After My Alpha Rejected Me for the Warrior Girl

I ran the whole way back to Judith's cottage, my heels sinking into wet grass, my mother's warning about the two-day window ringing in my head like a struck bell. I made calls I had no right to make anymore. Old healer contacts from the border packs, a trader in Wexford who owed Judith a favor from years back, even a rogue broker Judith once helped for free. Every line came back the same. No stock. No trade. No interest in helping a she-wolf with a torn mark and no pack behind her name.

I tried Silverfang myself, though I knew before I dialed how it would go. A clipped female voice answered, cool as the mineral tang I still remembered from the empty vault. "We don't negotiate with rejected wolves," she said, and hung up before I could say Judith's name.

By afternoon, Judith's breathing had changed. Shallow, then catching, like her lungs kept forgetting the rhythm halfway through. I sat at the edge of her bed and reached for the only thing I had left to give her — her own voice, from her own notebooks, read back to her in the dark.

"'Wolfsbane strain three exhibits a forty-eight-hour degradation window in the bloodstream,'" I read, my voice steadier than I felt. "'Refined antidote reverses vascular graying within six hours of administration.'" I kept going because the alternative was silence, and silence was where I'd start to think about what six hours we didn't have.

Judith's hand found mine somewhere in the middle of a paragraph about clove-root concentration ratios. Her fingers were cold. I held on anyway.

"You always were a good student," she whispered, eyes closed, mouth curving faintly. I didn't answer. I kept reading.

---

The mind-link between us had been thinning for years — Judith was never strong enough to hold it wide open, and I'd never had the training to reach for her the way I might have if I'd grown up anywhere else. But that night, past midnight, something in the thread widened instead of narrowed, like a door left ajar on purpose.

I felt her hands first. Not memory — sensation, real and present, moving through the link like it belonged to me. A healer's hands, steady even now, folding down over a patient's chest out of forty years of habit, except this time there was no patient. Just her own ribs. Just her own stillness settling in.

Then warmth, draining out slow, the way heat leaves a stove long after the fire's gone.

Then nothing.

I sat in the dark of her cottage with her hand still in mine, and I understood, with a clarity that had no room left for hope, that my mother was dead. The link didn't snap the way Kannon's rejection had. It simply dimmed, and dimmed, and went quiet, the way a candle gives out when there's nothing left to burn.

I didn't cry. I sat there for three hours with her hand cooling in mine, and when I finally stood, my face was dry, and something in my chest had gone as flat and hard as river stone.

I packed nothing for myself. I gathered her satchel — the cracked leather one she'd carried since before I was born — and her notebooks, every log documenting the strain, the antidote, its absence, the hour-by-hour collapse of her own body written in her own steady hand until the handwriting stopped being steady at all. I tucked them under my arm like they were the only thing left worth saving. They were.

---

The great hall was warm and loud when I walked in, firelight catching on the moonstone pendant at Presley's throat as she laughed at something Roland had said. Kannon sat at the head table, half-turned toward her, and for one moment before anyone noticed me, I watched the two of them look like exactly what they'd always wanted to look like.

I crossed the hall in twelve steps. My claws were out before I reached her — only the claws, my wolf too wrecked to give me anything more, but it was enough. I closed my hand around the pendant and tore it from her neck in one motion, welts blooming red across her throat as she screamed.

I turned and threw it through the open window behind me. I didn't watch it fall into the gorge. I didn't need to.

Then I turned to Kannon, and for the first time since the night he rejected me, he looked directly at my face.

Three strokes. Three deep gashes opened across his cheek before he could raise a hand to stop me. He staggered back into the table, blood sliding down his jaw, staring at me like he was seeing something he'd never once considered possible.

I didn't say a word. I turned, walked out through the hall doors, across the courtyard, past the border stones, and out of Ironvale's territory without looking back once.