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Home / Werewolf / CHOSEN BY ALPHA / Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

All Chapters of CHOSEN BY ALPHA: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

24 Chapters

CHAPTER 1

POV: NORA ASHThe white dress was not supposed to get dirty tonight.I had spent three months saving up for it. Sixty-two dollars from the dinner tips I stuffed into a cracked mug behind my bed. The dress was simple ,cotton, lace at the collar and a little too big on my waist because I kept forgetting to eat. But it was mine, and tonight of all nights, it had to be perfect.Tonight is the Moon Ceremony.Every wolf in the Silver Creek Pack had dressed up and gathered at the Stone Clearing to honor the full moon. Couples danced,alphas gave speeches,and real, confirmed mates pressed their palms together under the moonlight and let the bond glow gold between their fingers.Damon had promised me we would be one of those couples this year.I walked fast through the pine trees, my heels clicking on the dirt path. The music was already playing. It was of drums and strings. Laughter floating above the treetops like smoke. I was late because my cousin Sienna had borrowed my only mirror and taken

Chapter 2

POV: NORA ASHMy grandmother used to say that a wolf will always know when you are afraid."Fear smells like blood to them," she told me once, stirring her tea. "And blood smells like a meal."Standing barefoot in the dark with a wolf the size of a small car staring at me, I understood exactly what she meant.I was terrified. My legs were shaking so hard I could feel the tremors moving up into my stomach. But I did not run. Something deep in my chest ,some quiet, stubborn little thing that had survived three years of people calling me ghost-blooded ,told me that running would be the last thing I ever did.So I stood still. Arms at my sides. Chin up. Like I had any right to be on this side of the border.The black wolf watched me. Its pale eyes moved across my face, down my body, back up. It was not the look of a predator sizing up prey. It was something else. Something careful,like it was trying to figure out what I was.I had been asking myself the same question for twenty-two years.

Chapter 3

POV: NORA ASHI woke up to the smell of coffee…..And for three seconds, lying on that hard cabin cot with a folded blanket under my head, I forgot everything. I forgot the Moon Ceremony. I forgot Damon's hand flat against the bark. I forgot the way Sienna's fingers had curled into his shirt like she owned him. I forgot that I had run barefoot across a border in my nightclothes and fallen asleep in a stranger's cabin.Then I opened my eyes and saw the wooden ceiling, and all of it came back.I sat up slowly. My feet ached. The gauze had held through the night, and the cuts were already less angry-looking ,I had always healed fast, one of the only wolf-like things my body did without a wolf to explain it.Cole Vance stood at a small stove in the corner of the cabin. He was wearing a black shirt and the same dark trousers from the night before. His back was turned to me as he poured coffee into a single mug and he did it the way he seemed to do everything ,with no wasted movement and no

Chapter 4

POV: NORA ASHCreston smelled like rain and burned motor oil and something sweet underneath it all ,sugar, maybe, from the bakery that sat on the corner across from the bus terminal.I stepped off the bus with forty dollars, no shoes, and a dead phone I had charged for twelve minutes at the Harlow bus station off a stranger's portable charger. The woman who lent it to me had looked at my feet and pressed a granola bar into my hand without being asked. I almost cried.Fifth and Crane was seven blocks from the terminal. I counted them, as I kept walking carefully over the wet pavement, keeping to the edges of the sidewalk where the concrete was least cold. People moved around me in thick coats and noise. Nobody looked at my bare feet. This was Creston. People had seen stranger things.The diner sat on the corner between a laundromat and a bookshop that looked like it had not opened since before I was born. The sign above the door read MAE'S in red letters, the paint slightly chipped at

Chapter 5

POV: NORA ASHThirty-one days.That was how long it took for Creston to start feeling like mine.Not home ,I was careful with that word now, just the same way you were careful with a bruise. Mae's diner smelled different at 5 AM than at 5 PM ,it was quieter, older, like the building was resting. The sound the sticky window made when you yanked it open, always on the third try and with your whole arm.I knew the regulars by name. Freddie, who came in at 7 am sharp every morning and ordered black coffee and said "same as yesterday" even though Mae never wrote it down and never forgot. Old Pat, who ate dinner alone every Tuesday and always left a five-dollar tip on a four-dollar order and never made eye contact. The college girl, Bria, who studied at the corner table on Thursdays and always ordered something with extra cheese and always looked like she had not slept.I liked them…everyone of them. I liked that they came in and ate and left, and that for the forty minutes they sat in the

