Chapter 5 The Alpha Hunts
POV: Ragnar Voss
Five years. I had counted every single one of them. Not in calendars or seasons but in miles. Roads I had covered looking for her. Territories I had crossed, favours I had called in, scouts I had sent out and watched return empty-handed.
Five years of waking up every morning with the mate bond sitting in my chest like a splinter I could not reach, proof that she was alive, proof that she was somewhere, proof that she had not ended what was between us even after everything I had done to deserve it.
I told myself the anger would fade. It didn't. I told myself the guilt would either break me or harden into something I could function under. It hardened. What I had not told myself , what I had never once allowed myself to consider, was this: she was pregnant when she left.
I stood at the head of the Ironfang table and looked at my scout and felt the ground shift under everything I thought I understood about the last five years.
"Say it again," I said quietly.
Dex, my best tracker, held my gaze. He had been with me twelve years and was one of the very few men alive who could look me in the eye when I was on the edge. "A boy. Five years old. She's been riding with a human outlaw club. Southwest territory. The child's aura is unlike anything I've come across."
To my left, my second Brone let out a slow breath. "An heir."
The word landed like a stone into deep water. My heir. Raised among humans. Hidden from his pack. Hidden from me. Five years of his life already gone — years I would never get back, years during which my son had grown up not knowing what he was or where he came from or that there was an entire pack that would have laid the world flat for him.
I put both hands on the table. The wood cracked under my grip. Nobody spoke.
At the far end of the table, Elder Croft leaned forward. "If the child is what the scout believes.."
"He's mine," I said. The certainty in my voice left no room for argument. I had done the arithmetic the moment Dex said five years old.
"Then she hid him," Croft said. "She took your heir and disappeared. Whatever you owe her for the night she left, Ragnar, you must weigh it agains"
"I know what I owe her." The particular quiet of something that has been contained for a long time under a great deal of pressure. I looked at Dex. "Get the Black Howl ready. We leave tonight."
Brone leaned forward. "If we roll in heavy, she'll run."
"She'll try."
"And the boy?"
I lifted my hands from the broken table and straightened. "He's coming home. Both of them are."
──────────
I had built the Black Howl MC in the first year after she left. Not for soft reasons. I built it because the Ironfang pack needed a public face that could operate in human territories without drawing attention, and because I needed something to do with the fury that lived in me or it would eventually burn everything I had left to the ground.
Twelve riders, all wolves, all loyal, all fast. We moved out at midnight under a sky full of cold stars, following the trail Dex had marked on the way back.
She had chosen well. Hiding in plain sight among humans who would not feel what she was, in territory that no pack claimed, with a son whose aura she had apparently managed to keep contained. My wolf was not calm about any of this. He wanted her back with a single-mindedness that had not dimmed across five years. But now there was something else layered under it, colder and more focused.
She had kept my son from me. Whatever I had done, whatever I owed her for the way that night had gone, she had decided to take my child and disappear. I turned that fact over and over in my mind across every mile of desert road and it did not get smaller with the turning.
By the third day, scouts had confirmed her location. A small desert town. A human club called Rourke's, known for keeping to themselves and not asking questions about strangers who drifted in.
"She's spooked," one scout told me over the phone. "She's watching the roads."
"Good," I said. "Let her watch."
Brone raised an eyebrow when I ended the call. "You want her scared?"
"I want her to understand that running again is not an option. There's a difference."
I gave her two more days. Maybe because I was not ready for the moment when I would have to stand in front of her and find words for five years of everything. Maybe because I needed to be certain, absolutely certain, that when I looked at the boy I would not fall apart in front of my own pack.
I spent those two days watching the roads with my own eyes.
I saw her once from a distance. Riding the Ironfang bike down a long straight desert road in the early morning, hair loose, jacket open at the collar, moving like someone who had made peace with speed. She looked nothing like the woman in the white dress who had walked into my room and walked back out with everything in pieces.
She looked dangerous.
My wolf said, very quietly: There she is.
I pulled back before she could feel me watching. That night I rode into town alone and parked outside the human clubhouse and leaned against the bike and waited, because I knew her well enough to know she would come back before morning. She would not leave the boy overnight. Not now that she knew someone was close.
I heard the engine before I saw the headlight.
She came around the far bend doing sixty, and I watched the moment she saw me. The bike slowed. Not panicked. She was still the best rider I had ever seen, and five years had not changed that.
She stopped twenty feet away. Neither of us moved. The engine ticked as it cooled.
Her eyes found mine across the dark. Fear first. Then something that was not quite anger and not quite grief but lived in the same neighbourhood as both.
I had rehearsed words. I had none of them now.
What came out was quiet and entirely unplanned.
"I'm sorry," I said. "For all of it."
She did not respond. She sat on the bike that had once been mine, on the edge of a life I had never known she had built, and she looked at me like a woman deciding how many walls to keep standing.
Then she turned the bike and rode toward the clubhouse without a word.
I followed. Because I had not come this far to stop at the door.