The Alpha Rejected Me

Violet Eyes

My mother was a wolf."

"Your mother was a Lycan."

The word hit harder than the rejection had. I sat there at the kitchen table and let it bounce around inside my skull, and it didn't fit anywhere. Lycans were stories. Bedtime warnings. The boogeyman under the bed for wolf pups who didn't eat their dinner. Ancient, extinct, the thing that came before Alphas and packs and everything we knew.

"Every pup learns what the council wanted them to learn." My father's voice was flat. Tired. Like he'd been rehearsing this speech for eighteen years and had been dreading every syllable. "The Lycans didn't die out, Serena. They went into hiding. Because the people who hunted them were very, very good at their job."

I stared at him. "You're telling me Mom was—"

"The last pure-blood Lycan. Yes."

"And you—what? Just married her? Like that was a normal Tuesday?"

"I loved her." Something raw moved across his face. "And she loved me. And she was tired of running. So she married a Beta from a small pack, changed her name, buried her scent under a dozen layers of pack magic, and prayed every single day that the bloodline would skip you."

"It didn't skip me."

"No." He looked at my eyes again. The violet was still there, faint but unmistakable in the lamplight. "The rejection triggered it. The Moon Bond activating and then being severed—it cracked the seal she put on your blood. The one she died maintaining."

My mother died when I was twelve. I remembered the fever, the way she'd burned for three days straight, the healers coming and going with grimmer faces each time. I remembered her last words to my father, whispered in a language I didn't understand, and the way he'd cried for a week straight after.

"She was fighting something," I said. Not a question.

"The Covenant. Bloodsworn Covenant." My father said the name like it tasted bad. "They've been hunting Lycan blood for eight hundred years. They found Elena. She burned through the last of her power keeping them from tracking you. The fever wasn't an illness. It was her using every drop of Lycan strength she had to seal your bloodline and hide your scent."

"And now the seal is broken."

"The rejection cracked it. And once it starts, it can't be stopped. Your blood is waking up, Serena. All of it."

I looked down at my hands. They looked the same—same bitten nails, same scar on my left thumb from a training accident when I was fourteen. But underneath the skin, I could feel something moving. Not pain. Power. Like a current running through my veins that had been switched off for eighteen years.

"What happens when it finishes waking up?"

My father didn't answer right away. He opened the wooden box again and pulled out something else—a folded piece of leather. Inside was a pendant. Silver, tarnished black with age, shaped like a crescent moon wrapped around a wolf's head. The workmanship was too fine for anything modern. Too old.

"Your mother left this for you. For when the day came." He set it on the table between us. "She said it would call him."

"Call who?"

A knock at the door.

Not a knock. A blow. The entire cabin shuddered. Dust rained from the ceiling. My father was on his feet before the second blow landed, putting himself between me and the door, and I saw his hands shift—claws out, eyes glowing amber.

"They found us," he said. "Take the pendant. Back door. Run."

"Dad—"

"Run, Serena!"

The front door exploded inward.

I grabbed the pendant. The silver was warm in my hand—impossibly warm, like it had been sitting in sunlight—and I ran for the back door. My fingers found the latch and I threw it open and the night air hit my face, cold and sharp, and behind me I heard sounds that weren't human. Weren't wolf either. Something worse.

I ran.

The trees blurred past. My bare feet hit frozen ground and I didn't feel it—I was running faster than I ever had, faster than any wolf in the pack, and the forest wasn't dark anymore. I could see everything. Every leaf, every branch, every shadow between the trees, clear as daylight.

The pulse in my skull was roaring now. Not a heartbeat anymore—a drum. A war drum. And with every step, every breath, every c***k of twig under my feet, something inside me was pushing. Upward. Outward. Demanding to be let free.

I made it maybe two hundred yards before something hit me from behind.

Not a body—a force. A wave of power that sent me sprawling. I rolled, came up on my hands and knees, and turned to see what was chasing me.

Three figures. Dark cloaks, faces hidden. And their eyes—not amber, not gold, not any wolf color I knew. Red. Dull, flat, dead red, like embers that had burned out and left nothing but heat.

"Lycan blood," one of them said. The voice was wrong. Hollow. Like it came from somewhere deep and dry. "We smell it. We've waited so long."

The pulse in my skull went supernova.

And I stopped thinking.