They Erased My Name. Now Every Alpha Kneels to Me Chapter 03

They Erased My Name. Now Every Alpha Kneels to Me Chapter 03 — Zero Missed Calls
“Call me Nyx,” she said. “I’m the part of you that’s been asleep.”

I should have been terrified. I was, for about ten minutes. Then something worse happened.

I felt less alone than I had in a year — and that fact broke my heart more than anything my family ever did to me. Because that’s how low the bar had fallen. A voice in my head was better company than seven people who share my blood.

Nyx isn’t imaginary. I need you to understand that.

By the second night, I could hear the housekeeper’s radio from four hundred yards away through two stone walls. I could hear water moving under the lodge floor. I could hear the gate guard’s heartbeat stutter when he lied to dispatch about his cigarette break.

And once — just once — I heard a thought that wasn’t mine.

The groundskeeper walked past the lodge and I heard, clear as a struck bell, poor kid, nobody’s fed that girl in months, and his mouth never opened.

I threw up in the sink after that one.

“It’ll settle,” Nyx said. “It always does, by the end of the first week.”

“How would you know?”

“Because you’re not the first.”

She wouldn’t explain that. She still won’t.

On my last night, she asked me for one thing.

“Give them one chance. One dinner. Sit at that table and let me look at them. If I’m wrong about what I’m seeing, you can spend your whole life hating them. But look first.”

So I put on a clean shirt and walked into my family’s dining room for the first time in four months.

Here’s the part that finished me.

The housekeeper set a plate down in front of me — and she wasn’t surprised. Not a blink. Not a lovely to see you, Miss Wren. Like a ghost turning up at the table is just Tuesday in this house.

My father came in on a call. My mother came in with three binders. My brothers came in arguing about fabric samples, of all the stupid things — and then all six of them went abruptly, unnaturally quiet and started tapping at their phones.

Six men. One woman. All silent. All texting.

Talking around me. Over me. About me, maybe. Never to me.

I ate every bite. I don’t know why. Maybe I wanted to be able to say I gave them the whole hour.

At minute fifty-eight, my mother looked up. Right at me. One full second, her eyes on my face.

My whole stupid, starving heart lifted off the floor.

Then she said, “Kit, tell Cassian the west clearing’s booked,” and looked back down.

I stood up before dessert.

“I’m sorry, my girl,” Nyx said quietly, as I walked out into the dark. “I looked. I don’t understand them either.”

Two nights later came the Harvest Run, and Damon Vance rejecting me in front of four hundred wolves, and my father not lifting his head.

I packed in nine minutes. Everything I own fits in one bag, because a person who’s been erased learns to travel light.

I left three things behind: the green dress, the Ashgrove crest ring, and a note on my mother’s pillow.

I waited a year. Don’t come looking. — W.

I made it two hundred miles before I pulled into a gas station under a buzzing yellow light and did the one thing I’d sworn I wouldn’t.

I checked my phone.

I’d been gone eight hours. My fated mate had publicly cut me loose in front of the entire regional pack. My bed was empty, my bike was gone, there was a note on my mother’s pillow in handwriting she’d know anywhere.

Even an Ashgrove would have noticed by now.

The screen lit up my face in the dark.

No texts.

No voicemails.

Zero missed calls.

I stood in that parking lot and laughed until my ribs hurt, and then I laughed until I was crying, and a trucker asked if I was okay and I told him I’d never been better.

Then I dropped the phone in the trash, got back on my bike, and rode toward the only people on earth who had ever put my name in writing.

I had six days to reach the Ivory Guard.

What I didn’t know was that on the seventh — the day they thought was my birthday — my father would walk into an archive at 3 a.m. and find one file missing from the third cabinet.

And every phone I’d never owned would start ringing at once.