Blood Right

The challenge came at dusk.

They always do. Something about the dying light that makes cowards feel brave.

I stood in the clearing behind the main lodge, stripped to my undershirt, arms loose at my sides. Thirty wolves formed a circle around us, my pack, watching their Alpha face another test. Third one this month. The Council's been busy.

Brennan circled to my left. Big wolf, all muscle and snarl, my father's former enforcer. He'd been with Thornwood thirty years. Watched me grow up. Taught me to throw my first punch.

Now he wanted my throat.

"Step down, Kira." His voice carried across the clearing. "The pack needs strength. Real strength. Not whatever you think you're proving."

I tracked his movement without turning my head. "You want to lead, Brennan? Take it from me."

"The Council..."

"The Council can send their opinions directly to my teeth." I shifted my weight forward. "You came here to fight or to talk?"

He lunged.

Fast for his size. I'd trained him to be fast. But I'd also watched him fight for fifteen years, knew every tell, every habit. His right shoulder dropped before a charge. Always had.

I sidestepped, drove my elbow into his kidney as he passed. He stumbled. Turned. Came again.

This time I met him head-on.

The impact jarred through my bones. We grappled, claws out, neither of us shifting fully, this was dominance, not death. Though the line blurred more often these days.

Blood in my mouth. His. Mine. Both.

He got a hand on my throat. Squeezed.

My wolf surged against my skin, demanding release. Not yet. Not yet.

I let him think he had me. Let the pressure build until spots danced at the edges of my vision. His grip loosened a fraction, just enough satisfaction, just enough certainty.

I brought my knee up between his legs. When he doubled, I slammed my forehead into his nose. Cartilage crunched. He dropped.

I followed him down, knee on his spine, hand fisting in his hair to yank his head back.

"Yield." Not a question.

He struggled. I pressed harder.

"Yield, Brennan."

The fight went out of him all at once. "I yield."

I held him there another three seconds. Let the pack see. Let them remember. Then I stood, stepped back, and offered him my hand.

He took it.

That's the part they don't tell you about being Alpha. The challenge isn't the fight. It's what comes after. Do you grind your enemy into the dirt, prove you're exactly the monster they claim? Or do you help them up and pretend you don't see the hate still burning in their eyes?

I chose the latter. Predictable as sunrise.

It was starting to feel like a mistake.

The pack dispersed slowly. Some met my eyes, Elena, my youngest enforcer, practically glowing with pride. Marcus, my Second, watching from the porch with arms crossed and something careful behind his eyes. Others looked away too fast, guilty or resentful or both.

Brennan limped toward the lodge without a backward glance. He'd challenge again. Or someone would challenge for him. The Council's war of attrition, death by a thousand cuts.

I wiped blood from my split lip and headed for the stream to wash.

The water ran cold this late in autumn, carrying the first bitter promise of winter. I crouched at the bank and splashed my face, watched the pink swirl away downstream. My knuckles were raw. My ribs ached where Brennan had landed a solid hit I'd never let him see.

Small prices.

"You could have broken his arm."

I didn't turn. Marcus's footsteps were distinctive, measured, deliberate, the walk of a wolf who'd learned young that sudden movements get you killed.

"I could have done a lot of things."

"Would've sent a message."

"I sent a message." I stood, shook water from my hands. "I'm still standing. He's not."

Marcus came to stand beside me, staring at the water. Forty years old, grey threading through his dark hair, scars crossing both forearms from a fight he never talked about. He'd been my father's Second. Now he was mine.

Some days I wondered if that was choice or inertia.

"The Council sent a response to your last letter." He pulled a folded paper from his jacket. "Delivered this afternoon, while you were training."

"Let me guess. More demands for my resignation? A lovely summary of my inadequacies? Perhaps some threats dressed up in formal language?"

"Something like that." He didn't smile. "They've officially declared your leadership illegitimate."

I took the letter. Read it in the fading light, words swimming through the usual diplomatic sewage. The Alpha Council hereby declares... failure to maintain traditional standards... for the stability of the territory... immediate abdication recommended...

"Recommended." I laughed. It came out sharp. "They're getting bold."

"They've been bold since your father died."

Since they killed him, I didn't say. We both knew. Everyone knew. No one could prove it.

My father had named me heir three days before his Beta tore out his throat in a challenge that came too convenient, too coordinated, too clean. The Beta died a week later, hunting accident. The Council expressed their regrets and suggested the pack select new leadership through traditional means.

Traditional means. Another word for "let the biggest wolf win, and we'll control whoever that is."

I crumpled the letter. "What do they actually want?"

"Your removal. Your head on a pike. Thornwood absorbed into one of their allied packs." Marcus paused. "They're getting desperate, Kira. Three challenges in a month means someone's paying well."

"Brennan was paid?"

"Not directly. But someone's been whispering in ears. Making wolves feel like maybe they've got a chance. Like maybe the She-Alpha isn't as strong as she pretends."

She-Alpha. I hated that title. As if my sex was the first and only thing worth noting. Kira Thornwood, Alpha of the Thornwood Pack, leader of forty-three wolves, daughter of a murdered man and heir to a territory the Council would rather see burned.

But no. She-Alpha. The anomaly. The abomination.

