Claimed By Three Rival Alphas

Chapter 26: The First Night

~LYRA’S POV~

I knew something was wrong before either of them said a word.

Ryland and Eren didn’t sit across from me at the same table. Not casually, not without a reason. They were too careful with their individual rhythms for that kind of overlap to be accidental. When I came down and saw them both already seated, already quiet, I stopped in the doorway for half a second before I walked in and sat down.

I looked between them.

"Whatever this is... Just say it."

Ryland started. He was careful with it, not in the way that felt like he was softening the edges to protect me, more like he was laying it down piece by piece so it had room to land without crushing everything at once. He reminded me of the blackouts. The dates. The animal attacks in the eastern woods starting at the same time my gaps did. Eren going out after the hunting party left and finding the window in my room open.

I listened with my hands flat on the table.

Somewhere in the middle of it, I started shaking my head. Not because I didn’t believe it, something in the way my body had been feeling for days was already confirming everything he said before he finished saying it. More like bracing. The way you brace when something is coming at you and you can’t move out of the way in time.

When he finished, I looked at Eren.

"You saw me?"

"I saw you," he said. No softening on his end. Just the fact, delivered directly. "Fully shifted.

Full control in wolf form. No awareness in your human mind at all."

I looked back at the table.

The silence lasted about four seconds.

Then it hit me, the real weight. Not the wolf, not the shifting, not even the blackouts. The kills. The man in the undergrowth. The fugitive in the eastern woods. The marks on them that Ryland’s trackers had documented.

I stood up fast enough that the chair scraped back behind me.

"I killed people." My voice came out higher than I wanted it to. "Holy goddess, I killed people. Ryland, I killed..."

They were both on their feet immediately.

"Lyra..." Ryland moved toward me.

"I killed them." I could feel the guilt rising through my chest like water coming up fast in a closed space, no way to redirect it, nowhere for it to go. "All of them. That’s, that’s on me, that’s..."

"Lyra, listen to me." Ryland got his hands on my shoulders, not grabbing, just grounding.

"Listen."

"I killed them, Ryland." My voice broke on it.

"I know." He held steady. "But they were, the ones we can account for, they were guilty of crimes. The man who cornered the girl, the fugitive who..."

I looked at him. "So you’re saying they deserved it?"

"That’s not..." He stopped. Started again.

"That’s not what I mean, I..."

"Let me talk to her." Eren said it quietly, from behind Ryland’s shoulder.

Ryland looked at him for a second. Then he stepped back and let Eren in.

Eren didn’t touch me. He sat down at the table, not across from me but at the adjacent chair, close, same level, no barrier between us. He waited until I looked at him.

"Sit down," he said.

I sat. My legs were shaking slightly.

"You didn’t make a decision," he said.

"Your wolf did. And your wolf made the decision your human mind would have made if you’d been there and conscious of it, protect the girl, stop the man. The fugitive was in that forest for a reason, and none of the reasons were good ones."

He paused.

"What happened is not the same as murder. It’s not the same as a choice with full awareness behind it."

"It still happened," I said.

"Yes, It did. And you can carry that. You can sit with the weight of it and let it inform how you go forward. But you don’t have to let it bury you right now. Right now there’s too much to do."

I looked at him for a long moment. Then I exhaled, slow and uneven, the kind of breath that comes out shaky at the edges no matter how hard you try to control it.

"Okay," I said quietly. Just that, because anything more felt like too much.

Ryland came back to the table and sat. The three of us were quiet for a moment.

"When this gets out," I said, because that thought had already arrived and wasn’t leaving. "The council. The people. How do we handle it?"

"We’ll figure that out as we go," Ryland said.

I looked at him.

"We will," he said, and there was enough certainty in it that I didn’t push.

I exhaled again, steadier this time. "Okay." I looked at both of them. "So what do we do now?"

—

Control training started that evening.

Eren led it. Ryland stayed close throughout, not interfering, not instructing, just present, which turned out to be exactly what I needed even if I wouldn’t have known to ask for it. The group was small: just the three of us, a clearing at the far end of the eastern grounds where the tree line came close enough to give the space some privacy.

No audience. No pressure beyond what the exercise itself carried, which was already considerable.

The work was exactly what Eren had described, not physical pain, the other kind.

The kind where you’re trying to hold something enormous completely still through pure will, and the thing keeps sliding, keeps pulling, keeps insisting it knows better than you do. My wolf didn’t want to be contained.

She’d been moving freely for four nights and she had no interest in being asked to stop.

The first night I disappeared twice. Once early on, once near the end when my focus slipped for thirty seconds and that was apparently all it took. Both times, Eren found me quickly.

Both times, he brought me back the same way, no commands, no urgency, just that patient eye contact and the unhurried walk back. Like it was simply the next thing that happened, not a failure.

Ryland said nothing when I came back the second time. He handed me water and waited.

The second night was better. I disappeared once, about an hour in, but I came back faster, the thread between the wolf and my awareness didn’t snap completely, just stretched, and when Eren found me I was already turning back toward the lights of the packhouse on my own. Almost.

The third evening, I made it through without losing the thread at all.

It cost me. I was shaking by the end of it, the kind of shaking that lives in your core and doesn’t show much on the outside if you control your breathing. Eren saw it. He said nothing except "That’s enough for tonight,"

It was fragile. Everyone in that clearing knew it was fragile. The full moon was four days out and fragile was not the same thing as ready.

But it held.

During pack meetings, Eren covered for my absences with the efficiency of someone who had clearly thought through exactly how much vagueness was the right amount. Scheduling conflicts. Needed elsewhere. She sends her apologies. He said it all with such natural ease that no one pushed back, not even once, and I’d been around enough of these people to know that some of them would push back on anything if it gave them an opening.

I watched Ryland watch Eren handle it one evening from across the room. There was something in Ryland’s face I hadn’t quite seen before, not gratitude exactly, not approval.

Something quieter than that. Like a man recalibrating what he thought he already knew about someone and finding the update wasn’t unwelcome.

Less rival. More something else.

I made a note of it and said nothing.

The progress was real. Three nights, measurable improvement, a thread I could feel now even when I wasn’t actively reaching for it. My wolf was still stronger than my control, still faster than my awareness, still more than capable of slipping free the moment my focus wavered.

But she was starting to know I was there.

And I was starting to know her.

But It wasn’t enough. Not yet. And everyone who’d been in that clearing with me every night knew it without having to say it out loud.