My Mate Rejected Me for My Younger Sister

Vera came on Tuesdays and Fridays with the linen cart.

She was small and quiet, the kind of Omega who had learned to move through spaces without disturbing them. She never made eye contact with the warriors in the hall. She hummed under her breath sometimes — low, tuneless — and it had taken me two weeks to realize she only did it when she was nervous.

The first time I stopped her in the doorway of the Luna chambers, she went very still.

'I need a favor,' I said. 'Not an order. A favor. You can say no.'

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she nodded, once, and stepped inside.

It went slowly at first. A pair of sapphire earrings tucked inside a folded pillowcase. A gold bangle slipped beneath a stack of hand towels. The pearl bracelet — my mother's, the only thing of hers I'd been allowed to keep — I held for two extra days before I finally let it go. I sat on the edge of the bed with it pooled in my palm and told myself it was just metal and calcium. It didn't work. But I let it go anyway.

Vera returned it as money. Folded bills, small denominations, stitched into the hem of a dress she brought back from 'alterations.' She never said a word about it. She just set the dress on the bed, smoothed the skirt flat with both hands, and left.

I cut the hem open with nail scissors and counted every bill twice.

The rogue maps were harder to get. Calla's tracking manuals had been in the east wing storage room since I'd stopped training — boxed up and forgotten, the same way Elijah had forgotten I'd ever tried. I went in on a Wednesday afternoon when the pack house was quiet, told the warrior at the corridor that I was retrieving personal items from before the bonding, and he stepped aside without question. Lunas still had that much, at least. The appearance of authority.

I found the manuals in the third box. Calla's handwriting in the margins — neat, practical, no-nonsense, just like her. I sat cross-legged on the storage room floor and read until my legs went numb, memorizing the blind spots in the Ironcrest border patrol. The creek crossing at the northeast edge. The forty-minute gap in the rotation near the old mill road. The rogue corridor through the Ashfield pines that the pack didn't bother to watch because nothing useful ever came through it.

I put the manuals back exactly as I'd found them.

I closed the box.

I walked back to the Luna chambers and wrote everything down on a single sheet of paper in my smallest handwriting, then folded it into the lining of my winter coat.

Eden Vale. I had been practicing the name in my head for three weeks. Saying it quietly to myself in the bathroom with the water running. Letting it settle. It didn't feel like mine yet. But it would. I just needed time, and I was running out of it.

***

The announcement came on a Monday.

Margo sent it through the pack mind-link herself, which was already a statement. Lunas managed pack communications. Margo was not Luna. But she did it anyway, and no one corrected her, and I sat at the kitchen table with my coffee going cold and felt the message land in my skull like a stone dropped into still water.

*Holiday gathering, Christmas Eve, main hall. Formal dress. The Alpha requests full attendance.*

The Alpha requests. His words, her mouth. I wondered how long that had been happening without me noticing.

Vera came that Friday with the linen cart and something else — a flat garment box, ivory with a silver ribbon, the kind that came from expensive boutiques in the city. She set it on the bed without a word and looked at me with those careful eyes of hers.

'From Miss Margo's stylist,' she said quietly. 'Sent to the Luna chambers this morning.'

I opened the box.

Pale grey silk. Long, simple, elegant in the way that things are elegant when they've been chosen to diminish rather than flatter. The color of ash. The color of something fading.

I stood in front of the mirror in it while Vera pinned my hair up — she had steady hands, better than any stylist I'd been assigned — and I looked at myself for a long time.

Margo would wear emerald. Or gold. Something that caught light and held it. She would stand at the bottom of that staircase and every eye in the room would find her, and I would be the pale, quiet thing beside her, exactly as intended.

I reached for the last piece of jewelry I hadn't sold.

The mate ring was cold when I slid it onto my finger. Heavy. It had always felt heavy. I looked at it in the mirror — at the woman wearing it, grey silk and pinned hair and eyes that had learned to give nothing away — and I thought: *this is the last time.*

I didn't know yet how right I was.

I turned from the mirror, smoothed the skirt with both hands, and went downstairs.