They Erased My Name. Now Every Alpha Kneels to Me Chapter 05

They Erased My Name. Now Every Alpha Kneels to Me Chapter 05 The Oath

Nobody applauded.

Thirty-four people sat very still while a five-foot-five eighteen-year-old walked to the front of a room to be handed

command of them.

“They’ll hate you by lunch,” Instructor Gideon said, pressing a tablet into my hands. “Files on all of them. Scores, psych

profiles, bloodlines. Build your teams by morning.”

“They can hate me,” I said. “They just have to survive me.”

He almost smiled.

Our quarters are the east wing of a stone building we share with a unit that’s been operational for ten years –

Commander Kade Locke’s unit, which everyone here discusses the way people discuss weather and war.

I read files until three in the morning. But here’s what a year of invisibility teaches you: how to watch. I didn’t need psych profiles. I’d spent fourteen days learning who flinched, who lied, who covered for someone else’s mistake, who

ate alone.

At 0800 I stood in front of them in the common room.

“Juno, you’ve already picked your team,” I said. “Say it out loud and I’ll break you back down to junior.”

Juno shut her mouth.

“You are not picking friends. You are building something that keeps you alive.” I looked around. “Every one of you has

a flaw. I built your teams around the person who covers it. If you want to argue, argue when I’m done.”

Nobody argued. Not once they heard the reasoning. There is nothing on earth that shuts people up faster than being

seen accurately for the first time in their lives.

Juno’s team got the ground floor – five light sleepers between our wing and whatever walks in at night.

“You’re putting us on the door because you trust us?”

“I’m putting you on the door because you’re the only ones who’d wake up.”

She stood a little straighter. Then, quietly: “We won’t disappoint you, Commander.”

I keep that sentence in my pocket on bad days.

The oath happened at noon, in the library, with eight instructors circling to catch anyone mouthing the words without

saying them.

Do you swear your loyalty to the Crown?

“Yes, I do.”

Do you swear to serve the truth even when it costs your own blood?

“Yes, I do.”

Thirty-five voices in perfect sync – until the last line.

“Do you swear to abstain from intimate relations within your unit and across units – excepting only a lawful mating

or engagement?”

Five voices didn’t answer. I knew all five before Gideon called their names, because I could hear their heartbeats

jump.

“Didn’t know that was in there,” one mumbled.

“It’s in there,” Gideon said, “because two hundred years of history says a bad breakup between armed wolves ends

with a body.”

They swore it the second time.

That was the day I heard my first real stranger’s thought inside these walls.

We were crossing the courtyard when a woman from Locke’s unit passed us, and it landed in my head like a coin

dropped on a table:

Let’s see how fast I can get Commander Locke into my bed.

Then a man’s voice, sour: Hope the new lot brought some willing girls.

Neither of them had opened their mouth.

“Am I losing my mind?” I whispered.

“No,” said Nyx. “You’re just finally hearing what people are actually saying.”

Six months went by like a thrown knife.

We trained. We studied. We ate on our own floor because our kitchen was better and because I wanted my people

bonded to each other, not scattered. We graduated three weeks early – the entire unit, together, which had never

happened in forty years.

I told them about my hearing. All of them. I had to; secrets rot a unit from the inside.

They swore they’d never tell a soul. And Nessa – Nessa, who reads old bloodline genealogies for fun – went the color of paper and said, “Wren. There are only two lines on record that ever produced that. And what they used to do to the women who had it-”

“Don’t.”

“You need to know.”

“Not yet.”

I wasn’t ready. I’d spent a year deciding my family didn’t love me. I wasn’t ready to consider that they’d been afraid of

something.

Four days of leave before we went operational. We spent them cooking, arguing about films, and letting Nessa plan

her wedding to Torin out loud, because Torin had turned nineteen and formally asked for her the second he was legally

allowed to.

On the last afternoon I heard her coming up the stairs.

Nessa doesn’t stomp. Nessa doesn’t raise her voice. Nessa is the calmest person in my unit.

She came through the door shaking so hard she dropped the takeaway box.

Torin was up in half a second, arms around her, growling something into her hair. Between her breathing and her

swearing I got the story in pieces.

Commander Gage Thorne. Eight years in service. Third son of a founding pack.

He’d blocked her in a corridor with two of his men behind him. He told her exactly what he wanted, exactly which

room, exactly what hour.

And when she said no, he smiled and said: “Then I’ll file a fitness report Monday, and your little girl commander won’t

be able to save you.”

The room went very, very quiet.

I set down my coffee and stood up.

“Monday,” I said. “Monday’s my first meeting with the King.”