They Erased My Name. Now Every Alpha Kneels to Me Chapter 04

They Erased My Name. Now Every Alpha Kneels to Me Chapter 04 – W. Ashgrove Is a Woman

Sixty-three missed calls in eleven minutes.

MOM. DAD. CASSIAN. DORIAN. MOM. MOM. MOM.

Three hundred and seventy-two days of silence, and now the burner phone I’d bought in Ohio wouldn’t stop shaking in my hand. Two miles from the gate. I sat on my bike at the side of the road and watched it light up like a slot machine.

There was one voicemail. Eleven seconds. I played it, once, with my thumb over the delete key.

It was my father. Not speaking. Just breathing – that wrecked, ragged, animal sound a man makes when he is trying

not to howl in front of his sons.

Then: “Little Bird. Whatever they told you about us – don’t come home. He’s watching the roads.”

He.

“You could call back,” Nyx said. “You could hear what she has to say.”

“She had a year.” I turned the phone face-down inside my jacket. “She can have a year back.”

Here’s the thing about the number sixty-three. It isn’t love. It’s panic. Love shows up on day two. Panic shows up when

someone realizes there’s about to be a headline.

I rode the last two miles and stopped in front of a wrought-iron gate with a silver crown worked into it.

The guard came out of the booth, took one look at me, and physically laughed.

“Deliveries at the south gate, sweetheart.”

I took off my helmet.

I’m five foot five with black hair to my waist and a face that gets me carded buying energy drinks. I’ve made peace with it. Mostly.

I handed him the black envelope without a word.

He read it. He read it twice. He read it a third time. Then he keyed his radio and said, in a completely different voice:

“Director Hale. W. Ashgrove is at the north gate. W. Ashgrove is a woman.”

Behind me, three trucks of new recruits went dead silent.

“Enjoy this,” Nyx purred. “You’re going to hear that sentence for the rest of your life.”

The Ivory Guard campus is a hundred and sixty acres of stone and glass owned by the Crown itself. Fifty of us in the intake year. By the end of the trial fortnight there will be thirty-five, and the fifteen who fail are escorted off the property

and blacklisted from every pack on the continent. Forever. No appeals.

Director Hale met me on the front steps holding my file like a man who’d just been handed a live grenade with a bow

on it.

“Miss Ashgrove. You’ll be skipping the trial fortnight.”

Fifty heads turned.

“Sir?”

“Your assessment scores are the highest recorded in this institution’s history. Not this year.” He said it loudly. On purpose, I think. “Ever. It would waste everyone’s time to make you sit through it. You’ll spend two weeks with

Instructor Gideon instead.”

Forty-nine people looked at me like I’d killed something they loved.

Instructor Gideon is sixty, built like a retaining wall, and never once in fourteen days told me I’d done well.

He tested recall. He tested pack law – three centuries of blood-debt statutes, arbitration precedent, mating contracts.

He threw impossible scenarios at me: two packs, one dead heir, four hours to stop a war, go.

On day nine he stopped mid-question, stared at me for a long moment, and said, “Who taught you this?”

“My father,” I said. “By accident.”

Because that’s the joke, isn’t it. Every hour I sat quiet in Rhodes Ashgrove’s office as a kid, filing his papers, fetching

his coffee, listening to him negotiate with monsters he thought he was babysitting me.

He was training his own replacement.

The other recruits ate together, so I ate with them. It took four days to want to drown all of them. The worst was

Corbin Shaw, second son of the Shaw pack, jaw like a shovel and opinions like a landfill. His shadow was Vela Kestrel,

who informed a room of fifty people that “the little one” got a pass because somebody at the top wanted her in his bed.

“May I bite her?” Nyx asked.

“Behave.”

On the last morning they packed us into the auditorium.

Director Hale walked onstage. And behind him, without ceremony, came a silver-haired man in a charcoal suit who

owns half of everything, and the room made a sound like all the air had left it at once.

King Aldric. The Crown.

“Today you learn whether you belong to the Ivory Guard,” Hale said. “Fifteen of you go home within the hour. I’ll name

seven Team Captains. Then His Majesty will name this year’s Unit Commander.”

Beside me, Corbin Shaw stretched out his legs and smirked at the ceiling.

Hale read the Captains. “Juno. Torin. Perry. Nessa. Enzo. Ansel.” A pause. “Ashgrove.”

Then the cuts. Fourteen names. Faces going white one row at a time.

Corbin was still smirking when Hale read the fifteenth.

“Shaw.”

Vela’s name came right after his, and she screamed – an actual unhinged shriek – and Corbin hauled her out with murder in his eyes and his hand clamped over her mouth.

I should have watched him leave more carefully.

I didn’t, because the King had stepped to the front of the stage.

“Unit Commander outranks every Captain in this intake,” he said. “It is the highest post in this house that isn’t mine. I

have watched all of you for fourteen days.”

His eyes found me in the back row and stopped.

“This year’s Unit Commander is Wren Ashgrove.”

And in the ringing, disbelieving silence, I heard a thought that did not belong to me, drifting off a man three rows over

who was staring at the back of my head:

Ashgrove? The Ashgroves reported their daughter missing this morning.