The War of the Alphas: Book 1 of the Wolf Rising Saga

6| Crown Pack

Word count: 3988

Crown Pack: Alpha Robert

Cora's POV

The trees whistled in the wind around me. They sang a song with the birds hiding in the branches and the critters running across the ground. The sun was shining through the leaves of the trees, casting shadows everywhere I looked.

I was back in the second grade again, my first day of school after a summer of playing in the sun. I boarded the school bus that stopped at the end of my street. I ran to the back of the bus, eager to wave my parents goodbye. My dad had his arm wrapped around my mom's shoulder in a warm embrace, smiles splitting their faces in two.

The sun was shining down on all of us that day. It was a reminder of the good things in life.

If only my seven year old self knew that good things don't last forever.

Around Christmas that year when the temperature dropped my parents split up. My dad left for a year and when he came back he wasn't the same. He didn't love my mom anymore and he could barely look at me. He tried though. I hated him for so long. I hated him for what he put my mom through, how many nights she stayed up crying when she thought I was asleep. I hated him for always coming up with excuses to not see me on my birthday. I hated him for the way he thought he could buy my love with presents.

But it wasn't until a couple weeks ago that I realized why he did what he did. It wasn't until a couple weeks ago that I realized I was in the wrong the entire time. I was hating the wrong parent.

The sound of a grunt broke me from my spell. I shook off the bad mood I created when I began to look back on fond memories that turned to bad ones.

I looked over my shoulder to see Ronan's back wet with sweat. The green t-shirt drenched. He heaved as he raised the axe high in the air, letting it drop back down with a grunt. The sound of splitting wood broke the trance in the woods.

I shielded my eyes from the sun with my hand to get a better look at him. His back muscles rippled with every movement he made that I could see through his shirt and I couldn't take my eyes off of him. That happened a lot actually. He could be standing in front of the stove cooking us dinner and I wouldn't be able to take my eyes off the back of his neck. Or he would come through the front door in the evening and from my spot on the couch in his living room I would see the frown etched into his features. I would watch as soon as he looked in my direction the frown would cease to exist.

There was something about him that I was so attracted to. Maybe it was his haunting eyes and how they seemed to hold the secrets of universe in them; or it was the way he carried himself, a shadow in the corner one second and the center of attention the next.

From the way my heart sped up when he walked into the room or how it dropped when he walked out of it, I knew I was in big trouble. Every day I spent at his house bit by bit my heart began to hand itself over to him.

"Do you need sunglasses?"

I lifted my eyes from Ronan's defined torso where they seemed to lock while my mind was elsewhere. He was looking over his shoulder at me, sweat glistening his brows and running down his cheeks. I hadn't thought sweat was ever attractive before this.

I shook my head. "I'll manage."

"My sister can take you to the mall again if you like." He dropped the axe and turned fully towards me, hands on his hips. "You didn't buy much the other day."

"I think you and I both know that one can only have so much of Raini," I teased. "She's sweet but . . ."

"Annoying?"