13 The Night My Wolf Howled
+25 Bonus
13 The Night My Wolf Howled
Kieran’s POV
Sleep wouldn’t take me.
It circled, just out of reach, like a mercy it didn’t think I deserved.
I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling beams of the Alpha house, listening to the silence breathe, the old stone settling, distant guards changing shifts, and the faint crackle of torches somewhere down the corridor. Everything was normal.
And my wolf was not.
He paced inside me like a caged thing, nails scraping along my ribs, restless enough to make my skin feel too tight.
I turned onto my side.
Then onto my back again.
Then sat up so fast the mattress creaked beneath me.
“What is it?” I muttered under my breath, fingers digging into my hair. “What do you want?”
My wolf didn’t answer with words. He answered with sensation, an itch in my bones, a pull in my chest, a dread I couldn’t place.
I closed my eyes and tried to breathe through it.
But the bond,
The bond felt wrong.
Not aching the way it ached when Nyra was sad.
Not burning the way it burned when she was near.
This was sharper. Panicked. Like a cord being yanked hard enough to snap.
My stomach dropped.
Then my wolf finally gave me one word, not spoken, but thundered through my blood with absolute certainty.
Mate.
Nyra.
My pulse slammed.
I was on my feet before I fully understood what I was doing, grabbing my shirt, boots, reaching for my
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13 The Night My Wolf Howled
+25 Bonus
cloak,
A knock sounded.
Not the careful knock of a servant.
Not the light tap of a guard.
A heavy, familiar knock that carried authority.
The door opened without waiting for my permission.
My father stepped into my room.
Alpha Ethan Whitewolf filled the doorway like a shadow made flesh. Tall, broad, dressed in dark clothes as if he’d been walking the halls for hours. His eyes were sharp despite the late hour, and his jaw was set like he’d already decided the shape of the world.
I froze for half a breath.
Not because I feared him.
Because every second mattered and he was standing between me and whatever my wolf was screaming.
My hands tightened at my sides. I forced my voice into steadiness.
“Can’t sleep?” I asked, as if I hadn’t been clawing my way out of my own skin.
My father’s gaze swept over me, boots, cloak half in hand, the urgency I couldn’t hide.
He didn’t comment.
He simply nodded once and stepped further into the room, shutting the door behind him with deliberate
calm.
That calm was a warning.
He wasn’t here for small talk.
He crossed to the edge of my bed and sat, shoulders straight, hands resting on his knees like a man who carried war in his spine even when he was indoors.
“Elara sent word,” he said.
My chest tightened.
Elara.
Ronan’s mother.
The name alone was enough to make my wolf bristle.
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13 The Night My Wolf Howled
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“Her son is on his way to Vandwood.”
My heart jolted so hard it felt like it punched my ribs from the inside.
Ronan.
Of course.
Of course he would come now, when everything in my life was already splitting at the seams.
My father watched my face as if he could read every thought I didn’t dare speak.
“You know what this means, right?” he said.
I nodded. My throat was suddenly dry.
“It means he’s coming to challenge you.”
My wolf snarled. Not fear, rage. Ownership. Territory.
But beneath that was something colder.
A truth I’d spent years pushing away.
Ronan had a claim.
A claim the pack could respect if they wanted to.
My father leaned slightly closer, voice lowering.
“You can’t lose to him, Kieran.’
The words weren’t advice.
They were a command.
I swallowed, forcing my breathing slow.
“I won’t,” I said.
My father’s eyes didn’t soften. If anything, they hardened further, like he’d learnt long ago that promises were useless unless backed by blood.
“I wasn’t treated fairly by my father,” he said suddenly.
The confession caught me off guard.
I frowned. “What?”
My father’s gaze drifted somewhere far away, as though he was staring through the walls into an old memory that still had teeth.
“Kaden knew he might not beat me in an Alpha challenge,” he said, voice clipped. “So he settled with
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13 The Night My Wolf Howled
+25 Bonus
Elara.”
My stomach tightened.
He meant it the way every wolf meant it, politics dressed as romance.
“My father realised merging the two packs would secure Vandwood’s future,” he continued. “So he handed the Alpha seat to Kaden. I didn’t get the chance to prove myself.” His jaw flexed. “And the Prima Wolf I knew refused to mate with me. So, I couldn’t marry well enough to sway my father’s decision,”
A sharp silence filled the room.
The words landed heavy.
I’d heard whispers of this, of course. Pack children always heard the things elders thought they’d hidden. But hearing my father speak it out loud, hearing the sting in his voice, made my skin prickle.
“It was all messed up,” he said, and something bitter flickered in his eyes. “But eventually, the seat came to me. As it should have.”