"Let them whisper." I tossed the crumpled paper into the stream, watched it float away. "Let them send challenges. I'll break every wolf they throw at me until they run out of idiots or coin."

"And if they send something else?"

I looked at him then. Really looked. Saw the tension in his shoulders, the way his eyes kept cutting toward the treeline. Marcus wasn't given to nerves.

"What do you know?"

"Rumors." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Nothing solid. But word is the old guard on the Council, Theron's faction, they're tired of proxies. The challenges aren't working. The poison in your food last month didn't work. The ambush in the southern territory didn't work. And there's a deeper circle, wolves who operate outside official channels. They've been pushing for something more... permanent."

"I'm notoriously hard to kill."

"They've noticed." He met my eyes. "The rumor is they've contracted someone. A specialist."

Specialists were the Council's darkest secret. Wolves trained from childhood for one purpose: elimination of threats the Council couldn't handle openly. No pack. No territory. No loyalty except to whoever paid them. I'd heard stories. Everyone had. Monsters in the shape of men, efficient as winter and twice as cold.

"A rumor," I said.

"For now."

I turned back toward the lodge. Dusk had deepened to true dark, stars emerging through gaps in the cloud cover. Somewhere in the trees, an owl called. Normal sounds. A normal night.

Nothing about my life had been normal in eight years.

"Double the patrols." I walked without waiting for him to follow. "Western border especially. If someone's coming, they'll come through the Hollows, less coverage, more natural concealment."

"Already done." Marcus fell into step beside me. "I pulled two wolves from the interior rotation."

"Good." I climbed the porch steps. Stopped at the door. "Marcus."

"Yeah?"

"If I die." The words came out matter-of-fact. They had to. "You take the pack to the Northern Range. Alpha Cole owes me a favor. He'll give you sanctuary while you rebuild."

"Kira..."

"It's not negotiable." I looked back at him over my shoulder. "The pack survives. That's all that matters."

He opened his mouth. Closed it. Nodded once.

I went inside.

The main lodge smelled like wood smoke and venison stew, pack members scattered across the great room in the loose clusters that always formed after a challenge. Conversations dimmed as I passed. I didn't slow down, didn't acknowledge the attention. Straight through to the back hallway, up the stairs, into my private quarters.

The door closed behind me. Lock engaged.

Only then did I let the mask slip.

I pressed my back against the door and slid down until I was sitting on the floor, head in my hands. My ribs screamed. My knuckles throbbed. The split in my lip opened again, fresh blood dripping onto my already ruined shirt.

Three challenges this month. A formal declaration of illegitimacy. And now, maybe, something worse coming.

I was so tired.

Not of fighting. Fighting was easy. Fighting was clean. You knew where you stood in a fight, what the rules were, what victory looked like.

This war the Council waged? This slow grinding erosion of everything I'd built? I didn't know how to win that. Didn't know if I could.

But I'd die trying. That was the only promise I'd made that still mattered.

I hauled myself up. Stripped off the bloody shirt. The bruise across my ribs was spectacular already, deep purple shading to black. Brennan hit harder than I'd given him credit for.

Mirror showed the damage. Split lip. Bruise spreading across my ribs like a dark stain. The scar at my temple from a fight I'd won at fourteen. My mother's face staring back at me, set in my father's stubborn expression.

I looked like hell. Felt worse.

Alpha. For whatever that was worth.

I cleaned up. Bandaged the worst of the damage. Pulled on fresh clothes and made myself go back downstairs to eat with the pack, to show them an Alpha who wasn't bleeding, wasn't afraid, wasn't questioning every decision she'd ever made.

They needed that. They needed to believe in something.

Even if I didn't.

Dinner passed in a blur. Talk and laughter and the forced normalcy that always followed violence. I ate without tasting, responded when spoken to, slipped away as soon as I could without causing comment.

Back in my room, I stood at the window and watched the moon rise over the territory. Thornwood land. My land.

My father's blood was in this soil. My mother's, too, from the illness that took her three years before him. Everything I was had roots here, deep and tangled and impossible to pull free.

The Council wanted me gone. The Council could go to hell.

A knock at my door. Soft, deliberate. Marcus's rhythm.

I opened it to find him standing in the hallway, face grave.

"What now?"

"Messenger just arrived." He held out another letter, this one sealed with the Council's formal crest. "Direct from the High Alpha's office."

I took it. Broke the seal. Read.

The words blurred together at first. Then they snapped into terrible clarity.

"They're sending someone." I looked up at Marcus. "Not a challenge. Not politics. An actual..."

"What does it say?"

I read aloud: "In light of your continued defiance, the Council has authorized extraordinary measures. A resolution specialist has been dispatched. We advise you to set your affairs in order. The matter will be concluded within the week."

Silence.

Marcus's face had gone pale. "They signed it. They actually signed their names to a kill order."

"Arrogance." I folded the letter carefully. "They're so certain I'll die that they want credit for it."

"Kira. This is..."

"I know what it is." I met his eyes. "Find out everything you can about Council specialists. Who they are. How they work. How they've been stopped."

"They haven't been stopped. That's the point. These wolves..."

"Everything has a weakness." I stepped back into my room. "Find mine before they find me."

He wanted to argue. I could see it in every line of his body. But he didn't. He just nodded, turned, and walked away.

I closed the door.

Leaned against it.

And started to plan.