Roesha
The folder felt like a sheet of charged copper between my fingers. The shock hit my sternum before I could pull my hand away. The bond had already found a way into my blood. My lungs seized. Every single alveolus flared with the scent of him—crushed pine needles after a flash freeze, petrichor, dark cedar, and the sharp, metallic sting of ozone. My wolf didn’t just wake up; she slammed against my ribs with such feral, desperate force that my vision vignetted into shimmering gold. Claim him. The instinct was deafening, ancient, and entirely devoid of morality. Rip the jacket away. Sink your teeth into the junction of his neck and shoulder. Mark what was woven for you before the stars cooled. And beneath that primal roar, my healing magic—the Immortalis Lupi heritage coiled in my blood—panicked. Power leaked through my skin in an uncontrolled, emerald wave. On the vintage mahogany console table beside the entryway, the dried eucalyptus branches in Nana Carmella’s ceramic vase suddenly shuddered. Green, vibrant shoots exploded from the brittle stems, unfurling in real time, weeping sweet, sticky sap onto the polished wood.
The potted snake plant near the coat rack doubled in size with a soft, creeping rustle, its thick leaves stretching toward Dominic like starving hands. I yanked the folder to my chest, curling inward to break the invisible arc of electricity. Stop it, I screamed at myself, digging my fingernails into the thick cardstock until the fibers groaned. Roesha, breathe. Regulate your sympathetic nervous system. Lock it down. I forced my eyes up. Dominic hadn’t moved, but his entire six-foot-three frame was vibrating with an agonized, hydraulic tension. The veins in his forearms stood out like braided cords beneath dark hair. His hazel eyes were flooded with amber fire, tracking the rapid rise and fall of my collarbones, his nostrils flaring as he drank in the jasmine-and-almond resonance pouring off me. Then I looked back down at his left hand.
The white-gold band on his ring finger caught the soft hallway light. Simple. Clean. Unforgiving. The heat in my blood instantly curdled into pure ice water. 11Clara. That was her name on the tab of the chart I was clutching against my heart. Clara Santino. A human woman. A third-grade teacher who didn’t know the first thing about primal bonds, territorial wars, or gods who played cruel, sadistic games with human lives. And with her, two little girls—five and seven, with innocent smiles and fragile, non-shifter heartbeats that couldn't survive the collateral damage of a broken home. Grief, sharp and humiliating, cut across the back of my throat. I had waited twenty-four years. While my peers in our home packed up, coupled off, experimented, and settled, I had guarded my heart like a fortress.
I had spent late nights in surgical suites, buried in anatomical atlases and ancient runic scrolls, holding out for the singular, mythic promise of a True Amante. I had dreamed of the absolute purity of that first look—the joy, the unburdened glory of meeting the soul tailored to mine. Instead, the universe had handed me an ambush. A wrecking ball disguised as destiny. Dominic took a half-step back, his boot heel catching the edge of the entryway runner with a dull scrape. He dragged a rough hand down his face, the golden glow in his irises flickering as he fought tooth and nail to push his beast back down. The agony on his face was raw, bleeding, and absolute. “I didn't know,” he whispered. His voice was ruined, a jagged scrape of sound that barely carried across the two feet of air separating us.
“Spirits help me, Doctor Carter... I didn't know.” I stood my ground, though my knees felt hollowed out. “You’re Beta Dominic Santino.” “Yes.” He swallowed hard, his Adam's apple bobbing painfully. He kept his hands pinned rigidly at his sides, his fists clenched so tight that the knuckles showed stark white through his tanned skin. He was terrified to move. Terrified that if he shifted an inch closer, the thread would snap and pull him under. “And you’re... you’re Roesha.” Hearing my name on his tongue felt like a brand applied to raw skin. It sent a treacherous shiver down the back of my thighs.
“You shouldn’t say that,” I said, my voice shaking despite my best efforts to sound like the clinical, detached surgeon I had spent a decade training to be. “Don't say it like that.” “I’m not trying to disrespect you,” he said, the words tumbling out in a desperate, suffocated rush. “Or your family. Or... or my own.” He shut his eyes for a second, breathing hard through his nose, his jaw clenching so violently I could hear the enamel grind. “I love my wife. I built a life with Clara. Twelve years. Two daughters. I swore an oath before Alpha Tomas, before the pack, and in a church under human law. I am devoted to them. I will not abandon them.” The declaration should have comforted me. It proved he was a man of honor, the kind of male my soul recognized as worthy. But instead, each word drove like a rusted nail straight through my sternum. 12“Did I ask you to?” The anger caught me off guard, rising fast and hot from the bruised ruins of my pride. I stepped closer, my chin lifting, meeting the tortured gold in his eyes without flinching. “Do you think I wanted this? Look at me, Beta Santino. Look at what I’m holding.” I tapped the edge of the manila file against my chest. “I flew across the country to consult on your wife’s reproductive complications. I came here to use my gift to save her womb, to heal her body so she could give you the family you’ve been praying for. And the moment you cross this threshold, your bond slams into me like an eviction notice on my own life?”
