My Alpha Rejected Me for a Fake Luna

Dawn came gray and wet through the birches, and I woke on four legs with frost in my whiskers and a scent still pouring off my own coat that I did not know how to hold.

Winterbloom. Starfire. Those weren't my words. They came from somewhere older, unspooling in my head as if the wolf under my ribs had a vocabulary I'd never been given.

I hadn't slept so much as gone under. When I surfaced I shifted back—easier this time, no bones fighting me—and pulled on the ceremonial dress I'd carried in my teeth across the boundary line. The white silk was ruined at the hem. I didn't care.

That was when I felt the first one.

A distant shudder, faint as a memory of a memory, moving up through what was left of the pack channel. Not a howl. A wound. Somewhere east of Shadowvale's gate, three warriors were bleeding, and I knew it the way you know your own heartbeat had skipped—because for three years those wards had been an extension of my own nervous system, and even severed, the ghost of the loss still rang in me.

Rogues. Coordinated. Through the eastern seam I'd doubled-woven last spring because the soil ran soft there.

I closed my eyes.

I thought about Cassian standing in the smoke of a burned supply cache, turning to Ashlynn, saying *do something*. I thought about her mouth opening and no ward coming out. I thought about the way his own aura would be crackling at the edges by now—the biological ledger already balancing itself, hour by hour, against what he'd done in front of three hundred witnesses.

My thumb moved against my palm. Sigil, sigil, sigil.

I didn't go back.

---

He came for me by midmorning.

I felt him before I heard him—not with my ears, but through the ragged place inside my chest where the bond had been. A pull, insistent, familiar. Cassian, following my scent north through the wet leaves the way a starving man follows woodsmoke.

And then he was in my head.

He didn't speak. He shoved images.

*Kaia, nineteen, kneeling in the mud of the caravan wreck, stitching moonlight into a barrier with hands that shook so badly the light wobbled. His face above hers, awed. His fingers under her jaw.* Mine. *He'd said it like a vow.*

*Kaia in his kitchen, wrapped in his shirt, laughing at something he'd said. His mouth at her temple.* Just a little longer. Just until the alliances are set.

*His voice in the dark, low against her ear.* You're the whole thing. You know that, right? You're the whole thing.

I stood very still under a birch tree with my palms open, and I let each memory arrive, and I did not flinch.

He had taught me, without meaning to, exactly how to endure being touched by something that wanted to hurt me. Three years of sleeping in an Omega's room, listed on the roster as border maintenance staff, had made me a scholar of not flinching.

When the last image faded, I answered him.

I opened the channel, the tiny thread of it that still ran between our ribs, and I filled it with nothing.

Not silence like an absence. Silence like a wall. Silence like the pressure at the bottom of a lake. I poured it into him until it rebounded—until I felt him stagger somewhere out there in the trees, breath catching, hand going to his sternum.

*Kaia—*

I traced the closing sigil into my palm. Firm. Deliberate. Seven strokes, the way my aunt had shown me the summer before she died.

The channel snapped shut.

The phantom pressure at my throat—the place his mark had never been—cooled and quieted. My hands did not shake.

I turned north and started walking.

---

The forest opened onto a shale ridge by afternoon, and I let myself rest against a flat stone with my dress hitched up over my knees, chewing a piece of jerky I'd found in the pocket of the coat I'd stolen off a fence post twenty miles back. My silver wolf paced under my skin, restless and enormous, wanting a direction I hadn't chosen yet.

I heard the footsteps before I smelled the wolf.

Human feet. Careful. Not fast. Someone who wanted to be heard before he was seen.

I stood up.

Marcus Cole came out of the birches with his ceremonial coat torn open at the shoulder and a leather ledger under his arm. He was not armed. He had walked, from the look of him, all night and most of the day.

He stopped at the base of the ridge and looked up at me, and his mouth was a thin flat line I remembered from every council meeting I had ever stood outside of, waiting for orders.

"I renounced," he said. Flat. Economical. The way Marcus said everything.

I waited.

"In front of the elders. The full oath. I laid my badge at his feet." His throat worked. "I brought you this."

He held up the ledger.

I knew what it was before he said the next thing. I'd seen him writing in it, once, years ago—sitting at a corner table in the war room, pen moving in the small precise hand he used for military briefings. I had assumed, then, that he was tracking supplies.

"Every hour," Marcus said. "Every ward. What it cost you. Three years of it. I kept them because I thought someone should, and I never—" He stopped. Started again. "I never spoke up. I'm speaking now."

He climbed the ridge and set the ledger down on the flat stone between us, and he did not look away from me while he did it.

Above us, somewhere further north than either of us had ever been, I could feel the pull of a border I did not yet have a name for.