The Chronicles of Alpha Academy (bxb)

20: Another One

Chapter Twenty: Another One (on repeat)

Parker

What a day.

Leaving school was always a bonus. It wasn't just the kids that got stir crazy. The same walls, the same rolling lawn and forest, the same wolves, the same conversations, the same issues, the same food. For three years.

It got old for adults too.

Libby was not home.

At home, there was literally always something new to go see or do, or experience. New music, new food to explore, new wolves on vacation bringing with them new problems but also new perspectives. Warm, sultry nights. Strong coffee, ghost stories. Mardis Gras with all its garish splendor. You can always find a party, but you can also always find a quiet spot to sit mellow and enjoy breathing in the New Orleans air.

It was what I loved. I missed it.

But I knew, the minute my baby girl was Chosen, that I would need to leave it behind, at least for a while. I groomed one of the other alphas to take my place as pack leader of all Louisiana. It was easy to find someone. Tons of competitors for the title. I always faced challenges, sometimes every day. I might not be a muscular brute, but I was still the Alpha of my entire state pack. So there was something about me that defied easy categorization for sure.

As I sat there in the hotel room with the new Keystone Luna, Kieran fresh from the shower, smelling of generic body soap and clean boy, his reddish brown hair damp, curling over his forehead, I was drawn back to the day I met my mate, Mina's biological mother.

It was my birthday. I was a punk, eighteen years old, conceited asshole. Rich, lazy and arrogant. My parents and a few select friends from the pack took me for an extravagant night out. Drinks and jazz at the Davenport Lounge in the Ritz. Quite a few of our pack ran the place, so legal age drinking limits were bypassed without even a blink of an eye. Then dinner at Dooky Chase for the best etouffee in the state.

And then... and then there she was.

My beautiful mate, Felice. Pouring coffee at our table.

We saw each other and that was it. It happened like every cliche mate story. We looked into each other's eyes and knew instantly we were meant for each other.

I can still see her, twenty years later, in my mind's eye. Her deep brown eyes, her long brown hair, in ringlets down her back, her clear brown skin. How exasperated she was, after a long shift, serving rich assholes like me. Even in wolf packs there were haves and have nots. My Felice's family were deeply middle class. While my family was a throwback to the aristocrats of a bygone age.

My Felice. Lovely. Beautiful. Perfection.

Mina was born on a stormy night like this.

And if I gained a perfect baby girl, I lost my love. She kept telling the nurse something felt wrong, but no one listened to her. It was my fault maybe, insisting she deliver in a human hospital. Our wolf midwives were used to the old ways, and it seemed medieval somehow to me, to give birth at home.

It might have happened at home though too. I tried not to beat myself up about it.

Then, three years later, I met Chastity. It wasn't a goddess Mate match, but a love match instead. I was ready to be with someone again. I was young, so young, to be grieving for Felice, not even twenty when I lost her. At twenty one I thought I could open my heart again.

She was ...wonderful. A strong woman. A great mother to our Mina. My partner. My friend. My lover. My wife. Ten years together.

And then I lost her, too.