The Alpha's Rejected Mate

The First Lesson

Turns out “it’s going to hurt” wasn’t a metaphor. Yarrow kicks the bottom of my boot before the sun’s even up. “Up.

Now.

The moon doesn’t wait for beauty sleep, and neither do I.” “It’s not even light out,” I groan, peeling myself off the ground. Every muscle feels like it’s been dragged behind a horse for three days straight. “Good.

Pain doesn’t check the time either.”

She’s already walking off into the trees without looking back. “Come on, Nightshade. Let’s see what you’ve really got in you.”

I follow because I don’t know what else to do. Because two nights ago the man I was supposed to spend my life with called me weak stock in front of everyone I’ve ever known, and some old, angry thing inside me is done listening to that s**t. The clearing she takes me to is small, circled by stones half-buried in moss.

It feels like it was put there on purpose a long time ago and then forgotten.

Yarrow stops in the middle and faces me, arms crossed.

“Show me your hands.”

I hold them out. They’re still scraped and dirty from my fall.

She doesn’t touch them.

Just stares, like she’s waiting for something to happen. “Nothing’s happening,” I mutter after a minute, feeling like an i***t. “Of course nothing’s happening.

You’re standing there like a fence post.” She starts circling me slowly. “The fire in you doesn’t answer to waiting around.

It answers to need.

The real kind. The kind that rips its way out whether you like it or not.” She stops in front of me, eyes sharp. “Tell me what it felt like that night.

Not the sad part.

The rage.

Dig it up.”

My stomach knots.

“I don’t want to go back there.” “I don’t care what you want.” Her voice cracks like a whip.

The patient old woman from last night is gone.

“You want to walk back into that pack one day and make him choke on every word he said? Then find the rage, girl, and stop hiding from it.” So I do. I let myself remember the drums.

The whole clearing holding its breath, waiting for a miracle that never came.

The flat way he said no, like I was a mistake he was fixing. The laughter. My father turning his back on me, arms folded, refusing to even look.

Heat floods my palms before I realize I’m crying. “There,” Yarrow says, softer now, watching the faint silver light flicker under my skin.

“There it is.”

I stare at my own hands like they belong to someone else.

The glow is unsteady-flickering, stuttering, fading the second my focus slips-but it’s real.

“What the hell is this?”

My voice shakes.

“Moonfire.”

She says it like it’s the most normal thing in the world.

“The old wolves called it that, before your kind forgot the Nightshade line even existed. It’s not some pretty gift, girl. It’s a weapon.

Right now you’re holding it by the blade.” The light dies the second she says it. My palms feel raw and hollow, like something was scooped out of me.

“It’s gone.”

“It’s not gone. It’s tired. You’ve never used it before-your whole life you kept it locked down so tight you didn’t even know it was there. Can’t expect it to behave on the first try.”

She turns and starts walking back toward camp.

“We start again tomorrow. And the day after. Every day for the next two years, until calling it feels like breathing.”

I trail after her, bone-tired, but underneath the exhaustion there’s something new. Hope. Not the fragile, shaky kind I carried into that ceremony.

This one has teeth.

The days start to bleed together after that. Yarrow drags me out before dawn every morning. Most days I fail more than I succeed. Every night I fall asleep too exhausted to cry, which might be a mercy in its own way.

She doesn’t just teach me to call the moonfire.

She teaches me to fight-first with fists, then with an old curved blade she pulls from somewhere. She teaches me how to read people: the set of their shoulders, the flicker in their eyes, the things they don’t say. She feeds me pieces of my mother’s history like she’s handing me broken shards of a mirror.

“Lucienne could call the moonfire without even trying by the end,” Yarrow tells me one night, sharpening her blade while I press a hand to a fresh bruise. “It came off her like heat off a stove. People felt it before they even saw her.”

“Then why did she bury it?”

I ask. “Why let everyone think we were nothing?” Yarrow’s hands go still. For the first time, real sadness crosses her face.

“Because the last time a Nightshade wolf let her fire burn in the open, her own pack turned on her.

Hunted her for what she was instead of protecting her.” She looks at me. “Your mother wasn’t hiding you from shame, Elena.

She was hiding you from history repeating itself.” I sit with that for a while, the fire crackling between us. A cold feeling crawls down my spine that has nothing to do with the night air.

“What happened to her?”

I ask quietly. “The last Nightshade who let it burn?” Yarrow meets my eyes, and for a second I see something I haven’t seen in her before. Fear.

“That,” she says, setting the blade down carefully, “is a lesson for later.

Some fires you have to be strong enough to hear about before I tell you how they were put out.” She won’t say another word about it, no matter how much I push. And that’s when it really sinks in: whatever I’m becoming isn’t just about going back and making Damian Cross regret what he did.

Somewhere in my family’s buried past there’s a warning waiting for me. And I have exactly two years to become strong enough to face it.