My voice cracked, but I forced the tears back into the iron cage of my ribs. “I didn't spend my entire life saving every piece of myself just to become the home-wrecker in a pack’s tragedy.” Dominic flinched as if I had physically struck him across the mouth. “Roesha, please—” “Don't,” I warned, my chest heaving. “Don't look at me like I’m the prize you were cheated out of, and don't look at me like I’m a threat to your children. I will never touch a man who wears another woman’s ring. The Moon Goddess might have made a sick joke out of our souls, but my conscience belongs entirely to me.” For a second, the heavy, suffocating silence returned, so dense you could have carved it with a scalpel. The faint sound of onions and garlic simmering in olive oil drifted from the kitchen, a stark, grounding reminder of normal life continuing just thirty feet away.
From behind me, Eric finally exhaled—a long, rattling whistle that broke the sonic seal over the room. He stepped up beside me, placing a large, steady hand gently against the small of my back. His touch was cool, familiar, grounding my spiraling bio-energy before I caused the ceiling moldings to sprout ivy. “Okay,” Eric said, his voice flat, deadpan, and entirely laced with the hyper-vigilant adrenaline of a brother ready to throw down with a pack officer. “So, setting aside the medical miracle where Nana’s plastic-looking eucalyptus just achieved sentience and grew three inches, are we all just going to stand here marinating in enough electromagnetic tension to power downtown Chicago, or does somebody want to acknowledge that the universe has a truly disgusting sense of humor?” Beside him, Hailey grabbed Eric’s forearm, her eyes wide and pale. “Eric, shut up,” she hissed quietly, though she didn’t let go of him. Her gaze flicked between me and Dominic, her expression weighted with the horror of an Alpha’s daughter who knew pack law inside and out. Grandfather Edward stepped between us, his broad back a physical wall cutting Dominic’s line of sight to me. “Dominic,” Grandfather said, his baritone low, gravelly, and carrying the absolute authority of the pack’s chief elder. “Step out onto the porch. Right now.”
Dominic didn’t argue. He looked at me one last time—a gaze so thick with sorrow, desperate restraint, and unspoken terror that it made my teeth ache—before taking three deliberate steps backward and exiting through the heavy oak door. The cool night air rushed into the foyer, diluting his scent just enough for me to finally pull a full breath into my burning lungs. Before the door could swing shut, heavy, measured footsteps crunched up the gravel walk. Alpha Tomas Drake appeared in the doorway, his leather jacket open, radiating the dense, suffocating gravity of true Alpha command. His dark eyes swept over Dominic, standing stiff against the porch railing, before locking directly onto me, then dropping to the overgrown eucalyptus branches on the hall table. A muscle ticked in Tomas’s jaw.
He didn't look angry; he looked exhausted, the weight of an entire territory pressing down on his shoulders. “Doctor Carter,” Tomas said, his voice cutting through the room like a blade wrapped in silk. “Dominic. Eric. Hailey.” He paused, his gaze lingering on my trembling hands and the medical folder clutched against my ribs. “Inside the private study. Now.” “Alpha—” Grandfather began, stepping forward protectively. “Not here, Edward,” Tomas commanded, the Alpha tone rumbling beneath the surface, demanding instant submission from the room. “We have an hour before word leaks that the Beta’s scent shifted three octaves in the middle of residential territory.
We sit in council now, or by sunrise, the elders will be demanding blood.” Tomas turned and walked toward the back of the house, his coat billowing behind him. My grandfather looked back at me, his eyes swimming with an unbearable, heartbroken pity. “Roesha... sweetheart.” “I’m fine,” I lied, my voice shaking as I gripped the medical records of the human woman whose husband was carved into my bones. I followed them down the hall, feeling the cold, clinical reality settling over me like lead weights. They were going to go into that room, pull out ancient pack treatises, and weigh political stability against divine law. And looking at the closed door of the study, a terrifying realization hardened in my chest: the Covington Pack was about to decide what my life, my heart, and my body were worth to their hierarchy—and they were going to do it before I ever had the chance to speak.