[Leon’s POV]
The boy throws his first punch like he's been rehearsing it for years. Knowing his life, he probably has. Terrible technique, thumb tucked inside the fist, elbow flared. Also the most committed strike I've seen from a trainee in months.
"Good." I reset my stance, keeping three feet between us. "Now watch—thumb outside the fingers, here." I demonstrate, rotating my wrist. "You tuck it inside, you break it on the first real hit."
Ashton studies my hand with the intensity of a surgeon reviewing scans. He adjusts his fist—not perfectly, but close. On the first attempt.
I step forward to correct the angle of his wrist and he flinches. A micro-retreat, shoulders drawing in, weight shifting to his back foot.
The kind of flinch that isn't about me at all. It's about every hand that's ever moved toward him fast.
My hand drops. No child should flinch at an adult approaching. Especially in my pack. "I won't touch you. I'll show you, and you mirror it. Deal?"
When he searches my face with those amber eyes, my wolf stirs pressing forward. It makes no sense—a six-year-old in a sweaty gym and nothing here that should wake the animal.
The nod he gives is a single dip of his chin. I've brokered treaties with more flexible terms.
We work through the basics—guard position, footwork, weight distribution. I demonstrate each stance and Ashton mirrors it with precision that borders on unnerving. Where he's wrong, he's wrong by inches.
Between drills, I correct through description. "Wider—imagine your feet are on train tracks, not a tightrope." He adjusts. "Drop your center. You're a stone, not a tree." He drops, and the stance goes from passable to solid.
I've coached wolves twice his age who couldn't hold that guard for ten seconds. This boy holds it until I tell him to relax, and even then stays on his toes.
"Why did you learn to fight?" Ashton asks during a water break, cross-legged on the mat with his chin propped on his fist. Small talk isn't in his operating system.
I sit across from him, rolling my water bottle between my palms. He reads performance the way I read strategy—without mercy. So I give him the truth.
"My father was the previous Alpha of this pack. He was killed when I was twenty-four, and after that I had to learn faster or lose everything he built."
Ashton's hands still on his water bottle. His brow furrows—not sympathy, but recognition. Someone hearing a language they thought only they spoke.
"I don't have a father." Flat, factual, stripped clean. "So I had to learn fast too. To protect my mama and little sister."
I keep my face neutral—the mask I've worn through assassination attempts and hostile negotiations. Behind it something detonates that I have no name for and no right to.
This boy owes me nothing. I've known him for days. There is no reason his words should rearrange something behind my ribs with the certainty of a bone resetting itself.
"You did well." My voice holds, which qualifies as an engineering feat. "Most grown wolves couldn't have managed what you've done."
He shrugs, dismissive, but his grip tightens on the bottle. We run two more drills, and his strikes come harder, sharper, as if something just unlocked.
On the last combination, his fist connects with my palm hard enough to split skin on my knuckle. I look at the blood, then at the boy who put it there.
He's six. I've trained adolescents who couldn't crack skin through a braced guard palm. That force belongs to a wolf pushing toward the surface years ahead of schedule.
I've seen it maybe twice—pups whose wolves wake early, who shift at eight or nine instead of late teens. They almost always become Alphas, and watching the start of that in a boy barely reaching my hip sends something electric along my veins.
A strange pride settles inside, proprietary and unearned. I have the honor of shaping this. I'd like to see who this boy becomes in ten years.
If I ever have a son, I'd want exactly this—the fire, the stubbornness, the refusal to stay down. I do wonder, though, if it ever happens—the heir clause requires a child within two years, and I haven't shared a bed with my wife.
Wanting a boy like this while avoiding the only path to fatherhood isn't irony. It's a diagnosis.
"Good session." I nod toward the bleachers. "Go get your water, boy." He collects his things and trots off, and her scent hits me before I'm halfway across the gym—clean and warm, something floral that my lungs want to keep.
I've been catching traces in hallways, the clinic, at dinner when she passes behind my chair. Each time, the wolf pushes forward. Each time, I shove him back with less conviction.
She sits in the second row, knees drawn up, silver-blonde hair catching afternoon light. She is the most beautiful woman in this pack—the kind that doesn't announce itself but dismantles you quietly, one detail at a time.
Several unmated wolves have been circling her with the subtlety of dogs near a dropped steak, and the thought sends something hot and irrational through my skull. I have no claim and no right. The feeling is indifferent to either.
"His form is rough," I say, settling beside her with enough distance to qualify as appropriate and not enough to feel safe. "But his instincts are sharp. He reads movement faster than wolves three times his age."
"My Ash reads everything fast." Her voice is careful—a wall with a window cracked. "It's how he's survived."
"His temper needs channeling. Right now he fights angry—powerful but sloppy." I lean forward, forearms on my knees. "I want to teach him control. How to use that fire instead of letting it use him."
Her mouth softens. The guard thins, going translucent. "He showed River a defensive stance last week. Made her practice four times." A breath of a laugh. "She told him she'd rather learn to bite."
"That sounds about right." The warmth in my voice is unhidden, and Skyler glances at me—a flicker, quickly corrected. But I catch it. I catch everything about this woman lately, which is an increasingly inconvenient personal crisis.
I'm close enough to see the freckle below her left ear. Close enough that my body tilts toward hers—shoulder turning, knee shifting, an adjustment I don't authorize and can't reverse.
The space between us develops its own pulse. Compressed, warm, full of things I have no business reaching for.
"Leon!" Kailani's voice cuts across the gym—bright and musical, the frequency of a woman claiming what's hers in front of witnesses.
I straighten. The inches I add between my shoulder and Skyler's might as well be a continent. Her non-reaction is so perfectly performed it tells me everything her face does't.
"Good talk." I stand, and the words are absurd—you'd say that after a quarterly review, not to the woman whose proximity just scrambled every circuit behind your ribs.
I walk toward my wife without looking back. Looking back would confirm that the bench carries more gravity than the woman I'm walking toward, and the gap between duty and whatever this is has narrowed to a width discipline can't bridge.
Kailani loops her arm through mine, says something about dinner that my ears accept and my brain discards. Alpha and Luna, the portrait this pack requires. I deliver my lines and none of them are true.
What circles in my head isn't dinner or the woman on my arm. It's a boy with amber eyes saying he didn't have a father, so he had to learn fast too. And the wolf clawing at a wall inside my mind, because I no longer know which side of it I belong on.