My Mate Rejected Me for My Younger Sister

The sky over the Ironcrest training grounds was still bruised purple when I pinned the silver badge to the inside of my jacket. My fingers trembled. Not from the cold, though my breath ghosted out in little clouds. From hope. The dangerous, fragile kind.

Three months. Three months of slipping out before dawn while the pack house slept. Three months of Calla Prentice barking corrections at me in the back woods, of running until my lungs burned, of memorizing scent trails by feel alone. Calla was a retired tracker with a mouth like sandpaper and eyes that missed nothing. The first time I'd shown up at her cabin asking to be trained, she'd looked me over and said, "You sure, Howell? Tracker work ain't pretty."

I'd said yes. Because pretty hadn't gotten me anywhere. Pretty was Margo's job.

Now the badge sat warm against my collarbone. Certified. Mine. Earned.

I touched it through the fabric one more time and started toward the eastern clearing. Elijah trained there every morning, alone. I'd been counting on alone.

I rehearsed it in my head as I walked. *Alpha. I qualified for tracker status last week. I'd like to run beside you at the next pack run.* Short. Steady. No begging in my voice. Calla had drilled that into me too. *Don't ask him for a place, Eden. Tell him you've taken one.*

My boots crunched over frost-stiff leaves. A jay screamed somewhere overhead. I told myself my heart was pounding from the climb up the ridge and not from the thin, stupid hope that today, finally, he might look at me like I was something more than a name on a contract.

I broke through the tree line and stopped.

The clearing wasn't empty.

Elijah was there in his wolf form — that huge obsidian wolf, shoulders higher than my chest, fur black as wet stone. I knew that wolf. I had only ever seen him from a distance, his great head turned away from me, his body language closed.

He was not closed now.

His head was bowed low, almost to the ground, and he was nuzzling another wolf. Auburn fur, slim build, smaller. Margo. Of course it was Margo. He was grooming her — running his muzzle along the fur behind her ears, slow, careful, like she was made of something precious. His tail moved in a soft, lazy arc. Content. Tender.

I had never seen him tender. Not once. Not in eight months of sharing his bed.

Margo's amber eyes lifted over his shoulder and found me. They held. The black lip of her wolf-mouth curled, just a little. Just enough.

My fingers went numb. I felt the pin slip free of the fabric before I understood I'd reached for it. It dropped into the moss at my boot with a tiny, soundless landing.

Elijah's ears swiveled.

He lifted his head from Margo's neck and turned, and then there was a shimmer in the air and he was a man again, naked from the shift, pulling on the trousers he'd left folded on a stump. He didn't rush. He never rushed. He saw me before I could kneel down for the pin, and his gaze dropped to the moss, and he walked over and picked it up himself.

He held it between two fingers, turning it slowly in the gray dawn light.

"A tracker pin," he said. His voice was quiet. That was always the worst version of it. "You did all this in secret."

I couldn't make my mouth work.

"Tell me something, Eden." He didn't look at me. He looked at the pin. "Did you really believe a piece of silver would make you belong at my side?"

Behind him, Margo had shifted too. She stood half-hidden by his shoulder, wrapped in his discarded shirt, her hair tangled and her cheeks flushed pink. She made a soft sound. Not a laugh. Close.

Elijah dropped the pin to the dirt.

He ground it beneath his boot heel. Slow. Deliberate. I heard the silver crack.

"Go home," he said.

I looked at the crushed pin in the mud. The little curl of it where his heel had twisted. Months of running until I vomited in the dirt. Calla's calloused hand on my shoulder saying *good, kid, good.* All of it, ground under his boot in three seconds.

Something in me finally went quiet.

I lifted my eyes to his. They were gray. I had once thought gray was a beautiful color.

"I, Eden Howell," I said, and my voice did not shake, "formally request rejection of this mate bond."

His jaw moved once. Margo's breath caught — sharply, like a person whose script had just gone off-page.

Elijah said nothing. He only looked at me. Then he turned, put his hand on Margo's lower back, and walked her past me toward the path down the ridge.

I stood alone in the clearing for a long time.

***

The pack mind-link is faster than any phone. By the time I'd walked back to the main house, my father already knew.

Two Ironcrest enforcers were waiting at the side door. Big men I didn't know by name. One held a duffel that wasn't mine.

"Miss Howell," the taller one said, polite as a funeral. "Your father has asked us to escort you home for a family visit."

"I need to pack — "

"It's been arranged."

I looked past them, toward the upstairs window of the east wing. Elijah's study. The curtain moved, just barely. He had given the order. Or he had given the silence that let the order be given. Same thing.

They didn't touch me. They didn't have to. I walked between them to the black SUV idling in the drive, and I got in, and I did not look back at the pack house I had spent eight months trying to be worthy of.

We drove three hours north, into the pines, into the place where my father kept the things he wanted hidden.

The gates of the Howell estate closed behind the car with a low, final sound.

It sounded like a trap.