HIS REJECTED TRUE MATE

The pain waited until I was alone.

It started while I was locking up, sliding the deadbolt into place, the diner finally quiet behind me. A dull throb settled into my palm, right where the old scar sat pale and faded against my skin. I flexed my fingers, thinking maybe I had strained something carrying trays all day.

By the time I got home, it was not dull anymore.

It burned.

Not the sharp sting of a fresh cut, but something deeper, something that felt like it was coming from underneath the skin rather than on top of it. I sat on the edge of my bed and stared at my own hand like it belonged to someone else, turning it toward the lamplight, half expecting to see it glowing or splitting open.

Nothing.

Just an old white scar I had had since I was a kid, one my grandmother never fully explained and I had stopped asking about somewhere around fifteen, when it became clear she was not going to tell me.

I pressed my thumb against it and hissed.

That was new.

I do not remember deciding to call Wren. I just remember the phone was already ringing before I had fully thought it through, and she picked up on the second ring like she had been waiting for me to.

"Please tell me you are calling because you finally want to watch that documentary I sent you," she said.

"My hand hurts."

Silence.

Not the kind where someone is thinking of something to say. The kind where someone already knows exactly what you mean and is deciding how much of the truth they are going to give you.

"Wren."

"I am coming over."

She hung up before I could argue.

She showed up eleven minutes later in sweatpants and an old hoodie, her hair still damp like she had left in the middle of a shower. The second she saw my face, she did not bother with hello.

"Show me."

I held out my hand. She did not touch it right away. She just looked at it, her jaw tight, something moving behind her eyes that I had never seen there before.

"How long has it been hurting?"

"Since he left."

I did not have to say who.

"It got worse on the drive home. And then again just now, like it was reacting to something."

Wren exhaled slowly through her nose and sat down across from me, resting her elbows on her knees as she stared at the floor.

"Wren, you are scaring me."

"I know." She looked up. "I am sorry. I just need you to understand that what I am about to tell you is going to sound insane, and I need you not to shut down on me before I finish."

"Okay."

"I mean it, Ivy."

"I said okay."

She nodded once, almost as though she were steadying herself.

"That scar is not a normal scar."

I waited.

"It is a mark. The kind an Alpha leaves behind."

I laughed, a short, startled sound with no humor in it at all.

"An Alpha. Like Kade?"

"Like Kade."

"Wren, I have had this scar since I was a kid. I do not even remember getting it."

"That does not mean it was not left by one."

Something about the way she said it made my stomach drop.

"That does not make sense." I shook my head, pulling my hand back. "I have had this since I was eight. I remember my grandmother noticing it for the first time. She asked me where I had been, what I had done, and I could not tell her. I still cannot tell her. That is not something an Alpha does to a child."

"You do not know what happened that night."

"Neither do you."

"You are right." She held up her hands, palms out. "I do not. But I know what a mark like that looks like, Ivy. I grew up around pack markings. And that..." She pointed at my palm. "That is not a scar from a fall or a cut. It is too clean. Too deliberate. It was placed there."

The word hung between us.

Placed.

Like I had been branded and never knew it.

I stared down at my palm, at the pale line that had been part of my hand for as long as I could remember, and tried to see it the way she was describing it. Tried to imagine someone pressing it into my skin on purpose.

I could not.

"You are guessing," I said quietly.

"I am telling you what I know."

"And how do you know it?"

She hesitated. Her hands twisted together in her lap, and I watched her wrestle with something I could not see.

"Because I am not human either."

The words sat in the room between us for a long moment before either of us moved.

"You are a..."

I could not even finish the sentence. It felt too big for my mouth.

"Yes."

"You are a werewolf."

"Yes."

I stared at her, the person I had shared a hundred lunch breaks with, who knew my coffee order without asking, who had sat with me through two funerals and one truly disastrous breakup, and tried to reconcile her with the word she had just said.

"How long?"

"My whole life. It is not something that happens to you, Ivy. It is something you are born into."

"Then why did you never..."

"Because I am the last one."

Her voice cracked slightly on the word last, and whatever anger or confusion I had been building toward dissolved into something quieter.

"My family's pack was wiped out when I was a kid. A territory dispute that had nothing to do with us and everything to do with being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was young enough that a human family took me in, and I have spent every year since making sure nobody ever looks closely enough to figure out what I am."

"Wren..."

"If the wrong pack finds out there is a lone wolf with no territory and no protection living quietly in the middle of their land, that is not always a safe thing to be. So I do not talk about it. I do not use it. I just live like everyone else and hope nobody ever asks the wrong question."

"I am sorry."

"Do not be. It is not your fault."

"I still am."

She managed a small, tired smile.

"I know."

I looked down at my hand again, at the scar that suddenly felt like the least understood part of my entire life.

"So what does it mean? That an Alpha marked me?"

Wren was quiet for a moment before answering.

"Honestly? I do not fully know. Marks like that are not something you see every day, even in our world. It means something happened between you and an Alpha, something significant enough to leave a permanent trace. Whether that is connected to what happened today, I cannot say for certain."

"But you think it is."

"I think it would be a strange coincidence if it was not."

I sat with that for a long moment, turning it over in my mind.

Was I marked before I even met him?

Had I met him before, somewhere I could not remember, in some version of my life I had lost the way you lose the earliest years of childhood?

"I need to understand what is happening to me," I said finally. "I cannot just go back to pretending today did not happen. Not with this." I held up my hand. "Not when it feels like my own body knows something I do not."

"Ivy, be careful. The Ashfords are not people you investigate quietly. Whatever you are thinking of doing..."

"I do not know what I am thinking of doing yet."

That was not entirely true.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, an idea had already started to take root, small and stubborn, the kind that grows whether you water it or not.

If I could not get answers from Kade directly, then maybe I needed to get close enough that I would not have to ask.

Ashford Enterprises had been hiring for months. I had seen the signs around town and heard customers at the diner talk about the openings over coffee, always followed by some joke about how nobody who worked there ever seemed to leave.

I had not thought about it twice.

I was thinking about it now.

"Wren."

"I do not like that tone."

"What if I got a job there?"

She stared at me as though I had suggested walking into traffic.

"Absolutely not."

"Why not? It is a company. People apply for jobs there every day."

"It is not just a company, Ivy. It is his company. His pack runs through that building the same way blood runs through a body. If you walk in there asking questions, they will know exactly what you are doing within a week."

"Then I will not ask questions. I will just watch."

"That is worse."

"I need answers, Wren. I cannot keep living like this, waiting for my own hand to explain itself to me in the middle of the night."

She studied me for a long time, and I watched the argument slowly leave her expression, replaced by something closer to resignation.

"You are really going to do this."

"I do not see another option."

"There is always another option. You are just choosing the reckless one."

"Probably."

A ghost of a smile crossed her face despite everything.

"You have always been like this. Even before any of this happened."

"Like what?"

"Incapable of leaving something alone once it has decided to haunt you."

"I prefer determined."

"I prefer alive, which is why I am going to help you, against every ounce of my better judgment."

Relief loosened something tight in my chest.

"Thank you."

"Do not thank me yet. If this goes badly, I am blaming you at your funeral."

"Fair."

She reached over and closed my fingers gently around my palm, covering the scar the way you would cover a wound to keep it from getting worse.

"Whatever this mark means," she said quietly, "I do not think it is finished with you. I think it has only just started."

I did not tell her that some small, quiet part of me had already come to the same conclusion.

But as I lay in bed that night, staring at the ceiling, I could not shake the feeling that Kade Ashford was already part of this story, whether I wanted him to be or not.