FATED TO MY BEST FRIEND'S ALPHA

CHAPTER ONE

“I can't believe you’d kiss my own best friend Chris…I saw you two, don't even deny it” Carly shrieked pounding on the chest of the young man standing in front of her.

“Carly… please this is more than I can control, you won't understand this, you wouldn't, even if I had proof that this isn't our fault. Neither Anna or I wanted this but it's just fate, Carly… fate” Chris said trying his best to calm the already fuming Carly.

“Don't… don't fucking talk to me about fate… I won't be surprised if fate drives you to sleep with her as well… what the hell are you talking about Chris telling me about fate… so what happens to us then? Did fate decide you'd date me for two years and dump me for my best friend who you barely know?” Carly said bursting into tears.

Chris reached out to embrace her, he planted a soft kiss on her forehead and moved to kiss her. She pulled away, her voice seeming shaky.

“No Chris… you can't fucking kiss me with the same lips that tasted Anna's. You can't… just leave Chris, please leave…” She screamed, her body shaking terribly.

Chris was terrified when she began throwing things at him. He couldn't stand watching Carly in that mood, He ran out of Carly's home and ran after than his human body could carry. His strength flourished with his wolf spirit. He tore through the thick forest looking for safety, home, somewhere there's peace. His soul restless and his heart torn apart.

Anna was running.

The wheat sliced against her bare legs as she pushed forward, breath tearing from her chest in sharp, uneven gasps. The night air was thick and pressing against her skin like something alive.

The moon hung low and swollen above the fields, casting a pale, silver glow that made the world feel unreal.

Behind her, something moved but she didn't dare to look back.

A sound broke through the stillness. Not footsteps, it was heavier... deliberate. Like something that was hunting.

Her heart slammed harder.

Run...

The word weren't hers.

It only curled through her mind, deep and commanding, sending a shiver down her spine that had nothing to do with fear.

"Anna..." She stumbled.

That voice...

It wasn't distant. It was close. Low, rough, and dangerously familiar. It wrapped around her name like a promise... or a warning.

"Stop running."

Every instinct screamed at her to keep going, but her body betrayed her. Her steps slowed down. Her pulse shifted, fear tangling with something hotter, something confusing and unwelcomed.

She knew that voice.

She just couldn't remember why.

The wheat around her rustled violently in the breeze.

And then, there stood a presence.

Right behind her, Anna spun and woke up gasping.

Her bedroom ceiling came into focus in fragments, the familiar cracks and shadows grounding her back in reality. Her chest rose and fell too quickly, her skin was damp with sweat despite the cool night air drifting through the open window.

"Was just a dream," she whispered, pressing a hand to her racing heart.

But the feeling didn't leave, It lingered.

That voice... it had felt real.

Anna turned onto her side, pulling the quilt up to her chin, but sleep didn't come back easily. Tomorrow, she'd see Carly. Tomorrow, everything would feel normal again, It had to.

Because whatever that dream was...

It didn't feel like something she could outrun.

The highway stretched before Anna like a ribbon of gray silk, unspooling through fields that had shifted from the industrial gray-green of the city to the true, deep emerald of home.

She'd rolled down the windows an hour ago, letting the wind tangle her hair and carry away the last traces of campus life, the dining hall smells, the recycled dorm air, the perpetual low-grade anxiety of exams and deadlines.

Here, the sky was bigger. That was the thing she always forgot, the thing that hit her fresh every time she made this drive.

The way the horizon curved away in every direction, uninterrupted by buildings or trees, until the blue above met the green below in a hazy, shimmering line.

Her phone buzzed on the passenger seat. Carly's name lit up the screen: omg you're actually coming home finally!!! lake tomorrow??

Anna grinned, her thumb hovering over the keyboard. Just passed the water tower.

“Chris is here too just so u know”.

Anna's stomach did something complicated, a flutter, a drop, a warmth that spread through her chest and settled somewhere low and dangerous. The air became thick and hit her skin, sending chills down her spine.

Her dream the night before ran through her mind, she shook her head slightly intending to shake of the thoughts running through her mind.

She typed back a casual “cool” with three too many o's and tossed the phone face-down onto the seat.

She wouldn't think about Chris. She would think about Carly, and the lake, and the way the cattails smelled in late afternoon sun.