Chapter 6

CHAPTER SIXPOV: COLE VANCEHe should not have gone to the diner.Cole knew this the moment he pulled out of Mae's parking lot, the truck pointed back toward Black Ridge, the forty dollars she had handed him sitting on the passenger seat like an accusation.He came to Creston once a month. He sat with Mae for twenty minutes. He ate whatever she put in front of him, because refusing food from Mae was something his father had taught him not to do and it was one of the few lessons he had kept. Then he drove home.He had been there for sixty-seven minutes today.He was aware of every single one of them.Cole drove with one hand loose on the wheel and the other pressed flat against his thigh, a habit he had when something was working itself out in the back of his head. The forest road wound away from the city lights and into the dark between the pines, and the truck's headlights cut two pale channels through it, and there was nothing to look at but trees and road and the thing he was tryin

Chapter 7

POV: Nora AshThe napkin is still on the counter when I pick it up.It was Small,white and folded once, like whoever left it wanted it to look like nothing. The number is written in careful, unhurried handwriting.Someone who had time. Someone who was not afraid of being seen. And underneath the number, one word pressed into the paper in the same steady hand:Soon.I did not move as i stood behind Mae's counter with the napkin between two fingers and I let the word sit in my chest the way cold water sits spreading slowly, finding every corner. The diner is almost empty now. Freddie's stool is vacant. The grill is quiet. Outside, through the fogged glass, Creston's evening traffic moves past in yellow headlights, indifferent and ordinary, and nothing about the street tells me which direction the word came from.I turned the napkin over with nothing on the back.My hands are still steady. That is the part that surprises me twice in one night.Mae appears in the kitchen doorway with a dis

Chapter 8

POV: Nora AshCole's message is two words and it is the most frightening thing I have read all night.Not because of what it says but because of what it means. It means he already knows someone is outside this door. It means he has been watching this street, or someone has been watching it for him, and neither of those options is the kind of thing that lets you breathe easy. I pressed my back against the counter in the dark and I did not move and I looked at Mae's silhouette three feet away, and she was standing the way a person stands when they have done this before , weight low, perfectly still, not a single wasted muscle.The street light through the fogged glass throws the silhouette in orange.It still has not moved.I typed back with one thumb, slowly, so the screen light stays low“Who is it”It was not a question. I did not have the patience for a question mark right now.His reply took four seconds which was a long time when someone is standing on the other side of a locked do

Chapter 9

POV: Nora Ash…..Until something in my chest locked up tight, like a fist closing around my lungs. Cole already moved the phone back to his ear, two steps toward the back door with his whole body shifting into that mode I have seen once before, the night he found me bleeding in his forest. He was deliberate and every inch of him pointed at the problem.Mae stood off her stool before I could speak."Black Ridge. Your pack."He stopped,turned and looked at me over his shoulder with those pale silver eyes, and what is in them is not panic. It was one with calculation,the kind that happens fast and lands clean."Jared has it." "Six wolves, Cole…" It wasn't a question,although it sounded like one …I instead just wanted to be sure of the significance of having six wolves on the territory. "Jared has sixty-three wolves" he responded while moving his eyes in a calculative manner as though he was trying to prove the number with his eyes.He stepped outside to finish the call and the back doo

Chapter 10

POV: Nora AshI did not sleep.I lied on the narrow bed with my eyes on the ceiling and my father's number glowing on my phone screen and those words sitting in my chest like something swallowed wrong. She was here before you were born. I read the message eleven times. I know because I counted them, the way I counted the seconds watching Damon kissed my cousin ,one, two, three — like if I looked long enough the thing in front of me will rearrange itself into something that makes sense.But it did not .Someone used my father's phone to send that message. Either he is sitting somewhere with a stranger reading over his shoulder, or his phone is in a hand that is not his, and both of those possibilities opened a hole in my stomach that I cannot close by staring at the ceiling.I tried calling him again at midnight. Voicemail.At twelve thirty. Voicemail. The recorded version of his voice is so ordinary that it made the fear worse ,measured like the voice of a man who has spent thirty

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