Le Serment du Loup Alpha
The wolf had been watching her for three nights before Elira finally admitted it wasn't a dream.
White against the dark pines at the treeline, still enough that she'd almost convinced herself it was a trick of moonlight on old snow. But snow doesn't turn its head to track her the entire length of the garden wall, from the broken sundial to the gate no one in the house would admit to having locked.
Tonight it was closer.
Elira grew up on her grandmother's stories about the wolves in the old wood - stories meant to keep children away from the tree line after dark, full of teeth and treaties and men who weren't men once the moon rose high enough. She never quite believed them. Until now.
When she whispers, "You're not going to eat me," the wolf's ears shift at the sound of her voice. That alone should have frightened her more than it did.
A branch cracks behind the wolf, and it turns its head sharply - quick, assessing, almost apologetic - and in that single motion Elira understands with a certainty she can't explain that the wolf hadn't come alone, and hadn't come for her.
"Is someone hunting you?"
The wolf holds her gaze a moment longer than seemed natural, then vanishes into the trees. Not fleeing. Choosing to leave.
But when her aunt Sabine finds her at the wall an hour later and says, "There are no wolves this close to the house. Not anymore," something moves behind her aunt's eyes - too fast to name, gone before Elira could be certain she'd seen it at all.
"Not anymore." So there used to be.
In a house full of locked gates, whispered warnings, and a garden that watches back, Elira must uncover why the white wolf chose her - and what her family has been hiding since
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