Rejected by My Alpha Mate

I lost count of the days somewhere around the third one.

I walked because stopping felt like dying. The cold lived inside the place on my neck where the mark used to be—a dead weight, like a pebble pressed into bone. Every few miles, my body remembered the bond had been ripped out of it, and I'd have to crouch in the dirt until the shaking passed. Then I'd stand up and keep walking.

I ate what I found. Crab apples that puckered my mouth. A protein bar from the bottom of my bag. Snowmelt scooped from a stream that ran so cold it made my teeth ache. My silver ceremony dress went stiff with mud, then froze, then thawed, then went stiff again. By the second night I was walking in shoes that no longer had soles.

I didn't cry. I think part of me thought if I started, I wouldn't be able to stop, and stopping was the one luxury I couldn't afford.

The dawn I collapsed, I didn't know I was collapsing. One minute I was walking along a chain-link fence, and the next I was on my knees in the grass, watching my own hands sink into the dirt without feeling them.

Footsteps. Slow. Not hurried.

A man crouched in front of me. Dark hair. Dark coat. Eyes that took me in the way a healer takes in a wound—measuring, not flinching.

"Can you stand?" he asked.

I tried. I couldn't.

He didn't ask anything else. He just slid an arm under my knees and lifted me like I weighed nothing, and the heat coming off him was so startling that I almost flinched. I hadn't been warm in a long time.

I don't remember being carried inside. I remember a couch. A blanket that smelled like cedar. A glass of water pressed into my hand without comment. He sat across the room, not close enough to feel like supervision, not far enough to feel like abandonment. He didn't ask my name. He didn't ask where I'd come from. He didn't look at my neck.

I fell asleep waiting for the interrogation that never came.

When I woke, the light through the window had gone gold. The man was at a small table, sorting dried herbs into glass jars with the kind of patience I'd forgotten people were capable of. He glanced up when he heard me move.

"There's bread in the kitchen," he said. "And if you want work, I have plenty."

I stared at him. "Work."

"Feeding. Fencing. Sorting these." He nodded at the jars. "I won't ask for anything else."

I waited for the catch. None came.

"Okay," I said. My voice came out raspy. Unused. "Okay."

His name was Rhodes. He told me only that, and only because I asked. He showed me a small room off the back of the sanctuary house with a narrow bed and a window that faced the woods. He said I could stay as long as I needed. He said it the way other people might say good morning—plainly, like it wasn't a decision he expected me to argue with.

I laid down on that bed and put my hand on the dead spot on my neck and, for the first time since the ceremonial floor, I let myself breathe.

***

On the third day, I met Barnaby.

I didn't know his name yet. Nobody did. He was a half-shifted shape in the farthest enclosure, all jutting ribs and matted fur and eyes that hadn't been wolf-eyes in a long time—they were something further back than wolf, something past the point where language helps. The handler walking me through the sanctuary slowed her pace as we passed his pen.

"Don't get close," she said. "He'll go for you. He went for Rhodes twice last week."

I looked at him. He looked back.

I didn't move toward him. I didn't speak to him. I just registered, in some quiet place under my ribs, that I recognized the look in his eyes. I'd worn it for three days walking.

The next morning I carried my herb-sorting bowl out to a flat rock about twenty feet from his fence and sat down with my back to the post. I didn't look at him. I sorted lavender from chamomile, chamomile from valerian root, and let the work fill my hands.

He paced. He growled once. I kept sorting.

Around midday, the handler came by with feed buckets and frowned at me. "What's his name?" I asked.

She blinked. "He doesn't have one."

"Barnaby," I said.

She stared. "Why?"

"Because everyone deserves a name."

I didn't see Rhodes until later, when I glanced up and caught him standing under the eaves of the sanctuary house, watching. He didn't speak. He didn't come closer. Whatever he was thinking didn't show on his face. But he held the look a beat longer than a passing glance, and then he turned and went back inside.

I sorted herbs until the sun went down.

***

In Shadowveil, at 12:04 in the morning, Liam Voss sat alone in his office and smelled wildflowers and rain.

He stood. He searched. He turned the room over—lifted cushions, opened drawers, checked the windows for something blown in from outside. There was nothing. He sat back down at his desk and the scent was still there, soft and certain, exactly the way her hair used to smell when she slept against his shoulder.

His wolf paced behind his ribs and would not settle.

He summoned two healers at dawn. They found nothing. The next night, the scent returned. And the night after that.

He told no one. An Alpha did not admit to ghosts.