feel of the Earth beneath their paws, the dirt digging into their nails, and the steady thump of their heart with their feet. The surrounding sound of their pack with them in motion. Running. It was a group activity that was loved by almost every wolf I had ever met. I was different though. I loved running, but I loved running alone.
There was something I loved more than running. Something that scared me to my very core. I was scared of very few things in my life. In all honesty, I feared only this one thing. I didn’t have the luxury of being afraid. My job was simple: find, capture, destroy. I wasn’t dealing with wolves who needed a slap on the wrist. I was dealing with wolves that stepped out of line, witches and warlocks that crossed us. Rogue wolves.
I loved the hunt.
I was only a child when the pack came and killed my father. I knew he wasn’t a good man. I knew there was something off with him, but he had been my father and all that I had. When I was three years old, my mother had been killed by some pissed off witches, and when he had tried to save her, he almost died himself. So my father was mateless and uncontrollable. He was never a stable man, but losing my mother and his love was the final straw. He was done for. While I wasn’t born to a rogue, I was raised by one. My mindset was always a little off from the rest of the pack’s.
I was fourteen when Damian the Alpha of the Lowe pack took me in as his own child. He had never found his mate. He was one of the only Alphas known not to have his mate. He told me many times he believed that his one mate had died at birth and he would never find her again. When I asked him why he thought that he said he felt an infinite sadness in his chest once, almost twenty years before. Since then, he gave up all hope. He took me in and groomed me for the Alpha position, so when I told him I was going to be an enforcer, things between us became strained. I was not budging on the issue though. It was my decision.
I was not made to be an Alpha. I knew my blood carried more rogue than it did anything else. Being an enforcer satisfied my wolf’s undeniable need to hunt and kill. I didn’t take pride in what I did, but it was necessary. It was what I was meant to do.
I feared my twenty-first birthday. I feared that I would smell her scent and I would drop everything and go running. It’s been five years. Five peaceful years. After the first year, I stopped worrying. I almost hoped that I would be the same as Damian. I knew for a fact none of the females in our pack looked at me the same way they would look at the twins. Jude, who was significantly older than us and mated, told me that they looked at me, but I just wasn’t paying attention. I knew perfectly well how they watched me. They watched me with hungry eyes, knowing there was a good chance I would be Alpha when Damian stepped down or he passed away. While my pack went by the laws of the mating curse, we also fought against it. Many of the females and males in my pack dated and held no qualms about flaunting their relationships.
I didn’t care for that though. I did not want a mate, real or chosen. They would slow me down, and it was a responsibility I did not want. My crew and I were headed toward the northern territory in order to take down a warlock that had been attacking some of our outskirt pack members. We headed to Michigan following his trail. This is what I lived for: the hunt. I will admit though, the want to destroy him was overpowering.
I had hated witches and warlocks for what they had done to my family and what one had done to me. Knowing that as an enforcer, I could hunt their kind down, kill them, and destroy them in the way they had destroyed me, I was more than willing to take the job I knew many did not want.
The older males wanted their mates; they wanted the kids, wife, and family.