Rejected By My Fated Alpha

The scream that woke Wren Sorensen wasn't hers. It took three seconds to understand that — three seconds of gasping upright in the dark, heart slamming so hard she could feel it in her teeth. The sound faded into the hum of the refrigerator down the hall. *There's no one here. There's no one here but you.* It hadn't been the first time. Not since the dreams started — always at 3:14 a.m., always the same feeling of her skin being too tight for her body. She told herself it was stress. Grad school applications, extra diner shifts, the six-month anniversary of her mother's death creeping up like a bruise she kept pressing. She didn't believe herself. Not really. She padded to the window. Full moon tonight, fat and silver-white, low over the rooftops. *Beautiful,* she thought. Then, unbidden: *dangerous.* --- The letter arrived three days later, on a Tuesday. Plain cream envelope, no return address, her name in old-fashioned slanted ink. She almost tossed it with the coupon mailers — until she saw the wax seal on the back: a wolf's head in profile, circled by a crescent moon. *Wren,* *If you are reading this, your mother is gone, and the time has come for truths she wished to spare you.* *You are not what you believe yourself to be. On your twenty-third birthday, in three days' time, the blood that sleeps in you will wake, whether you are ready or not.* *Trust your instincts. They will be louder now. Do not be afraid of them.* *And when they find you — because they will — do not go quietly.* *Someone who loved your mother, and who will love you, in time.* Wren read it four times, waiting for it to resolve into a prank, a mix-up, anything ordinary. It didn't. Her mother's face rose up in memory — the way Elaine Sorensen always steered conversations away from *before*, the way she'd flinched at wolves howling on a nature documentary and laughed it off. The way she'd gripped Wren's hand on her deathbed, half-delirious, and whispered, *"Run if they come for you, baby — run and don't look back—"* Wren had assumed it was the morphine talking. *What if it wasn't?* --- Her birthday came gray and unremarkable. She worked her shift, let Priya buy her cake, blew out a crooked candle and wished, silently, *let today be normal.* For a few hours, it almost was. It stopped being normal at nine p.m., on the walk home, at the corner of Birch and 4th. A man stood beneath the streetlamp — tall, dark wool coat, hands in his pockets, watching her approach with an attention that raised every hair on her arms before her mind caught up. *Cross the street. Cross now.* She didn't move fast enough. "Wren Sorensen." His voice was too smooth, too certain — like he'd practiced saying her name and liked the taste of it. "You got the letter." "How do you know my name?" "Your mother hid you well. Better than most." He tilted his head, studying her like livestock, or a lock he was deciding how to pick. "You've been living inside the Voss pack's claim for six years and never felt it. Rare bloodlines don't stay hidden past the full moon of a birthday, sweetheart. Not once they wake." Something in her chest *pulled* — sudden and violent, like a hook yanked on a line. The streetlight went too bright. The smell of his coat too strong. A dog barking three streets away, too close, too clear — every sense turned up at once. She stumbled back. "What did you do to me—" "Nothing you didn't already have." Gentle now, which was worse than the threat. "I just get to watch it happen." He moved — not a run, just suddenly *closer*, impossibly closer, and Wren finally understood, far too late to matter, that whatever wore this man's face wasn't a man at all. His eyes had gone gold, pupils slit and strange, his hand closing around her wrist like a manacle. "Let go of me." "Not a chance. You're worth a great deal, little wolf. To the right buyer — or the wrong one. Either way, you're coming with—" A sound tore out of Wren's own throat — not a scream, something lower, something that vibrated in her chest like a growl. His grip loosened, just a fraction, his golden eyes going wide with surprise. It was enough. She wrenched free and ran. --- She didn't think about direction. Her body moved with a speed that had no business belonging to her — around the corner, down an alley she'd never used, over a fence she shouldn't have been able to clear, lungs burning, heart hammering, and underneath it all a terrifying flicker of *joy* — some animal part of her had been waiting her whole life to run exactly like this. She didn't hear footsteps behind her. She didn't know if that meant she'd lost him or something worse. She ran until pavement gave way to packed dirt, until dirt gave way to trees — the same dense, dark tree line from three weeks of dreams — and only then did her legs finally give out, dropping her to her knees in the cold grass, shaking, her wrist throbbing where his fingers had bruised it. *This isn't real. This can't be—* A branch cracked in the dark ahead of her. Wren's head snapped up. Two amber eyes were watching from the shadows — exactly as they had every night for three weeks. Except this time she was awake. The grass soaked cold through her jeans. Her breath fogged in the air. And the eyes were *real*, enormous, unblinking, fixed on her with an intensity that stole what air she had left. *You're close now,* whispered the voice from her dreams — low, rough, unmistakably male, sliding into her mind like it had every right to be there. *Come find out what you are.* The shape behind those eyes began moving toward her out of the trees, and Wren Sorensen — twenty-three years old as of six hours ago, human her entire life until nine minutes ago — did not run. She couldn't have said, afterward, whether that was courage or something else entirely.