Yes, My Alpha Queen

Citlali's POV

So, the beginning of this story? Huh. That's actually harder to pinpoint than you'd think. I mean, I could start with the night everything exploded—literally and figuratively—but that feels like cheating.

You want to know where it all really began? Fine. Let me think. When I was still a kid, I guess. Back when I didn't know shit about who I was or what I was capable of.

I was eight years old the first time I had it. Just a dream, nothing more—the kind of weird, vivid nonsense your brain cooks up when you're a kid.

At least, that's what I told myself every time I woke up from it, heart pounding, sheets soaked with sweat. It felt real in the way dreams sometimes do, but it was just my imagination running wild. Had to be.

In the dream, I was small. Really small—maybe four or five years old, young enough that the world felt impossibly huge and adults seemed like giants who could do anything.

I was sitting on something's back, my tiny hands tangled in thick grey fur that gleamed like moonlight. The fur was warm beneath my fingers, and I could feel powerful muscles moving underneath, each stride smooth and impossibly fast.

Around us, others moved the same way—dozens of them, maybe hundreds. Some carried children like dream-me, small figures clinging to their backs.

Others pulled carts loaded with supplies, though even in the dream I could tell something was wrong with the picture—the way everyone moved too fast, too tense, like prey that knew the predator was close.

Then the grey wolf I was riding on stopped, and I found myself standing on the ground, small enough that the adults towered over me like trees. Dream-me just stood there, waiting.

A woman appeared, striding back toward the group from somewhere behind. Even though I'd never seen her before that first dream, even though she was just some character my sleeping brain had invented, she felt important somehow.

The woman from the dream—not anyone I knew, just some figure my mind had conjured up. She was tall and fierce, with hair the color of sand in sunlight and eyes that caught the light like polished silver.

She moved like violence wrapped in skin, like someone who commanded attention without saying a word. She was magnificent in a way that made my chest ache even in sleep, though I had no idea why a dream-person would affect me like that.

She wore practical warrior's clothing—not the pretty decorative kind you'd see in paintings, and definitely not some fancy royal gown. Blood spattered across the dark fabric, fresh enough that I could almost smell the copper tang of it even in the dream.

Two figures moved toward her to meet her—warriors in armor, moving with the kind of fluid coordination that spoke of years fighting side by side.

"I just dealt with a few bastard wolf hunters who were tailing us," the woman said, her voice carrying that particular quality of command that made it impossible not to listen.

She wiped blood from a wicked-looking blade as she spoke, the motion casual, practiced. "You two, get to the front of the column. Scout ahead for ambushes. We can't afford another attack."

One of the warriors—a man with a scar bisecting his left eyebrow—hesitated. "My Queen, what about you?"

My Queen. Even in the dream, even knowing it was just my imagination, the title felt weighty somehow, like it meant something I couldn't quite grasp.

The woman's expression hardened, and even though I was just watching all this like a movie playing in my head, I felt the weight of her authority like a physical thing pressing down on the air around us.

"I gave you an order. Go."

They went. Of course they went. You didn't argue with a woman who looked like she'd just walked through a battlefield and come out the other side without breaking a sweat, even in a dream.

I watched them disappear toward the front of the strange caravan, then dream-me looked up at the woman. She seemed impossibly tall from a child's perspective, a warrior queen straight out of the kind of stories I'd never heard but somehow recognized anyway.

"Mama," I heard the child say, voice high and uncertain, "where are we going?"

The woman looked down, and for just a moment, her expression softened.

She knelt down and pulled the child into a brief, fierce hug.

"I don't have time to explain everything right now, baby," she said, her voice gentler but still carrying that edge of urgency. "We need to get to your uncle as fast as we can. Okay? Oh, babe."

The child nodded in the dream, because what else was a child supposed to do? The woman squeezed once more, then stood and strode back toward the rear of the column.

Then the woman shifted. Her body flowed and changed, becoming the massive white wolf. Dream-me climbed onto her back, small hands burying themselves in that moonlight fur.

The column moved faster after that, the world blurring around us as we ran.

The carts were abandoned first, supplies scattered across the ground as everyone who could shifted into their wolf forms. I didn't understand what I was seeing at the time, even in the dream—couldn't process the way human bodies seemed to flow and reshape themselves into massive wolves, each one easily twice the size of any normal animal.

Some of the children, the ones who couldn't shift yet, were secured to their parents' backs with leather straps and rope. Dream-me must have been one of them, though in the dream I couldn't feel the restraints, only the rhythm of the wolf's movement beneath me and the wind in my face.

The woman's voice rang out again. "This won't work. We need to abandon all supplies and move fast! Hold onto your cubs!"

Everyone started dropping their burdens, lightening their loads. Most of them were already in wolf form, and the cubs were fastened onto their parents' backs with pre-tied harnesses.

We ran. God, how we ran in that dream. The forest became a green blur, trees whipping past so fast they seemed to merge into walls of shadow and light.

I could hear others around us, the thunder of paws on earth, the harsh panting of wolves pushing themselves to their limits. The white wolf I was riding—the woman—was larger than the others, moving with a deadly grace that made her look like she was dancing rather than running for her life.

Then everything went wrong.

The pass appeared ahead of us, a narrow gap between two steep hills that the column had to funnel through. I felt the white wolf beneath dream-me tense, heard a sound that might have been a growl or a warning, but it was too late.

They were waiting for us. Hundreds of them—men in armor that gleamed silver in the dappled sunlight, mounted on horses that screamed and reared at the scent of wolf.