Bound to the Alpha's Enemy

Mia didn’t believe in monsters. She still doesn’t, not really. She just believes in whatever that thing in the woods was, which isn’t the same thing, she tells herself.

She’d cut through Ashwood Trail a hundred times. Behind the chapel, past the creek, fifteen minutes shaved off her walk home. Free real estate. Tonight the trees felt wrong though. Too quiet. Even the crickets had shut up.

She heard the growl before she saw anything. Low. Close. Close enough she felt it more than heard it, like a subwoofer under her sneakers.

She stopped walking. Her brain said run, her legs said absolutely not.

Then the eyes. Gold. Not headlight-gold, not reflective-gold, actual glowing gold, watching her from somewhere in the dark.

“I don’t — I don’t want trouble,” she said, and her voice came out smaller than she meant it to.

Nothing moved. It just looked at her, head tilted a little, weighing her.

A branch cracked behind her and she spun around — dumb move, she knew it was dumb the second she did it — and when she turned back the thing was just gone. Not ran-away gone. Gone like it had never been standing there.

She ran the rest of the way home. Locked the door, then locked it again for no reason, then shoved a kitchen chair under the handle because apparently that’s a thing she does now.

Big dog, she told herself. Somebody’s big, weird dog.

That story lasted about two days. Until the mark showed up on her wrist — a thin silver crescent, cool under her thumb, doing something uncomfortably close to a pulse. She scrubbed it in the shower until her skin was raw. Still there.

Then the feelings started. Not hers. A flash of anger out of nowhere while she stood in line at the pharmacy. A hunger at 3 a.m. that had nothing to do with food. Once, walking to class, grief hit her so hard she went down on one knee on the sidewalk. A stranger asked if she was okay. She had no idea how to explain that it wasn’t even her sadness.

Three hundred miles away, a guy named Kian felt it too, the second it happened. He hadn’t meant to mark her. He’d meant to scare her off before someone worse found her first.

Too late for that now.

Kian hadn’t slept. Two nights, maybe closer to three, he’d lost count somewhere in there.

Every time he shut his eyes he saw her — hair in her face, fear coming off her in waves he could actually taste, copper and static. He’d felt that fear like it was his, because now, technically, it kind of was.

“You marked a human.” Dax said it slow, the way you’d explain something to someone who clearly hadn’t thought it through. “Untrained. Unclaimed. You get what that means right now, of all times?”

Kian got it. That was the annoying part.

Ashwood was at war, sort of — not tanks-and-flags war, the slow kind. Wolves vanishing off patrol. Fences cut in places nobody could prove. Voss wanted the land and wasn’t picky how they got it. A bonded mate, unprotected and human, was basically a hostage with a bow on it.

“I didn’t choose this,” Kian said. “The bond doesn’t send a form to sign.”

“No. But you’re the one cleaning it up.”

He put his hand flat against his chest, where the bond sat now like a second, off-rhythm heartbeat. Faint, but there. Confused. Scared. Somewhere he couldn’t picture yet.

“Bring her here,” he said, before Dax could argue him out of it.Mia woke up somewhere that was definitely not her apartment.

Pale wood walls. Windows way too tall for a normal house. That specific pine smell, the real kind, not the car-freshener kind. For a second she thought, okay, dream, fine, weird dream. Then she remembered the men outside her door — three of them, too calm, like they already knew which apartment was hers.

She sat up too fast. The room did a slow tilt.

“Easy.” A voice from the doorway.

She turned and there he was. The eyes from the woods, gold even now, even human-shaped. Tall, dark hair, standing so still it was somehow worse than if he’d been pacing.

“Who are you.” Not even really a question at that point.

“Kian Ashworth.” Said like it should mean something. When her face stayed blank, something in his shifted. “You really don’t know.”

“Know what?”

“What you are to me now.” He nodded at her wrist, at the mark glowing faint under her sleeve. “You’re bonded. To me. Wasn’t on purpose. Doesn’t matter, it’s done. Until we know if it can even be undone, you’re safer here than anywhere else.”

She laughed, short, not really a laugh. “I don’t know you. I don’t want to be bonded to some guy I met in the woods. I want to go home.”

“Can’t. Not yet.” He looked away, the muscle in his cheek tightening. “People would use you to get to me. Not happening.”

“So I’m a prisoner.”

“You’re protected.” A pause, too long. “Has to be enough for The pack house was the kind of beautiful that made Mia nervous — old wood, stone, the sense that a lot had happened inside these walls and none of it was boring.

She stayed in her room the first two days out of pure stubbornness, skipping meals until hunger beat pride. That’s how she ended up in the kitchen at 2 a.m., raiding the pantry like a raccoon, and that’s how she found the photo.

It had slipped down behind a drawer. Curled edges. A family — mom, dad, a little girl maybe six — standing in front of a house Mia recognized so fast it knocked the air out of her.

Her house. The one that burned down when she was six. The one her aunt never once talked about in thirteen years.

“Where’d you get this.” Kian, behind her, voice tighter than she’d heard it.

“It fell out of a drawer. That’s — that’s my house. My family.” Her hands were shaking. “Why do you have a picture of my family?”

His face did something complicated. Grief and guilt, tangled so tight she couldn’t tell where one started.

“Ashwood was different back then,” he said, quiet. “My father was Alpha. There was a raid, a human settlement too close to pack land, wolves that didn’t stop when they should’ve. Your family’s house was one of the ones that burned.”

The room got cold fast.

“You knew,” she whispered. “This whole time. You knew what your pack did and you brought me here anyway.”

“I was twelve. I pulled a six-year-old out of a burning house because my father’s wolves wouldn’t listen.” His voice cracked, just barely. “I’ve spent thirteen years trying to fix what he broke. I didn’t know it was you, Mia. Not until the bond hit and I saw your face and it all lined up.”

Neither of them slept much that night. She lay awake, the weight of the past heavy between them, and nothing about it added up to anything she could stand.