Orphan Alpha novel Chapter 1

“Hannah, can you step into my office please?” Called Barb.

I sighed and turned around to walk back to her office. She gave me a gentle squeeze on the shoulder as I entered and sat down. Barb was a sweet woman; she had run the orphanage since before I had arrived. My eyes followed her as she took her own seat behind her desk, her glasses swaying on their chain around her neck. I couldn’t help but chuckle to myself at her appearance. She looked not a day over thirty, but she chose to dress like an elderly librarian from the fifties.

“As you are aware, Hannah, you age out in a month.” Her words wiped the laughter from my face. “How is the search for a job and apartment going? Have you found anything yet?”

“No.” my shoulders slumped heavily, “Nobody wants to take a chance on an orphan with no work history.”

“Well. I have great new than!” Barb chuckled. “I’ve recently been authorized to add another caregiver to the orphanage. The position comes with room and board as you will be responsible for the younger children and their needs round the clock.”

“Really?” I shrieked in excitement. Barb had just told me I wasn’t going to be homeless and on the streets in a month.

“Hannah,” Barb cautioned. “I wouldn’t offer this position to any of the others. Your circumstances are unique.”

Barb was right. Before coming to the orphanage, I had belonged to a pack. The rest of the orphans that had come through here in my time had all been human. The only other wolf in the entire place was Barb herself. She was offering me the position not just so that I wouldn’t end up on the street, but also so that I wouldn’t be considered a rogue threat by other wolves in the area. I was an alpha by birth, which made me an even bigger threat as a rogue.

I had come to the orphanage when I was eight, before my wolf had ever made an appearance. My parent’s and entire pack had been wiped out while I was at a sleepover in the neighboring human community. I couldn’t remember much about that night, just my friend’s father coming home in his policeman uniform with a grim look on his face. He had received a call from my parents, alerting him that something was wrong, but by the time he arrived, our packs compound was a grizzly murder scene. The locals had written it off as some kind of religious massacre. They all assumed we were a religious group of some sort. None of them had been aware that we were a pack of werewolves.