Hidden Bond by Nina Soelian
Hidden Bond
Description
Kylie is a hybrid - half-witch, half-werewolf - passing as wolfless in a pack that would destroy her if they knew the truth. She's spent twenty-one years suppressing her wolf, faking mediocrity, and following her mother's only rule: stay invisible. She's managed. Barely. Except for one problem she can't suppress, can't fake, and definitely can't solve - the future alpha is her fated mate, and he's two weeks from choosing someone else. He doesn't know what she is. He can never know. All Kylie has to do is keep her head down, her wolf buried, and her heart out of it. She's been doing it her whole life. How hard can it be?
Chapter 1
May 15, 2026
[Kylie’s POV]
“Ready… Steady… And… Go!” the horn sounds, deafening me.
The obstacle lane stretches out in front of me, forty-seven students ranked and scored in front of everyone who matters, and my entire strategy is to be aggressively average. Run fast enough that nobody wonders why a girl with no wolf shows up, slow enough that nobody wonders how she keeps up.
I have a system for this. A razor-thin margin I've been walking the whole twenty-one years of my life—careful mediocrity that takes more effort than winning ever would.
The first lane is an obstacle run—walls, ropes, a mud crawl that exists purely for the instructors' amusement. I clear it in the middle third, breathing harder than I need to, selling every heaving exhale.
Max Cornwell is on the east platform with the ranking overseers, clipboard in hand, jaw set the way it gets when he's being the future alpha instead of a person. Dark wavy hair, piercing blue eyes, the color of the stormy skies and the cheekbones that I could cut myself on. Impressive physique—and not helpful in the slightest.
He’s twenty-three years old, two weeks from his deadline to find a fated mate or take a chosen one. The whole pack is counting down for him. I'm also counting, but my version involves tracking the way light hits his eyes at this specific angle, which is a less productive use of mathematics.
I have a crush on the future alpha. That's the story—a crush, harmless and stupid, the kind that doesn't require a wolf or a bond or a claim I'll never act on. Not the other word.
The sparring rounds come after lunch and I draw a Theta girl named Ava who telegraphs her right hook like a novice. I dodge two swings, let the third connect, and go down in the final round on a sweep I absolutely saw coming.
"You're faster than you look," Ava says, offering me a hand up from the mat. Her grip is easy, unbothered—that confidence that everyone have, except for me—this confidence comes from not having to ration oneself.
"Low bar." I take it, brush off my knees. "But I appreciate the effort."
She snorts. Nobody else even looks our way, which is exactly right—respectable loss, textbook invisibility.
Max's gaze sweeps the ring while he marks scores. It passes over me the way it passes over everyone, and my heart does a thing I refuse to name.
The endurance lane is last—five laps, increasing speed. This is where control costs the most because my body wants to run, not jog. The wolf inside me has been aching for it since I was old enough to feel her pressing behind my ribs, begging for something I can't give her.
Third lap. The girl ahead of me—Jess, one of Mina Walker's orbit—stumbles, or performs stumbling, her elbow catching the lane barrier and swinging it into my path while another body boxes me toward the edge.
Mina herself watches from the sideline, her face arranged into polite concern. She's Max's expected chosen mate, the pack's golden girl—beautiful the way girls with real power are always beautiful, like the world quietly rearranges itself to accommodate them. She never dirties her own hands.
My knee catches the displaced barrier and I go down hard, palms tearing against the track surface. The wolf surges to absorb the impact and I shove her back so hard my vision whites out.
I finish the lap dead last. Twenty-third drops to thirty-first. No instructor says a word about the crooked barrier or the convenient collision.
On the platform, Max's pen stops against his clipboard, and he's looking at the lane, then at the barrier, then back at his scores. He sees it—I know he sees it—and he writes something down and moves on.
"You good?" A girl from my left slows for half a second beside me, already past before I answer.
"Love it. Eating gravel is a whole hobby of mine." She's already gone, but the joke is for me—the alternative is admitting my palms are bleeding and my ankle is folding in on itself.
I clean my hands on my leggings and walk out like nothing is wrong. This is what it costs to stay hidden in a pack that would throw us out tomorrow if they knew what my mother really is—a witch who's been passing as a werewolf since she married my father—and what that makes me.
The walk home takes twenty minutes. I spend them recalculating how badly today damaged my cover, turning the numbers over until my skull aches. The front door opens to my mother standing in the kitchen with her arms folded and her mouth already shaped for a fight. Hope doesn't do casual.
"Tell me," she says, "that the future alpha did not personally watch you fall on your face today."
"Hi, Mom. Lovely to see you too." I drop my bag by the door. "I'm having a great day, thanks so much for—"
"Kylie." Her voice drops into the register that sounds like patience and is definitely closer to a cage. "Did he see you?"
"Everyone saw me." I shove my shaking hands into my sleeves. "That's how public trials work."
"Don't be clever with me." She crosses the kitchen in two steps and her hands find my shoulders, gentle and steady—the way she holds me when she wants me to feel loved while she takes me apart. "You were supposed to be invisible. That is the one thing I ask."
My throat closes around the words I want. "I didn't do anything, Mom. They came after me."
"And you let them make you visible." Her grip tightens. "If people are watching you, they start watching us. The glamour has limits, Kylie."
My nails dig into my palms inside my sleeves, finding the cuts from the track. "I know the glamour has limits."
"Do you?" Her voice stays perfectly even, which is worse than yelling. "Tomorrow it's Max Cornwell asking why the wolfless girl moves too fast, heals too quick, doesn't carry a scent. You cannot be interesting to him."
"What was I supposed to do?" My voice cracks on the last word, and I hate it. "Let them shove me down and just lie there?"
"Yes." Her eyes move across my face, searching for cracks. "If lying there keeps you small enough to survive, you lie there."
But it was her who made sure I survived. As much as I despise my mother’s control, I know she’s right, because the last and only time I let my true nature surface, it went badly. I was only eight. I cannot forget the aftermath of it. I swallow thickly.
It is not something I remember clearly or like remembering at all. But the blood on my small, childish hands, the warmth of it quickly cooling the same as the body beneath me—all of it is not letting me go, hunts me down in my nightmares and reminds me just how dangerous I can be even if I don’t want it.
Mom did everything in her power (literally) to protect me, and that sacrifice is not something I can forget or ignore. It’s also why I’ve been hiding my whole life—and if hiding means no more victims, I should be content with that.
Hidden Bond
30 Chapters
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