Claimed By Three Rival Alphas

Chapter 25: Silver wolf

~RYLAND’S POV~

Eren’s request came through Cade the next morning. Private meeting. Just the two of us and Cade, no explanation attached.

That alone told me enough to take it seriously.

I added my father to the list before sending the reply. Tyran had been present through enough of this investigation that cutting him out now would create more problems than it solved, and whatever Eren had to say, I wanted as many eyes in the room as possible.

When he came in and saw Tyran seated in the corner of the study, something moved behind his expression, a brief registration, nothing more. He didn’t comment on it.

He also didn’t sit down.

The four of us in my private study, door closed, no staff. Cade stood near the window. Tyran had the chair in the corner, arms folded, watching with the stillness of a man who’d learned long ago that listening first cost you nothing.

Eren stood in the centre of the room, and started talking.

"Lyra’s been experiencing blackouts,"

"Memory gaps. Whole evenings she can’t account for. She told me yesterday."

Cade’s expression sharpened immediately. I went still.

"They started four days ago," Eren continued. He let that land, then drew the second line.

"The animal attacks in the eastern woods, they also started four days ago."

Nobody spoke.

"The silver wolf sightings," he said. "Four days ago."

The room didn’t erupt. It went very, very quiet, which was somehow worse.

Eren didn’t fill the silence. He stood there and let all three lines sit in the air between us, let us connect them ourselves, and waited.

I was the one who finally broke it. "You’re saying..."

"I found her last night," he said. "Before your hunting party did. I brought her back to the packhouse. That’s why they came up empty."

Cade opened his mouth first. "Wait..."

"Lyra is the silver wolf."

"What!" The word came out before I could stop it.

"Is this a joke right now?" Cade said, his voice flat with the particular tone he used when something landed too hard to process immediately.

"That’s impossible." I leaned back, adjusting my position, because I needed to do something with my hands and that was the only option available.

"Lyra can’t shift. We’ve been over this. The wolf is locked, the elder said as much months ago..."

"Not locked," Eren said. "Emerging. There’s a difference."

"How is that different?"

"A locked wolf won’t come. An emerging wolf comes when it decides to, not when she does."

He held my eye.

"You know I wouldn’t be standing here saying this if I wasn’t certain."

He was right. Eren didn’t make statements like this. He didn’t walk into rooms and say things he hadn’t already turned over six times from every angle. That was the only reason I let myself keep listening instead of pushing back harder.

"Walk us through it," I said, slowly, "All of it."

He did.

The timeline first, her blackouts beginning four nights ago, the gaps she’d described to him, reaching back through her own evenings and finding clean walls where memory should have been. The physical evidence her body had left behind: the bone-deep aches, the jaw tension in the mornings, waking up more exhausted than when she’d gone to sleep.

Then the forest, what he’d tracked, what he’d found, how he’d brought her back before we could stumble across her ourselves.

"The missing time," he said, "is her wolf taking over when her conscious mind isn’t equipped to contain it yet. She goes to sleep. The wolf surfaces. Her body goes somewhere her mind doesn’t follow."

I pressed my palm against my forehead. "How solid is all of this? How valid is any of it?"

"I spent several hours last night going through the secondary texts," Eren said.

"The older material. And what I found didn’t surprise me, it confirmed what I’d already started to believe." He paused, looking at each of us in turn.

"The Moonborn awakening has more than one stage. Everyone who knows the mythology assumes the wolf simply arrives, one shift, one transformation, finished. But the older texts describe something different. A fractured emergence. The wolf surfaces during sleep while the waking mind stays behind. Two halves of the same person running on separate schedules until something brings them into alignment."

The room was quiet again.

Then Tyran spoke from his corner, his voice careful and even. "Silver wolves are extinct."

"Apparently not," Eren said.

Tyran’s jaw tightened slightly, but he said nothing else.

I sat forward. "But Lyra, I mean... how? Where does this even come from? She was wolfless for eighteen years. How does someone go from wolfless to a silver wolf?"

"I don’t have all of that yet," Eren said.

"But somehow she’s descended from the first.

Tied to the Moon Goddess at a level none of us fully understand, and probably at a level she doesn’t understand either. The bloodline carries things forward across generations. It doesn’t ask permission."

I sat back and looked at the ceiling for a moment, trying to put the shape of it together in my head. Lyra. Walking through the eastern forest at night with no memory of leaving her bed. Protecting a fourteen-year-old girl from a man who’d cornered her. Making deliberate choices about what deserved to be stopped and what didn’t.

That part, actually, made a strange kind of sense.

Tyran’s voice shifted then, something sharper coming into it, quieter at the edges.

"You all understand what it takes to deal with a normal rogue wolf. But a silver wolf, a first blood, true born... that’s a different conversation entirely. One I wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of."

"Good," Eren said, without a beat of hesitation. "Because we won’t be having that conversation. Nobody is taking anyone down."

"No," I said immediately. "Absolutely not."

Cade and I landed on the same word at the same moment.

"Train her."

Cade looked at me. I looked at him. We’d arrived at the same place from different directions, which was how it usually worked with Cade.

Tyran pinched the bridge of his nose. He looked like a man who had seen a great many things in his life and was beginning to believe this would be the most complicated of all of them.

"Sure. Train her. Right." He opened his eyes and looked at Eren. "How long before the next full moon?"

"One week," Eren said.

The silence that followed had a different quality to it. Not disbelief anymore, we were past disbelief. This was just weight. The specific, pressing weight of a clock that had already started and wasn’t waiting for any of us to catch up.

"Damn," Cade said, his voice quiet. "That’s a big problem."

Nobody disagreed.

I looked at Eren. "Does she know?"

"Not yet," he said. "I’m telling her this morning. After this."

"I want to be there."

"I know." He met my eyes. "That’s why I told you first."

I nodded slowly. There was nothing else to say that was more useful than that. The clock was running. The full moon was seven days out. And somewhere in the packhouse, Lyra was waking up with aching muscles and no idea that the wolf she’d spent eighteen years waiting for had already started finding its own way out without her.