My Alpha Parents Gave My Tuition Away, So the Royal Command Took Me novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Dawn at the Gate

The Commander collects her through a ring of pack warriors, and she shifts for the first time. His wrist mark burns.

I spent the night on the cot in the back of the garage, with my toolbox for a pillow.

Nobody from the pack house came to find me.

At dawn I heard a car turn in off the road, and I was already on my feet.

It was a black sedan with the Royal Command's crest on the door.

A man got out of the back seat before it had fully stopped.

He was tall, in a black coat, with a scar that split his left eyebrow in two.

He looked at the garage, then at me, and his face did not change at all.

"Linnea Brask."

"Yes."

"Commander Hollis Garrow, Fourth Hand. Your handler." He held out a hand without any warmth in it. "You have two minutes to take what you need."

"Teague," he said over his shoulder, "the trunk."

The driver, a sandy-haired man with a crooked nose, popped it open and grinned at me.

"He's like this with everybody," Teague said. "Don't take it personal."

I shook the commander's hand.

His grip was dry and brief, and he let go first.

I picked up my toolbox and my bag, and then I heard boots on gravel.

Six pack warriors came around the corner of the garage and fanned out across the yard.

My father walked in behind them with his hands in his coat pockets.

My mother was a step behind him, in her robe, holding a cup.

"Commander," my father said, pleasantly. "A misunderstanding got her into your paperwork. My daughter is a small wolf, and she's confused."

"She's twenty-two," Hollis Garrow said.

"She's unmated, and under pack law she answers to me."

"Under pack law she did. Since yesterday afternoon she answers to the Crown."

My father's ring turned once on his finger.

Two of the warriors moved closer to the car doors.

Teague stopped grinning and put one hand flat on the roof of the sedan.

The commander took a tablet out of his coat and didn't look at my father at all.

He looked at me.

"I have a ledger I want you to hear," he said. "The Crown pays a monthly stipend to any pack that raises an S-Rank child."

"That money isn't hers," my father said fast. "It's for Sabine."

"Four years of it," Hollis said, "paid to the Brask pack. Since your younger daughter turned sixteen."

I stared at him.

"I never saw a coin of that," I said.

"I didn't think you had."

"There's one S-Rank in this family and it's Sabine," my father said. "Everyone knows it."

"Then why did the Command's instrument read it from this garage yesterday?" Hollis said.

It was very quiet in the yard.

My mother's cup rattled against its saucer.

"Take her home," my father said to the warriors.

He said it without raising his voice.

The six of them closed in, and the first one reached for my arm.

I stepped back and my shoulder hit the car.

My father's weight pressed in on the yard, the Alpha pressure I had folded under all my life.

My chest tightened and my knees began to bend.

Then I remembered the cup I hadn't drunk from in eight weeks.

Something inside me turned over, the thing I had always thought was nothing but a stomach ache at full moon.

It came up through my ribs and would not be pushed down again.

"Get back," Teague said sharply, and he wasn't talking to me.

My bones cracked first.

Then my spine bowed and my hands hit the gravel and were not hands.

I screamed, and the scream came out as a long, low howl.

My clothes tore and fell away.

The warriors jerked back one by one, and the first one dropped his hands and went white.

When the pain stopped I was standing on four legs, taller than the nearest man's shoulder.

My coat was white, and the air smelled of everything at once: oil, pine, fear, my mother's tonic.

My father took one step backward.

I had never seen him take a step back for anybody.

"That's not possible," my mother whispered. "She's never shifted."

I looked at her.

She stared at me with her hand over her mouth, and she did not look surprised.

She looked afraid.

Hollis Garrow had gone completely still beside the car.

He wasn't looking at the warriors or at my father.

He was looking at his own left wrist, where his sleeve had slipped back.

A dark mark on the inside of it was glowing, and the light was the same silver as my fur.

He pulled the cuff down fast, and when he raised his eyes they were on me.

"Get in the car, Linnea," he said, and his voice had changed. "Now."

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