She would think about her mother's peach cobbler and her father's terrible dad jokes and the particular silence of her childhood bedroom.

But her hands tightened on the wheel as she passed the city limits sign, WELCOME TO MILLBROOK, POPULATION 4,287 and she realized she was driving just a little too fast.

The town unfolded like a memory: Henderson's Gas Station, where she'd bought her first candy cigarette at eight; the library where she'd kissed Tyler Marsh behind the biography section in ninth grade; the ice cream shop that was only open Memorial Day through Labor Day, its striped awning already unfurled for the season.

Anna slowed to a crawl, letting the familiarity wash over her, each building a landmark in the map of who she'd been before college had stretched her thin and remade her.

She felt different now. She wasn't sure if the town would notice, or if it would wrap around her like an old sweater, erasing the year away until she was just Anna again, Anna who'd never lived alone, never failed a chemistry final, never woken up at 3 AM wondering if she was studying the right thing, becoming the right person.

The lake glittered to her left, visible between two farmhouses, and she felt her breath catch. Tomorrow, she'd be there. Tomorrow, she'd sit on the dock with Carly's shoulder pressed against hers, and they'd talk until the mosquitoes drove them inside.

Tomorrow, she'd see Chris. She heaved a sigh.

Adjacent, she told herself firmly. He's just adjacent.

But her heart didn't believe her, it just didn't seem to believe that.

The porch light was on when she pulled into the driveway, even though sunset was still an hour away.

Her father's truck sat in its usual spot, and her mother's hydrangeas were already blooming in explosive clusters of blue and white.

The front door flew open before she'd even shifted into park.

"Anna-bug!" Her mother's voice, somehow exactly the same and somehow different - thinner, maybe, or carrying a note Anna didn't recognize.

Maddie was down the steps before Anna could unbuckle her seatbelt, pulling the car door open and reaching for her with the same desperate enthusiasm she'd shown at kindergarten pickup, at middle school graduation, at the airport last August when they'd said goodbye.

"Mom...." Anna laughed, stumbling into the embrace, smelling her mother's perfume... lavender, always lavender and the faint chemical trace of the hair salon where Maddie worked three days a week. "I was only gone nine months."

"Nine months, eleven days." Maddie pulled back, her hands framing Anna's face, her thumbs brushing her cheekbones.

"You look tired and skinny baby. I could literally trace your bones out Anna. Are they feeding you well up there? You're not vegetarian now, are you? I didn't make anything vegetarian...."

"She's not vegetarian, Maddie, let the girl breathe." Pete appeared on the porch, leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed, but Anna could see the way his eyes were shining, the way he was trying not to crowd his wife's moment.

"Hey, kiddo."

"Hey, Dad." Anna pulled herself from her mother's grip and took the porch steps two at a time, throwing her arms around her father's neck.

He smelled like sawdust and the peppermint gum he chewed to quit smoking, and he hugged her back with the careful strength of a man who built things for a living, tight enough to matter, loose enough not to bruise.

"Truck's running okay?" he asked against her hair.

"Perfect. Thanks for the tune-up over spring break."

" *That's good." He pulled back, his calloused hand rough against her cheek. "You grew up on us."

"I did not. I'm the same height I was when I left."

"Not height." Pete's gaze was steady, searching. "Something else. College looks good on you, Anna-bug."

Maddie had already begun unloading the car, chattering about dinner, pot roast, Anna's favorite, with the carrots that always turned out too soft but that Anna loved anyway.

Anna tried to help, but her mother swatted her toward the house.

"Go! Shower off that road dust. We'll eat in twenty."

Her bedroom was a time capsule. The same yellow curtains, the same quilted bedspread, the same shelf of horse figurines she'd collected between ages eight and twelve and never had the heart to pack away.

Anna stood in the doorway and felt the strange feeling of being two people at once, the girl who'd slept here dreaming of escape, and the woman who'd returned wondering if she'd left something essential behind.

She showered quickly, the water pressure disappointingly weak after the industrial strength of the dorm, and pulled on jeans and a faded t-shirt she'd left behind last summer.

When she descended the stairs, the house smelled like rosemary and roasted meat and something else, something warm and safe that made her eyes sting unexpectedly.

