After My Alpha Rejected His Wolfless Luna Before Everyone

I didn't know about Mia then. I learned the rest later, in pieces, from her whispers and her shaking hands.

The morning after the rejection, she was on her knees in Wyatt's office, scrubbing the floor. Lola had ordered every room scoured of "that old jasmine smell." So Mia scrubbed. Eyes down, like always.

Eyes down is how she saw it. A thin curved scratch in the floorboards, beside the bookshelf. The kind a hidden panel leaves when it swings out too many times.

She pressed the wood. It clicked.

Behind it sat a second ledger, handwritten, the corners soft from use. On the desk lay the official budget, neat and typed. Mia compared the two. Steel. Silver. Wolfsbane. The numbers did not match. Not even close.

She told me she couldn't breathe. She told me she almost put it back.

Instead, she copied every page.

Two nights, by a candle stub in the laundry room, her fingers black with ink. Every time Lola's heels clicked down the hall, Mia shoved the pages under a pile of sheets and held her breath until the sound faded. Twice, Lola stopped right outside the door. Twice, she laughed at something and moved on.

On the third dawn, Mia wrapped the copies in oilcloth and slipped out through the kitchen gardens. At the border stood the hollow birch where I'd once taught her the old scout signs. She scratched the mark into the bark. Urgent. Eyes only.

Then she walked back to the pack house with her gaze on the floor. Nobody noticed she'd been gone. Nobody ever noticed Mia.

That was her gift. I should have seen it years ago.

---

I found the packet at dusk on the fourth day.

The scratch on the birch was fresh. Inside the hollow, the oilcloth smelled of lye soap and fear. I carried it back to the cabin and opened it on the table with the one good leg.

Mia's handwriting was small and cramped, every letter pressed hard into the paper. I read the first page. Then the second. By the fifth, I had stopped breathing.

It wasn't only the stronghold.

The infirmary's maintenance fund was gone. So was the emergency stockpile. The fever tinctures for the pups. The wolfsbane antidote for border patrols. The winter rations we kept sealed in the cellar. Wyatt had bled them all, month after month, in careful little amounts that no one would catch.

I would have caught it. That was why he'd locked me out of those books two years ago and told me to "rest."

My hands were shaking. I looked at them, surprised. It wasn't grief. Grief had gone quiet somewhere around the third day. This was hotter. It climbed my arms and settled behind my teeth.

Pups had slept in that infirmary. My grandmother had died under a roof built by men who counted coins instead of lives.

I squared the pages against the table. I slid Mia's copies in with my own, forged orders, brass registry plate, invoices. I tied the whole dossier with twine and wrote one word on the cover.

Complete.

---

Beta Vance came the next evening.

I heard his car first, then his footsteps on the rotten porch. He knocked like a man selling insurance. When I opened the door, he stood there in a pressed gray suit, with dust already clinging to his shoes.

"Luna," he said.

"I'm not anyone's Luna."

"Elisa, then." He stepped in. His eyes slid to a spot above my left shoulder and stayed there. "May I sit?"

"There's one chair."

He didn't take it. He tugged his cuffs instead. Left, then right. "I'll be brief. The pack is in a delicate moment. Tensions are high. We all want what's best for everyone."

"Do we."

"The Alpha is prepared to be generous." Another tug. "A parcel on the southern border, three acres. Omega housing, fully furnished. A modest monthly pension. All we ask is that you leave Ironridge for good, and that you take nothing to any outside forum." He cleared his throat. "Call it a compromise. For the greater good. For stability."

Three words. He said them like prayers.

I let him finish. I watched his cuff links catch the dusk light, and I thought about how many times I'd poured this man tea in my own kitchen. How many pack disputes I'd settled so he could take the credit.

"Three acres," I said.

"Generous, considering your... circumstances."

"Wolfless, you mean."

He flinched. Barely.

I stepped closer. He didn't look at me. He couldn't.

"Vance. Did you know about the den?"

His hand flew to his collar. His fingers worked at the knot, loosening something that was not tight.

He said nothing.

The silence told me everything. Years of silence, stacked like bricks. The same silence that had stood in that circle of thirty wolves while Wyatt cut me open with a sentence.

"You may go," I said.

"Elisa, please be reasonable. If this reaches the Council, no one will be safe. Not the pack, not the alliances, not—"

"Go."

He went. The door shut behind him with a soft, cowardly click. His car started. The sound faded down the road until the woods swallowed it.

I stood still for one breath. Two.

Then I picked up the dossier and slid it into a waterproof case. I pulled the petition from the bottom of the pile and checked the seal. I laid out my boots, my coat, a map with a single border marked in red.

Beneath my ribs, something turned over, slow and heavy, like it was waking up.

Tomorrow, I would cross into Lycan land.