He reached out and gripped my shoulders, fingers firm.
“You have to keep it, Kieran,” he said, voice rougher now. “Ronan is already leading Blackwood. It would be wrong to lose Vandwood to him too. He has an option. You have none.”
My wolf shifted inside me, impatient, furious.
Nyra.
The bond tugged again, sharp, urgent, and my chest squeezed.
I needed to leave.
Now.
But my father wasn’t finished.
“Remember all I taught you,” he said. “Stay strong. Marry well. Win.”
I swallowed back the pressure rising behind my eyes. “Father,”
“No one cares about the weak without power,” he cut in. “An Alpha without a pack is nothing.”
His grip tightened slightly, as if he wanted to press the lesson into my bones.
“I have lived it,” he added quietly. “And I won’t let you live it too.”
My heart caught in my throat because for a heartbeat I saw it, my father not as the Alpha the pack feared, but as a man who had once been stripped down to nothing and built himself back out of rage.
I should have felt sympathy.
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13 The Night My Wolf Howled
+25 Bonus
Instead, all I felt was panic.
Because Nyra,
My wolf paced, frantic.
Mate. Danger.
I forced my voice steady. “If I win the challenge…” I hesitated, then shoved the words out, urgent, messy.” I’ll still have to mate with Beverly, won’t I? Why can’t I just wait for my fated?”
My father’s eyes sharpened instantly.
A long, measuring look.
I felt my stomach drop.
“What if I find my fated mate?” I pushed, desperate to get him to answer so I could end this conversation
and move.
My father studied me like a predator considering whether its prey was lying.
Then he asked the question that nearly stopped my heart.
“Have you?”
Every ounce of me wanted to say yes.
Every ounce of me wanted to scream it. To shove fate in his face. To demand that my father, the pack, the whole damned world accept what the Moon had done.
Nyra is mine. Nyra is my mate. Nyra is,
But my father’s expression told me exactly how that would go.
He wouldn’t see love.
He would see weakness.
He would see scandal.
He would see a threat to the crown.
So I did what cowards did.
I lied.
“Not yet,” I said.
The words tasted like poison.
My father exhaled, satisfied in a way that made my stomach churn.
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13 The Night My Wolf Howled
+25 Bonus
“Good,” he said. “Because if you had, I would’ve told you to reject her.”
My wolf slammed against my ribs like he wanted to tear free.
I clenched my jaw so hard it ached.
“There is no wolf better than Beverly in this pack,” my father continued. “No one can stand beside you as
Luna and lead Vandwood better than her.”
stared at him, pulse pounding, Nyra’s voice echoing in my skull.
Power doesn’t make cowards brave.
My father kept talking, the words like chains.
“Other packs taking over Vandwood is the least of our concerns,” he said. “We still have the King of the Outlands and those who live there to worry about. To keep the barrier strong, you need a strong woman by your side. That is the sacrifice an Alpha makes.”
Sacrifice.
He said it like it was noble.
Like it wasn’t the same word my mother used when she talked about people who died quietly and were forgotten.
My hands curled into fists. “Did you find and reject yours for Mum?”
The question slipped out before I could stop it. 1
My father’s face went still.
His eyes went far away again, distant, hard, as if he’d opened a door inside himself and found something there he didn’t want to look at.
His jaw tightened.
“There are certain things,” he said slowly, “that are left for the future.”
A refusal.
A wound.
I saw it in the way his mouth hardened, the way his gaze didn’t quite meet mine.
Something had happened in his past.
Something that still stung.
I swallowed the thought and forced myself back to the present.
Nyra.
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13 The Night My Wolf Howled
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I needed to move.
To change the subject, quickly, before my father decided to stay longer.
“When will we consult the Prima Wolf?” I asked.
My father’s jaw tightened even more.
“The pack has survived all these years without a Prima Wolf,” he snapped, and the sharpness in his tone slammed the door shut. “Or consulting any. I think it is best to keep it that way.”
I nodded once, because arguing with him would waste time and start a war I couldn’t afford right now.
My father stood.
He looked down at me, and for a moment I felt the full weight of what he wanted me to become, an Alpha carved out of strategy, duty, and cold victories.
“I’ll send some documents over now so you can help me sort them out while you’re awake. I’ll be back in
fifteen minutes,” he said.
My heart dropped.
Because it meant I couldn’t leave the house.
I wanted to tell him I was busy, but what could I even say, what did I need to do out in the night, past midnight? So I stayed silent.
Then he turned and walked out of my room.
The door shut.
Silence rushed back in like a tide.
I stood there for a second, unmoving, my chest tight, my mind racing.
Nyra’s words replayed in my head, her tears, her bleak certainty.
You were the one in our way, Kieran.
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