"...told you she was excited," her father was saying as she entered the kitchen. He stopped when he saw her, exchanging a glance with her mother that Anna couldn't quite read.

"What?"

"Nothing." Maddie set a platter of pot roast on the table, the ceramic dish painted with chickens, the same one they'd used for Sunday dinners her entire life. "Your father was just being your father."

They sat in their usual places, Pete at the head, Maddie to his right, Anna to his left, the fourth chair empty where her grandmother used to sit.

For a moment, no one spoke, the clink of silverware against china filled the comfortable silence.

"So," Pete said, cutting his meat with methodical precision. "Tell us everything. Classes, friends, the boy situation..."

"Daad?!."

"I'm just asking. Your mother and I need to know if we should be buying extra locks."

"There is no boy situation." Anna speared a carrot, avoiding her mother's knowing look.

"Unless you count Max, who spent three months trying to get Sadie to notice him and finally succeeded by serenading her outside her window at 2 AM."

"ooohh that's romantic," Maddie said softly, with a smile mischievous as ever.

"You mean deafening," Anna corrected. "She only said yes so he'd stop singing."

Pete laughed, the sound rumbling from his chest. "And the friends? They're good people?"

"The best, they're the best." Anna felt that familiar ache, the one that had started somewhere around October when she'd realized she missed her parents with a physical intensity that surprised her.

"They teased me mercilessly for being excited to come home, though. Apparently enjoying your hometown is 'uncool.'"

"Kids," Maddie said, with the authority of someone who'd heard every teenage drama in Millbrook for the past fifteen years. "They don't know what matters yet."

"Speaking of home..." Anna set down her fork, suddenly eager. "I'm meeting Carly tomorrow. At the lake. She said Chris is around too."

The silence that followed was brief, less than a heartbeat but Anna caught it. The way her father's knife paused against his plate.

The way her mother's smile flickered, something complicated moving behind her eyes.

"What?" Anna asked.

"Nothing, honey." Maddie reached for the green beans. "We're just glad you're reconnecting with your friends."

"Carly missed you terribly," Pete added, his voice carefully neutral. "Called here at least once a week asking when you'd be home."

"And Chris?" Anna heard herself ask, hating the note in her voice, the barely disguised hunger. "How's he been?"

Another silence, it was longer this time.

"Chris is..." Pete began, then stopped. He looked at his wife, some silent communication passing between them that made Anna's skin prickle with irritation. She was nineteen. She didn't need them managing her friendships.

"Chris is what?"

"He's fine," Maddie said quickly. "They're both fine. We're just happy you're home, Anna-bug. That's all."

But her father's jaw was tight, his gaze fixed on his plate, and Anna felt the first stirrings of unease beneath her excitement.

She thought of the highway stretching empty behind her, the way the sky had seemed to press down with sudden weight as she'd passed the city limits.

"Okay," she said slowly. "Well. I'm excited to see them. It's been way too long and I've been dying to hangout with Carly."

"Just..." Pete looked up, his eyes dark with something Anna couldn't name. "Just be careful, okay? With... all of it."

"Careful of what? My best friends?"

"Anna." Maddie's voice was gentle, placating. "Your father just means, summer changes things. People change. You might find that home isn't exactly how you left it."

Anna thought of Carly's text, the casual mention of Chris being there too.

She thought of the way her stomach had flipped, the dangerous warmth that had nothing to do with friendship.

"I can handle it," she said, and wasn't sure if she was reassuring them or herself.

Later, lying in her childhood bed with the window cracked open to let in the sound of crickets, Anna stared at the ceiling and tried to identify what felt wrong.

Her parents had been warm, welcoming, exactly as she'd remembered. The house smelled right, felt right, held her with the same embrace it always had.

But her father's warning circled her thoughts like a moth around a porch light. Be careful. Of what? Carly had been her best friend for thirteen years. Chris was... Chris was Carly's boyfriend. A nice guy. A friend. Nothing more.

She rolled onto her side, pulling the quilt to her chin. Tomorrow, she'd see them. Tomorrow, everything would make sense.

But sleep came slowly, and when it finally took her, she drifted once again to her dream of running through wheat fields under a full moon, something chasing her that she couldn't see, something calling her name in a voice that made her want to run toward it and away from it all at once.