Rejected By My Fated Alpha

Chapter 6: First Blood

Training started before dawn, which Wren discovered was less a scheduling choice and more a fact of wolf physiology she hadn't been warned about — apparently the body she now lived in woke naturally an hour before sunrise whether she wanted it to or not, some ancient rhythm baked into blood she hadn't known she carried until four days ago.

Rhys was already in the yard when she stumbled out, wrapped in a borrowed jacket against the cold, looking entirely too alert for the hour.

"You get used to it," he said, reading her expression. "Eventually the wolf stops treating dawn like an emergency."

"When's eventually?"

"Ask me in a year." He tossed her a training staff, wooden, worn smooth from use, and she caught it more out of reflex than intention. "We're starting with control, not combat. You've got strength you don't know how to aim yet, which makes you more dangerous to yourself than to anyone else."

"I threw a man across a room with my mind three days ago. I think I've got a handle on strength."

Something flickered — amusement, maybe concern. "You didn't do that with your mind. You did it because your wolf panicked and your human half wasn't strong enough yet to hold the reins. That's not control, Wren. That's luck. Today we work on the difference."

---

It took less than twenty minutes for Wren to understand exactly how outmatched she was.

Rhys moved like water — unhurried, economical, never where she expected him to be. She swung the staff and hit air. She braced for an attack and found herself on her back in the dirt before she'd registered him closing the distance. By the fifth time she hit the ground, frustration had burned through most of her embarrassment.

"You're thinking like a human," Rhys said, extending a hand to pull her up — the fourth time she'd actually taken it. "Human combat is planning three moves ahead, calculating angles, being clever. Wolf instinct doesn't work that way. It's not slower thinking. It's *no* thinking. You have to let the animal answer before the mind gets in the way and slows it down."

"That's terrifying advice."

"It's also true." He stepped back, resetting the space between them. "You did it in the forest, with the trafficker. You didn't calculate that growl. It came out because some part of you that wasn't waiting for permission decided you needed a weapon and made one. That's the part I need you trusting. Not the part that's currently overthinking every swing."

Wren exhaled, rolled her shoulders, and tried — genuinely tried — to stop thinking. To let whatever animal instinct lived under her skin take the wheel instead of her scrambling, panicked human mind.

The next time Rhys came at her, she didn't decide to duck. Her body simply *did*, low and fast, and came up inside his guard with the staff angled at his ribs before he caught her wrist and stopped it a hair from contact.

Something like genuine surprise crossed his face. "Better."

"That felt different."

"That's because it was you, actually. Not panic. Not the wolf running the show alone. You, using what's yours." He released her wrist, stepping back, something warmer in his expression than the careful neutrality he'd worn all morning. "That's what we're building toward. Not a weapon someone else controls. You, armed."

For the first time in days, something in Wren's chest loosened that wasn't relief and wasn't grief. Something that felt, cautiously, like pride.

---

The training continued through the week — dawn sessions with Rhys, afternoons with an older pack member named Sable who taught her to read scent trails and territory markers, evenings spent poring over Council law with a sharp-tongued beta named Owen who clearly resented the assignment and did it thoroughly anyway. Wren fell into bed each night bone-tired in a way that felt, strangely, like relief. Exhaustion left less room for the hook in her chest to ache.

It didn't stop the hook from aching anyway.

She felt it most at night, in the quiet — a low, constant pull toward the west, toward Voss territory, toward a man who'd stood in front of his entire pack and called her *one night in the woods.* She hated that her body still reached for him. She hated more that some nights, half-asleep, she caught herself wondering if he felt it too, wherever he was, and hoping — despite everything, despite every reason not to — that it hurt him exactly as much.

She never let Rhys see that particular weakness. She suspected he already knew anyway.

---

It was on the eighth day that the first real test came — not training, not sparring, but real danger, delivered without warning in the middle of a routine patrol along the northern border that Rhys had allowed her to join, more as observation than participation.

The rogue trafficker found her before anyone else did.

He came out of the trees the same way he had on Birch Street — sudden, too close, golden eyes catching the afternoon light with the same predatory hunger. "Little wolf," he said, and there was something colder in his voice now, something that suggested he'd been searching hard in the days since she'd slipped through his fingers. "You've been busy."

Wren's whole body went cold, old fear rushing up fast — and then, underneath it, something new. Something Rhys had spent a week building into her, one dawn session at a time.

*Let the animal answer.*

She didn't run. She dropped low into the stance Rhys had drilled into her, staff forgotten, hands curling into something that wasn't quite claws yet but was heading there fast, and when the trafficker lunged for her — overconfident, expecting the same terrified girl from the streetlamp — she wasn't there anymore. She'd already moved, low and fast, coming up behind him with a strength that surprised even her, driving her shoulder into his spine hard enough to send him sprawling into the dirt.

He rolled to his feet, golden eyes narrowed now, surprise and fury tangled together. "That's new."

"I had a good teacher," Wren said, and was startled by how steady her own voice sounded.

He came at her again, faster this time, and she met him with an ease that would have terrified her a week ago — blocking, redirecting, using his own momentum against him the way Sable had taught her, until Rhys's patrol, alerted by the noise, broke through the tree line and the trafficker, outnumbered and outmatched, finally chose retreat over pride, vanishing back into the dark with a snarled promise that this wasn't finished.

Rhys reached her first, hands checking her over for injury with a carefulness that made something in her chest tighten in a way that had nothing to do with fear. "You're all right?"

"I'm fine." And she was — shaking slightly with adrenaline, but genuinely, unmistakably fine, standing on her own two feet after facing down the thing that had haunted her for two weeks. "I held him off, Rhys. I actually held him off."

Something proud and fierce moved across Rhys's face, and for a moment neither of them said anything else, the after of adrenaline crackling between them in a way that felt charged, different, new.

"You didn't just hold him off," Rhys said quietly. "A week ago you were a girl who didn't know what she was. Today you stood your ground against a trained trafficker and won." He studied her for a long moment, something unguarded moving behind his eyes. "I told you I didn't know what I'd get out of helping you. I think I'm starting to find out."

Wren felt heat rise in her face that had nothing to do with the fight, and didn't look away.

Somewhere to the west, faint and unwelcome, she felt the hook in her chest give an answering pull — as if some part of Kellan Voss, miles away, had felt exactly this moment happen and didn't like it one bit.

*Good,* she thought, with a satisfaction that surprised her with its sharpness. *Let him feel it.*