I Had Triplets from the Alpha Who Hates Me: The Virgin Alpha Marked the Wrong Witch

Chapter 1

My mother always said that red was the most honest color in the world.

That it didn't pretend to be gold when it was fire.

I grew up trying to believe her.

It wasn't easy.

My name is Ellowen Volkov, and I was born a redhead in a family where red hair was synonymous with trouble. In the Lunar Witch lineage, appearance had always carried weight. Dark-haired witches were elegant, powerful, respected. Blondes were seen as blessed, full of lunar grace. And redheads? Redheads carried an ancient superstition that no one had the courage to say out loud, but everyone practiced in silence.

Unstable. Unpredictable. Dangerous.

My mother, Enora, was blonde. Wheat-blonde, with honey eyes and the kind of soft beauty that made people look twice. She was everything the family approved of. Delicate, polished, with a luminous, harmonious magic that never frightened anyone.

My father was Russian.

Red-haired like an ember, tall, with that way of filling an entire room just by being in it — or so she told me. She'd met him on a trip to Saint Petersburg when she was twenty-two, fallen in love in three days, and forgotten the world for three months. She came home pregnant and alone. He didn't come with her.

I never really found out what happened. My mother changed the subject every time I asked, and after a while I stopped asking. Some questions you learn to swallow before you ask them.

What I did know was that I'd inherited everything from him.

The hair. The short stature that was even more embarrassing in a family of tall women. The freckles on my nose that appeared in summer and vanished in winter. And the magic.

Ah, the magic.

In our lineage, each witch developed her gift after turning sixteen. My grandmother, Dagnar, controlled lunar magic in its purest form — light, time, memory. My cousins had been blessed with admirable gifts. Beatrice projected illusions so perfect you questioned your own sanity. Latoya manipulated emotions with a single touch. Janiely entered dreams and planted false memories like seeds.

Elegant gifts.

Gifts that made my grandmother smile.

Gifts that people applauded.

I developed winter.

The first time happened at sixteen, during a family dinner. Beatrice had announced in front of everyone that I looked like a maid trying to wear a witch's clothes. Everyone laughed.

I didn't say anything — I never said anything — but I felt something slide down my spine like ice water, and suddenly every flower in the centerpiece wilted at once. The air chilled until people reached for their coats. My grandmother watched me for a long time after that.

It wasn't pride I saw on her face.

It was caution.

"Winter magic," she said later, when we were alone. "It hasn't appeared in this family in two hundred years."

That should have made me feel special.

It didn't.

Because winter magic was considered dangerous. Tied to emotions too directly, without filter, without refined control. When I was sad, the temperature dropped. When I got startled, the windows froze. Once, at Latoya's birthday, she shoved me in front of everyone like it was a joke and it snowed inside the mansion for four minutes.

My grandmother erased the staff's memories that day.

My cousins found one more reason to laugh.

"Careful around Ellowen," Janiely would say. "If she gets sad, we'll need coats in July."

I learned not to feel in front of them.

I learned to smile when I wanted to cry, to leave the room when the anger started sliding down my spine, to breathe slowly until the cold retreated. I got good at it. So good that sometimes even I believed I was fine.

I left for the College of Magical Sciences outside the mansion at eighteen. Four years of relief. I studied enchanted botany, the history of lineages, advanced potions. I earned high marks — not because I was the most talented, but because I worked twice as hard as everyone else to make up for what I thought I lacked.

I came back at twenty-two.

Nothing had changed.

Beatrice still looked at me like I was a stain on the living room carpet. Latoya had perfected the habit of touching my shoulder and injecting a stab of shame that I felt for hours afterward. Janiely simply pretended I didn't exist, which was sometimes almost worse than the other two combined.

My mother tried. She hugged me, told me I was beautiful, that my magic was rare and powerful. But she never stood up to the others for me. Never raised her voice. Never told my grandmother what happened when no one was watching.

I understood. My mother was too gentle for that family. Too much gentleness in that place was almost a disadvantage.

Then on the day I turned twenty-three, my grandmother gathered us in the main hall.

Me, Beatrice, Latoya, Janiely.

Our grandmother sat in the dark velvet armchair that no one dared sit in but her, hands folded in her lap, eyes sweeping over each of us slowly.

"My time is coming to an end," she said, without a shred of drama. Like someone talking about the weather outside.

The silence that followed was heavy.

"The Suprema is not chosen by love or by favoritism. She is chosen by the ancestral magic. And the ancestral magic recognizes one thing above all."

She paused briefly.

"Life."

I didn't understand immediately.

Beatrice understood before I did. I saw the exact moment she grasped it, because her shoulders relaxed in that specific way — the way of someone who has just realized she is going to win.

"You have three months to become pregnant before my ninetieth birthday. The first to conceive inherits everything. My magic, the power of every witch in this lineage, the fortune, the properties, the absolute authority."

She looked at us one last time.

"Whoever inherits will be obeyed by all. Without exception."

Beatrice turned to me and smiled.

It was the smile she saved for when she knew I was going to lose.

I left the hall with my heart in my throat and the air around me growing cold enough that I could see my own breath.

Three months.

With no one.

I had never dated. Never been desired. Never had a man look at me as if I were worth something.

I walked into my bedroom, closed the door, and sat on the edge of the bed for a long time.

Then I opened my computer.

Because if fate hadn't given me what the others had, I was going to buy it.

And this time, no one was going to stop me.