The Mating Season (Chase Me, Dear Alpha REWRITE)

Introduction

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Would it really be 5 days?

5 more days until I handed destiny my free will and stuck her the middle finger as some unknown man drove me away?

I couldn't believe nineteen years of laughing, crying, troublemaking, and causing my poor father more gray hair than he could handle, boiled down to this. Sulking in my room. Watching the seconds tick by on the clock as my fate came closer and closer.

"This really, really, sucks..." I sighed, leaning my head onto the cold glass pane of the window and closed my eyes. I could feel my wolf stirring uncomfortably within me. She hated being pinned up. It wasn't healthy. She needed to be able to stretch her legs and feel the wind on her face.

But this suffocating depression that held me down and even affected her, dulling her excitement.

"Five days until the Mating Season begins," I breathed as I stared out the window, taking in the warm amber drenched sunset fields of the Ash Oak lands.

Every year, the eligible ladies of the Big 5: Ash Oak, Crimson Timber, Sentinel Dawn, Night Blood, and Imperial Canis; met in Central Point Neutral territory where we were groomed and evaluated on our physical prowess. After a three-day hiatus between seeing our families, we would be reunited on a day marked in history as The Claiming Day.

Women were torn from their packs on this day, by the eligible bachelors of rival packs to 'keep the peace.' It was like an auction, but no money would be exchanged. Only the promise of peace between the packs. I found it similar to sex trafficking, where women did not have the choice to say 'No, I want to go home.' But...women did have a choice. Women had a couple of choices in fact.

If more than one man claimed us on this day, we could choose our mate. A lot of women actually looked forward to this as the pinnacle of their lives, as if this was what they were bred to do. Many accept the idea of meeting their possible true mate at this Big 5 mixer, to see who the Moon Goddess has...ew...completed them with.

Maybe one day, I could have given this a chance, but not now. Not at the height of my youth. Not when I had so many plans and not enough time to do them in. Not when I still had my big brother and my father to take care of. Not when I still had ambitions to complete college.

I dual-enrolled in high school and began taking a massive course load of on-campus and online classes and just now completed my core classes this past fall.

But now?

I made sure not to enroll for my spring semester so I wouldn't be penalized for missing all of my classes due to being kidnapped.

I heard my phone buzzing on my cheap desk not too far off and I chose to ignore it, knowing exactly who it was. My laptop was emitting soft music, well, I wouldn't call it soft. It was softly emitting 2000s pop-punk music that I had turned on after I had finished my video game binge.

My room was dingy, a cheap double bed with a yellow quilt my grandmother had made for me when I was nine took the center of the room, my desk directly across where it homed my laptop and, now cold, cup of coffee, and the window I stood in front of. I hadn't bothered to clean in weeks and clothes and schoolwork were strewn all over the floor. I had pictures of my family on my walls with a few posters I'd bought in my childhood years that somehow survived...

My phone began vibrating again.

I began to get an eerie feeling that if I didn't at least check the caller ID...I quickly marched over and snatched my phone up, eyes widening as I saw Alpha Daniel's name and seven missed calls from my dad...thirteen from Grayson, my big brother.