Filed to story: The Alpha’s Pen Pal Book
It was especially hard to not sign it “Future Alpha Wesley Stone” since that was how I was used to writing my name and being addressed by most of the members of my pack.
Not that it mattered. Because there was no way I was going to be writing to my pen pal again. I did the bare minimum for the assignment. I would get my A, and then I would never have to write to them again.
HAVEN
My jaw clenched after reading his letter, and I turned it over, grabbed the closest writing utensil to me—a dull, red crayon—and wrote out my response.
Dear Wesley Stone,
You do not deserve the word “dear” in front of your name. You are a big, ugly meanie. I hope someone punches you in your stupid face, and I hope it hurts you the same way your words hurt me.
See you never,
Haven Kenway
I dropped the red crayon onto the top of my desk, then tucked my hands beneath my thighs, trapping them between my legs and the seat of my chair so no one could see how much they shook.
I blinked back the tears shimmering in my eyes, trying to remind myself it was nothing personal. It was nothing against me. He didn’t even know me or anything about me.
He wasn’t trying to be a big, ugly meanie.
I shouldn’t have let his words bother me. He didn’t know I was an orphan. He didn’t know someone left me at the fire station when I was a baby, wrapped in a purple blanket with my name, Haven Kenway, embroidered on one corner.
He didn’t know the social workers searched for any records of anyone with the last name Kenway having given birth in any nearby town and that they found nothing. He didn’t know I had spent my life being moved from home to home to home. He didn’t know I was with my ninth family in the same number of years.
Again, it shouldn’t have bothered me. Because I was finally in a home where I felt comfortable and safe, where I actually felt the beginning of a connection to the people fostering me.
When I was a baby, they moved me early. I was what they called “high needs.” I constantly needed to be held and hated to be left alone in any room, ever. I guess it was exhausting for my first family because they moved me before I was even a year old.
The next family lasted longer, almost until I was two, before they decided I was too old, and they only wanted to foster babies. And after I turned two, it had been one home every year. Until it wasn’t.
My foster parents, Jack and Shirley Franklin, didn’t have any other kids in their home. Well, not anymore, at least. Their children were all grown up and moved out, so they wanted to open their home to a child in need. A child like me.
I’d been keeping my fingers crossed that this placement would last longer than the rest. It had already been almost a year since I moved here when I was eight.
Jack and Shirley had treated me with nothing but kindness. They bought me what I needed when I needed it, and even got me surprise gifts when there wasn’t any reason for them. They showed up for every school event, and Shirley picked me up from school in her air-conditioned car every day.
They enrolled me in dance lessons, something I had been wanting to try since I was four years old and caught a snippet of someone dancing ballet on TV. They told me I could call them Mom and Dad, too, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do that yet.
When my hands were back to normal and not trembling, I removed them from beneath my legs and scanned his letter one more time, checking the address on the envelope so I could write the correct address on mine.
He said he didn’t want to continue to write to each other, but, just like him, my teacher was giving us a grade for this pen pal assignment. So I had to write him back. But I couldn’t send him what I wrote on the back of his letter. It was the truth, but I didn’t want to be a big, ugly meanie back to him. Shirley always said, “Treat others the way you want to be treated,” and Jack always said, “You can’t fight fire with fire.” And I didn’t want to get in trouble.
I took a deep breath, calming my emotions and forcing the tears down. I was Haven Kenway, and I would not let some stupid twelve-year-old boy get to me.
I grabbed my favorite pencil—one of the good ones, the kind with the type of eraser that didn’t leave annoying streaks on the paper—and I sharpened it with my handheld sharpener until it was as pointy as possible. My pencils always had to be sharp. I couldn’t stand dull pencils. I pulled out my dictionary and thesaurus, setting them within easy reach. Then I took out a clean piece of my nice, crisp, white paper with perfect blue lines and wrote back to my pen pal, who didn’t want me.
Dear
Wesley,
Thank you for being honest with me. It’s not a surprise that you don’t want me as a friend. I’m used to people not wanting me.
You see, I’m an orphan. My parents left me when I was a baby. I was only a few days old. I have lived in pretty much one home a year since I was a baby. So I guess that would make it nine homes now, since I am nine years old. And since I move so much, it makes it harder to make friends.
I’m not telling you this to make you feel bad. I just wanted to tell you I know why you did it, and even though you didn’t ask for it, I forgive you.
I hope you get your A.
Haven Kenway
WESLEY
The reply letter came in our packhouse mail almost a week after I sent mine. I didn’t realize I wrote my home address on the envelope instead of the school’s address.
I arrived home to find the letter already open. It was on the small, round dining table in the kitchen of the alpha suite where my family and I lived. My mom sat in the chair facing the doorway, giving me “the look.”
Every kid knew that look. It was the look that put the fear of Selene in the toughest of wolves and lycans. The look that made even my dad, Alpha Harrison Stone of the Crescent Lake Pack, tuck his tail between his legs and say, “I’m sorry,” before he even knew what he did wrong. The look that said, “You done messed up.” That look.
Don’t get me wrong. My mom, Luna Emily Stone, was the best mom any lycan could ever ask for. I mean that. She was truly the glue holding our family, and our pack, together, just like any good luna should.
That’s why the ancestors of our pack made a rule that the alpha heir could only take over the pack once they marked their mate—be it fated or chosen—so they had the person who could balance them and keep them from being too overworked or stressed.
Obviously, the pack had the beta, gamma, and delta positions to help the alpha as well, but those people couldn’t calm down an angry, irritated lycan in the same way a mate could. Even if something happened to the current alpha, the next highest ranked member with a mate would run the pack until the heir found or chose their mate.
Not all werewolf packs handled succession that way. Some packs designated an age at which they handed the pack over, and others let the current alpha decide when their heir was ready. But this was the way our pack had done things since the beginning.
With that look on my mom’s face, I was likely in for an earful. I didn’t get in trouble often. I was well-behaved and a rule follower, but like any kid—wolf or lycan or human—I messed up occasionally.
I sat in the chair right across from her, folding my hands on top of the table as I eyed her. She gestured at the open envelope on the table, so I picked it up, took out the letter, and read it to myself.
With each word, I shrank further and further into my seat, my mother’s eyes boring a hole straight into my brain, as if she might extract the words I had written to this girl for her to respond so coldly to me.
New Book: Veiled Desires of the Alpha King Novel
Dayson was the alpha of the largest pack in North America. Powerful figures from other packs sought to offer gorgeous girls as potential mates for Dayson. He steadfastly rejected these advances, he was not a pawn to be manipulated. But eventually there came a mysterious girl he could hardly say No. Who was she?