Rejected by My Alpha Mate

The flicker came back on a Tuesday.

I was holding down a rogue-wolf during treatment—a young male with a gash across his ribs that kept reopening because he wouldn't stop thrashing. Maren was stitching. I had my weight across his shoulders, my hands pressing his front legs flat against the table, and he was making a sound in his throat that I felt more than heard.

"Almost done," Maren murmured. Her hands were steady. Mine were not.

The wolf bucked. My grip slipped. And behind my eyes—

Silver. Bright enough this time that I had to close them. Not a flash. A flare. Like someone had struck a match inside my skull and held it there.

I didn't let go of the wolf. I kept my hands where they were and breathed through my nose until the light faded and Maren said, "Got it."

I stepped back. The wolf went limp with relief. I walked out of the medical shed on legs that felt like someone else's and sat down on the ground behind the building where no one could see me.

My hands were shaking again. The dead spot on my neck was warm.

Not painful. Just... present. Like something dormant had rolled over in its sleep.

I pressed my palm flat against it and waited for the feeling to pass.

It didn't.

***

The nightmares started that week.

Not every night. Just often enough that I stopped being surprised when I woke up on the floor with my back against the wall and my knees pulled to my chest. Always the same dream. The ceremonial ground. Liam's voice carrying across two hundred witnesses. The bond tearing out of me in real time while my father stood in the crowd and did nothing.

I woke from one of those on a Thursday and the silver was there before I'd fully opened my eyes.

Not a flicker this time. A presence.

I sat up slowly. My heart was doing something complicated in my chest. The room was dark except for the moonlight through the window, and I was alone, but I didn't feel alone. There was something else in the space with me. Not outside. Inside.

I put my hand on my neck. The warmth was still there.

"Hello?" I said it out loud. My voice came out smaller than I meant it to.

Nothing.

I let my hand drop. Told myself I was imagining it. Told myself the wolfsbane withdrawal—if that's what this was—was playing tricks on my nervous system. Told myself to go back to sleep.

I didn't sleep.

I sat on the edge of the bed with my feet on the cold floor and waited for dawn.

***

The voice came three nights later.

I was alone in my room. It was past midnight. I'd been sorting through a box of old bandages Rhodes had asked me to inventory, and my hands had gone still on a roll of gauze because the neck-scar was aching again—not sharp, just a dull, persistent throb that made it hard to think about anything else.

I pressed my fingers against it. The warmth flared.

And then—

*"Hello, Summer."*

I froze.

The voice was inside my head. Not outside. Not a sound I heard with my ears. It was deeper than my own internal register, older, and unmistakably not mine.

I sat down on the floor. Right where I was. The gauze roll dropped from my hand and bounced once before going still.

"Who—" I started. My actual voice came out thin. I tried again. "Who are you?"

*"My name is Solene,"* the voice said. Calm. Certain. *"I am your wolf."*

I stopped breathing.

Twenty years. Twenty years of every healer, every pack member, every well-meaning stranger telling me my wolf didn't exist. Twenty years of standing in training yards watching other wolves shift while I stayed exactly the same. Twenty years of Liam's careful patience when he looked at the empty space where my wolf should have been.

Twenty years of believing I was broken.

"I thought you weren't real," I whispered.

*"I was always real,"* Solene said. Her voice—my voice, except it wasn't—carried a weight I didn't have words for. *"They just made sure you couldn't hear me."*

I put my hand over my mouth.

The tears came before I could stop them. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just quiet, relentless, the kind that come from somewhere too deep to control. I pressed my palm against my neck and felt the warmth there pulse once, twice, like a heartbeat that had been waiting twenty years to start.

*"I'm sorry,"* Solene said softly. *"I'm sorry I couldn't reach you sooner."*

I shook my head. I couldn't speak. I just sat there on the floor of my small sanctuary room and cried for the first time since the ceremonial ground—not because I was sad, but because something inside me had finally named itself, and I had spent my entire life believing I had nothing to name.

***

I didn't tell Rhodes.

I meant to. I walked to the main house the next morning with the intention of saying it plainly—*I heard my wolf*—but when I got there, he was on the porch with Maren, and they both looked up at me with expressions I couldn't quite read.

Maren spoke first. "Summer. Can you come inside for a minute?"

Her tone was careful. Clinical. The way people sound when they're about to deliver bad news they've rehearsed.

I followed them into the kitchen. Rhodes pulled out a chair for me without a word. I sat.

Maren set a file on the table between us. Medical records. My name across the top.

"I ran a full panel during your wellness check last week," she said. "Standard procedure for new sanctuary residents. The results came back yesterday."

I looked at the file. Didn't open it. "And?"

Maren glanced at Rhodes. He nodded once.

She opened the file and turned it toward me. Rows of numbers. Chemical compounds I didn't recognize. And at the bottom, circled in red ink: *Wolfsbane accumulation—chronic, long-term exposure.*

"This isn't trace amounts," Maren said quietly. "This is years. Possibly a decade or more. Someone has been dosing you continuously since before your wolf should have awakened."

I stared at the page. The numbers blurred. My hands went very still on the table.

"Who?" I said.

Maren shook her head. "I don't know. But whoever it was, they knew what they were doing. The dosage was calibrated to suppress without killing. That takes knowledge. And access."

I thought of my father's kitchen. Alexis setting my plate in front of me every morning. The way she always smiled when she did it.

My stomach turned.

Rhodes was watching me. His face was unreadable, but his hands were flat on the table, and I'd learned by now that when Rhodes went very still, it meant he was very angry.

"We're going to find out who did this," he said. His voice was quiet. Certain. "And we're going to make sure they can't do it to anyone else."

I looked at him. Then at Maren. Then back at the file.

*They just made sure you couldn't hear me.*

Solene's voice echoed in my head, and suddenly everything made sense. The wolflessness. The years of feeling broken. The way my family had always treated me like something fragile that needed managing.

They hadn't been protecting me.

They'd been burying me.

I stood up. The chair scraped loud against the floor.

"I need some air," I said.

Neither of them stopped me.

I walked out onto the porch and kept walking until I reached the eastern fence line, where the woods started and the sanctuary ended. I put my hands on the chain-link and squeezed until my knuckles went white.

Inside my head, Solene was quiet. Waiting.

*"They poisoned us,"* I said silently.

*"Yes,"* she said.

*"For years."*

*"Yes."*

I closed my eyes. Breathed once. Twice.

*"What do we do now?"* I asked.

Solene's voice, when it came back, was not sad. It was not afraid.

It was furious.

*"Now,"* she said, *"we wake up."*