REJECTED BY MY MATE, CLAIMED BY THE ALPHA KING

CHAPTER 5: THE TRAINING

Seraphine's POV

Dawn came before I was ready for it.

I had been awake since the corridor went quiet, sitting in the dark with Amara's notes open in my lap, reading the second name over and over until I had memorized every word around it. There was not much. Amara had been careful not to write down more than she could prove. But what was there was enough to make me understand that whatever I was walking into with Ryder Graymane was more complicated than I had allowed myself to consider.

I folded the notes back into my bag, tucked a single page into the waistband of my training gear, and went to the yard anyway.

Ryder was already there when I arrived. Dark training clothes, no greeting, those green eyes on me the second I stepped through the gate. He tossed me a wooden staff without preamble. It was heavier than I expected and my hands were already cold.

"You showed up," he said.

"I said I would."

I moved into the stance my father had drilled into me since I was old enough to hold a weapon. Feet apart. Weight forward. Ryder circled me without rushing. He was reading my footing, my grip, the way I held my shoulders. It felt worse than being hit.

Then he came at me.

The first swing was fast and he did not soften it. I blocked and the impact rattled all the way up to my shoulders. I countered hard and he moved aside like I had telegraphed the whole thing three seconds in advance and tapped my shoulder with the end of his staff.

"Too slow recovering," he said. "Again."

We went again. And again. My arms burned. Sweat was already in my eyes. Every time I thought I had found his pattern he changed it. He corrected my footwork with a tap against my ankle. He called out when my grip loosened. He did not praise me when I got something right. He just adjusted and kept going. That was more motivating than any praise would have been.

Fourth round. I landed a clean hit to his ribs. The sound cracked across the yard. Ryder grunted and for half a second, barely visible, actually smiled. Real. Small. Gone before I could decide if I had imagined it.

"Not bad," he said.

We kept going.

By the time the sun was properly up my legs were shaking and my lungs were burning and something else was happening underneath all of that. Something quieter. I felt awake in a way I had not been in months. Not the forced alertness of someone running on fear and bad sleep. The real kind. The kind that lives underneath all of that and waits. The part of me that had been going through the motions in Stoneclaw, holding back every strike, keeping every reaction small so I did not give anyone a reason to look too closely.

That part of me was paying attention for the first time in a long time.

Ryder called a break. Tossed me a water skin. I drank deep and wiped my face with the back of my hand and he leaned against a wooden post and watched me catch my breath.

"You held back in Stoneclaw," he said.

"What makes you say that?"

"You train like someone who was taught to fight to kill, not just to defend. But you pull every strike. Like you are afraid of what happens if you actually connect."

I looked away. The memory of Xander's voice in the living room sat somewhere behind my sternum where it had been living for weeks. "Maybe I was."

Ryder pushed off the post and walked closer. Not close enough to touch. Close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off him in the cool morning air. "You do not have to be afraid of what you are capable of. Not here. Not with me."

I looked at him. The honesty in it was the uncomfortable kind. Too direct. No way to deflect it without looking like I was trying to.

We trained again. Hand to hand this time. He taught me how to use my smaller size as an advantage instead of working around it. How to redirect a bigger opponent's momentum instead of trying to match it. How to breathe through pain and keep moving after the moment when your body is screaming at you to stop. Every correction came with a reason. Every time I improved he noticed. He did not make a thing of it. He just moved to the next round.

Hours later I sat on a low bench at the edge of the yard with my hands still scraped from the staff. Ryder sat a few feet away. Not close enough to crowd. Close enough that the silence between us did not feel empty.

"Why are you doing this?" I asked. "Actually."

He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. "Because I saw you in that park. Not the version Stoneclaw built. The real one. The one who kept moving even when she was falling apart." He paused. "I do not offer protection to people who are waiting for someone else to save them. I offer it to people who will fight beside me when the time comes. You are the second kind."

My throat tightened. The baby pressed against the inside of my ribs the way it sometimes did in quiet moments, as if it wanted to remind me it was there. I wanted to tell him. The words were right there. But something else was pressing harder.

"Ryder."

He looked at me.

"Rosita was in your corridor last night. I heard her voice."

Something passed across his face. Fast and controlled. "She visits sometimes. She knew my former mate."

"I know." I held his gaze. "I also know she is the reason your former mate is dead."

The training yard went very still.

Ryder looked at me for a long moment without speaking. The green of his eyes had gone flat in a way I had not seen before. Not anger. Something underneath anger. Something that had been sitting there for a long time waiting to have a name put to it.

"How do you know that?" he said quietly.

I reached into my waistband and pulled out the folded page I had tucked there before I left the room. I held it out. He took it without looking away from my face first. Then he looked down.

I watched him read. I watched his jaw set. I watched his hands go very still around the paper.

When he looked up his voice was completely even. "Where did you get this?"

"My sister," I said. "She died finding it."

The silence between us shifted into something heavier. The kind that means something has changed and neither person is quite sure yet what comes after it.

Ryder folded the page carefully and held it back out to me. I took it.

"The second name," he said.

"Yes."

"You are sure."

"My sister was sure. And she was never wrong."

He stood up slowly. Walked to the edge of the yard and stood there with his back to me, looking out at the tree line. I waited. The morning was warming up and somewhere across the yard a door opened and the sounds of the pack starting its day drifted in from outside the training ground. Normal sounds. Ordinary morning. Like none of what I had just said was sitting in the air between us.

When Ryder turned back around his face was settled. Controlled. But his eyes had not gone back to what they were before.

"Tonight," he said, "you tell me everything."

It was not a request.

I nodded once.

He walked back past me toward the pack house. Just before he reached the gate he stopped without turning around.

"And Seraphine."

"Yes."

"The person on that list." A pause. "They will not see tomorrow."

He walked through the gate and left me standing in the training yard with the morning sun warming my face and the folded page in my hand and the slow, certain understanding that I had just handed Ryder Graymane the match.

Whatever came next, we were burning this down together.