The Alpha's Forsaken mate

Episode 2

Thea's POV

The room stayed silent for what felt like much longer than it probably was.

I stood there with the tray still balanced in both hands, every face in the hall turned toward me, waiting to see what I would do with the humiliation that had just been handed to me in front of two entire packs. I could feel my aunt's eyes on me from across the room, and when I finally glanced her way, her expression told me everything I needed to know. There was no shock on her face. No anger on my behalf. Just a kind of grim satisfaction, like Kade Blackthorn had simply confirmed something she had been saying about me my whole life.

The Silvermoon wolves nearest me shifted uncomfortably, some looking away, some exchanging glances that carried more embarrassment for themselves than sympathy for me. The Nightshade wolves looked somewhere between awkward and apologetic, a few of them glancing toward their Alpha like they hadn't expected him to say it quite that loudly, or at all.

Kade himself had not moved. He stood exactly where he had been standing when the words left his mouth, his jaw set, his eyes fixed somewhere just past my shoulder now instead of on my face.

I did not cry.

I felt it building somewhere behind my eyes, hot and immediate, but I had spent twenty-two years learning how to keep my face still when everything underneath it was falling apart, and that training did not abandon me now, in the moment I needed it most.

I did not argue. I did not ask him to explain himself in front of everyone, did not demand he take it back, did not give my aunt or anyone else in that hall the satisfaction of watching me beg for something that had already been decided the moment I was born.

I set the tray down on the nearest table, careful enough that the glasses didn't even rattle.

Then I turned and walked out of the hall.

I kept my pace steady the entire way, through the side corridor, past the kitchen where two attendants stopped mid-conversation to stare at me, out through the side entrance into the cold evening air. I did not stop walking until the sound of the summit had faded completely behind me, until I was standing alone at the edge of the training grounds where nobody would think to look for the wolfless girl who served drinks at events nobody cared if she attended.

Then I let myself fall apart.

I sank down onto the cold ground and let everything I had been holding back since the moment his words landed pour out of me all at once, my whole body shaking with it, my breath coming in broken pieces between the sobs I had refused to let anyone in that hall witness. I cried for the twenty-two years of hope that had just been crushed in front of an entire room. I cried for the mother. I barely remembered who would have told me that I deserved better than a man who looked at a scar and decided that was the whole story. I cried because some small, stupid, hopeful part of me had spent my entire life believing that fate would finally choose someone who would choose me back, and instead fate had handed me to a man who took one look and decided I wasn't worth the trouble.

I let myself have exactly that, one complete collapse, alone, where nobody could see it and use it against me later.

The tears flowing down my cheeks finally stopped after a while.

I sat there in the cold for a long time afterward, my breathing slowly returning to something normal, my face dry by the time I finally stood up. Something inside me had shifted during those minutes on the ground, something I didn't fully understand yet but could feel settling into place regardless. The hope that had carried me through every bad year in that house was gone now. In its place was something quieter and harder, something that didn't ache the same way hope did.

I walked back to my aunt's house that night and said nothing to anyone.

She blamed me for causing a nuisance at the party, and after I left, Alpha Kade refused to stay for the peace summit.

The next three days passed in a kind of fog. I did my chores. I avoided my aunt's eyes whenever she glanced my way with that same satisfied expression she'd worn in the hall. I avoided the whispers that had already started moving through the pack, the story of the wolfless girl rejected in front of two packs spreading faster than I expected.

On the second night, I climbed into the attic space above my room, the one place in that house that had always felt like it belonged to me because nobody else ever bothered going up there, and I pulled out the old trunk that had been sitting untouched since my mother died.

I had gone through it a hundred times over the years, never finding anything beyond old clothes and a few faded photographs. This time, running my fingers along the inside lining out of habit, I felt something stiff beneath the fabric that I had never noticed before.

I tore the lining open carefully.

Inside was a small folded piece of paper, yellowed with age, a single name written on it in handwriting I recognized instantly even though I hadn't seen it in over a decade.

My mother's handwriting.

I sat in that attic for a long time staring at the name, my mind turning over every possibility of what it could mean, why she had hidden it so carefully, why something this small had survived years inside a trunk nobody else had thought to search for properly.

By the third morning, I had made my decision.

I packed only what I could carry, left before my aunt woke up for the day, and walked out of the Silvermoon pack lands without looking back even once.

I was done being the wolfless girl this pack had decided I was.

Whatever waited for me beyond these borders, it had to be better than staying somewhere I had never once wanted.