpha's own hall. But I don't think that's what's going to happen tonight. I think something a lot stranger already has."

He pulled her toward the side door, past the Beta's sharp, narrowed glance, past a hundred wolves too drunk on moonlight and mead to notice the girl being led away had just tried to end their Alpha's life. Wren's tray clattered to the floor behind her, forgotten, and the last thing she heard before the door shut behind them was the sound of the celebration rolling on without her, as if nothing at all had happened.

Nothing had, to them.

Everything had, to her.