After Three Alphas Tried to Claim Me

He sat down across from me without asking.

No hesitation, no pretense of courtesy. Just the scrape of the chair and then Lucas Gibson filling the space on the other side of the table like he owned it — like he owned everything within a ten-foot radius and was still deciding whether to expand that claim.

I did not look up from my contract pages.

"Alayna Riley." His voice was low. Not a greeting. A confirmation, like he was checking something off a list.

"Alpha Gibson." I turned a page. "I don't recall scheduling a meeting."

"You didn't." He leaned back in his chair, but there was nothing relaxed about it. His eyes were moving over me the way they had from the doorway — that slow, searching sweep of a wolf trying to locate something it had already half-identified. "I'm making one."

I let the silence sit for a moment. Then I picked up my coffee and drank.

He named a number.

Triple my standard rate. He said it the way men like him said everything — flat, declarative, already assuming the outcome. Exclusive placeholder rights. No other bookings. No other Alphas. Just him.

I set my cup down.

"No."

Something shifted in his jaw. "I haven't finished."

"You have." I looked back at my pages. "Exclusivity isn't available. It's not a pricing issue."

The temperature at the table changed. I felt it before I heard it — that particular pressure drop that preceded Alpha tone, the way the air thickens right before a storm breaks. When he spoke again, his voice had dropped into that register. Low. Grinding. The kind of sound that was designed to reach past the conscious mind and press directly on the instinct that said: obey.

"You belong to me."

Three words. The same register he had used on a seventeen-year-old girl who had nowhere to run.

I looked up.

I held his eyes and I did not flinch. I did not blink. I let the silence stretch until he could feel it, and then I reached into the folder beside my coffee cup, pulled out a rate card, and slid it across the table toward him.

"Exclusivity is not available at any price." I kept my voice so quiet he had to lean in to hear it. The irony of that — Lucas Gibson leaning toward me — was not lost on me. "Review the standard contract. The terms are not negotiable."

He looked at the card. Then he looked at me.

His hand closed around it.

He didn't leave immediately. He sat there for another moment, and I could feel his wolf working — that restless, frustrated energy of an animal that had been told no and did not have a framework for processing it. His nostrils flared once. The cotton candy and vanilla scent was doing exactly what I needed it to do: keeping his wolf engaged, keeping the question alive, making the no feel like a door that was closed but not locked.

Finally he stood. He didn't say anything else. He just took the rate card and walked out.

I watched his reflection in the café window as he crossed the parking lot. A dark SUV was idling at the curb. The passenger window was down, and I could see the outline of a man inside — his Beta, I assumed, from the set of his shoulders. Lucas got in. The Beta's head turned toward him, and I watched Lucas's hand move to his jacket pocket, pressing the rate card flat against his chest.

The Beta said nothing.

I turned back to my contract pages and finished my coffee.

---

My apartment was quiet when I got home.

I set my bag by the door. Removed my earrings. Filled a glass of water and stood at the kitchen counter drinking it in the dark, because I didn't feel like turning on the lights yet.

The Alpha tone had been fine. I had handled it. I had handled it perfectly.

I told myself that while I rinsed the glass and set it in the rack.

I told myself that while I walked to the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed.

And then it came anyway — the way it always came, not as a memory but as a physical fact, my body deciding without my permission that we were going back there whether I wanted to or not.

The dress was pale blue. I had saved three months for it. I remember standing in front of the mirror in the pack house bathroom thinking that maybe, if I looked right enough, if I smelled right enough — I had read somewhere that scent mattered to wolves, so I had bought the cheapest body spray I could find, cotton candy and vanilla, and I had used too much of it because I didn't know yet that you could use too much — maybe tonight would be the night my wolf came.

The Come of Age platform was lit with ceremonial torches. The whole tri-pack was there. Hundreds of wolves, all of them watching, all of them waiting to see who would awaken and who wouldn't.

I stood at the edge of the platform and I prayed.

Chase Weaver's voice carried from somewhere to my left, easy and loud, pitched for the crowd the way his voice always was. "Someone tell the omega her wolf isn't coming."

The laughter hit like a wave. I remember the specific quality of it — not mean, exactly, just careless. The laughter of people who had already decided I wasn't worth the effort of cruelty.

Then Lucas's hand was on the back of my neck.

The ice trough was part of the ceremony — meant for the newly awakened, a ritual cooling after the heat of the shift. He shoved my face into it anyway. Both hands. The cold was absolute. I couldn't breathe. I could hear the crowd and I couldn't breathe and the ice was in my nose and my mouth and I was scrabbling at the edge of the trough with both hands and no one stopped him.

When he finally let go I came up gasping, and I turned — I don't know why I turned, some stupid, animal hope — and I found Bryce.

He was already looking away.

Not disgusted. Not amused. Just — done. His eyes had moved on to something more interesting, and his expression was the expression of a man who had briefly noticed a piece of furniture and then forgotten it. I was not worth the energy of a reaction. I was not worth the two seconds it would have taken to say stop.

The crowd chanted. Omega. Omega. Omega.

I pressed my thumbnail into the inside of my wrist.

Hard. Harder. The sharp edge of the nail biting into skin, the small bright point of pain that was here, now, real — not there, not then, not her.

I breathed.

The apartment came back in pieces. The dark ceiling. The glass in the rack. The three printed schedules on the kitchen table, each one with a name at the top.

I breathed again.

I had not cried in five years. I was not going to start tonight.

I pressed my thumbnail in one more time, held it, released.

Then I got up, turned on the kitchen light, and picked up my pen.

Lucas Gibson: Alpha tone deployed at first solo contact. Wolf recognition confirmed — scent response consistent with Bryce and Chase. Rate card retained. Possessive fixation escalating ahead of projected timeline.

I wrote in small, precise letters.

The apartment was very still.

I kept writing.