Reject Me Once, Regret Me Forever

Chapter 6 — The Girl Who Smelled of Roses

**POV: Aria Silverfang**

The village at the edge of the third ring smelled of cold earth and woodsmoke.

I had been there five days.

Five days since I crossed the border with a rejected bond burning in my chest and a name I would never say aloud. Five days of keeping my hood up, my wolf quiet, my face turned away from anyone who looked too long. I had also learned the village's breathing—the noise at the well each morning, the talk that rose by the fire each evening, which child stole sugar, which hunter had a bad back.

The healer before me had died in the spring—old lungs, the village said—and they had been without one since. I offered what I knew. It was not kindness. It was cover. A stranger with skills is a stranger with a reason to stay, and a reason to stay is a stranger no one questions.

By the second day the children came with scraped knees. By the fourth, the hunters came with torn shoulders from the woods. I wrapped, I brewed, I stitched. I learned their names. They learned to trust the quiet girl who kept her hood up and never asked where she had come from.

An old hunter with a bad leg limped in the first time, grinning in the doorway. "Girl," he said, "this old bone's in your hands." I dressed it with three roots of nightshade vine; three days later he walked back on his own staff to thank me. He took to calling me "healer girl" and told anyone who would listen that the third ring had got itself a clever-handed lass.

My wolf settled into the work. She liked the ordering of it—root, boil, bind. She liked that here, no one expected me to be a bride. I even enjoyed it, a little: my first free week had begun with healing others. Last life, at eighteen, I had been thrown into a dungeon, and no one had ever called me "healer girl."

On the fifth day, the soldiers came.

They rode in at noon, three of them, Thornheart grey on their cloaks. They did not draw weapons. They asked the elder about a girl.

"A stranger," one of them said. "Arrived on foot, recent. She would smell of roses."

I was grinding fever root at the edge of the square. My hands did not stop.

*Roses.*

He had noticed. Of course he had.

The soldier described me without describing me—dark cloak, hooded, no name, a scent like a garden after rain. He did not have my face. He did not have my name. He had a smell and a memory of a girl who had looked at an Alpha and said no.

One soldier's gaze swept the square and passed over me. I kept the pestle's rhythm steady, even lifted my eyes, and let his glance slide a half-inch past. He did not know me. He turned to the next house.

The girl they were hunting stood three paces away, grinding herbs.

*Let them search,* I thought, with a calm that surprised even me. *They had only a scent, had never seen my face, did not know my name. And yet I stood in the sun.*

The soldier moved on to the next house. The elder shook his head. No new girl, he said. Not one who smelled of roses.

He was not lying. He simply had not looked at me.

I watched them ride out, dust settling back onto the road. A strange lightness rose in me—not safety, but a hand won. I had rejected the most powerful Alpha on the continent, and his men could not pick me out standing right in front of them. This round, I had won first.

A thought rose, cold and sweet. Last life, he had not once deigned to look at his own bride—he had locked her in a dungeon and not come down in three years. This life, the men he sent scoured the border for a girl who would not give her name. The same Alpha who had not spared his bride a glance now had his whole territory hunting me.

Was this not, in its own way, being seen?

That night the bond scar twinged—a small, hot pull under my ribs, there and gone. I had learned its language in five days: it spoke when he was near, or when he thought of me. Sometimes it pulled by day too, as if he were unfolding border maps and speaking my name. I did not know which. I only knew the thread between us was not dead. It was scarred, and it was patient, and it waited the way old things wait.

I did not need to know how madly he searched. What would knowing change?

The hunters at the fire spoke of wolves.

Not the pack. Rogues. The border packs had been restless since the snows broke—picking at the edge villages, taking sheep, once a child. Thornheart had sent word that the Alpha himself would come to clear the ring.

I stirred my brew and did not let my face change. I thought of the man on the forest road with his hand pressed to his chest, the bond cut between us. Now he would come himself.

The Alpha. Kael Thornheart. The man I had rejected in the woods, the man whose name I had spoken like a curse and a prayer. He was coming to my village.

The scar under my ribs gave a slow, deliberate throb, as if it had heard me think his name.

I smiled into my cup. Not a kind smile.

The same smile I had worn in the woods.

Let him come. Let him turn over the third ring, let him walk to this village, walk to me—and I would stand with my basket of medicines and smile at him like a stranger.

He was coming for me. But he did not know that the one he sought was waiting for him to arrive.