The Alpha I Was Meant to Hate

You cannot force two metals that fight each other's grain. But the fated seam takes whether you will it or not, and a joint made under the right heat is stronger than either piece alone. I weld for a living, in a dying steel city where the mills are graves and the packs run the dark underneath. I know a bad joint by the flaw it hides. I never once thought I'd feel that pull in my own body, aimed at the last man on earth I was raised to destroy.

Eleven years ago something tore my pack apart on the Fallow Night. My family, my people, my whole Greywater bloodline, gone in one dark, and the city has always said it was Blackseam that did it. So I gave my life to hating Blackseam and its Alpha. Then Ellis Sedgecroft walked onto the killing ground where I was reading a body, and the Recognition hit us both at once, the fated-mate bond snapping tight between the grieving welder and the Alpha she blames for everything, and I have never hated my own skin so much in my life.

He doesn't push it. That's the worst part. He never once uses the bond or his rank to pull me an inch. He tells me the truth doesn't work the way I was taught, that his father ate a lie to stop a war, that the real hand behind the Fallow Night is still out there and still hunting the strayed. And when I finally take the forged blade that started it all and read it the only way I know how, the way I read a weld, I find a seam no Blackseam smith would ever lay, and the whole story I built my grief on begins to fail under load.

Something is moving to burn this city down by turning the packs against each other. The only way any of us survive it is if the welder and the Alpha stop fighting the seam between them and choose it, freely, in the open, and lay a joint strong enough to hold a hundred years of pack feet crossing over. I was meant to hate him. I'm choosing the weld instead.