Claimed by the Alpha Who Rejected Me

The message arrived wrapped around a child's tooth. I almost threw it away with the rest of the morning post. Rent was due. The window over the shop door was cracked. The woman downstairs believed chamomile could repair what her husband had done to their marriage. I had built a life out of small problems, because small problems let you sleep. Then the tooth rolled out of the envelope onto my counter. A milk tooth, still threaded with a little red. Someone had drilled a hole through it and tied it to a strip of blue cloth. Silvercrest blue. I put down the scissors. Four years earlier, I had walked out of that pack carrying one bag, wearing a dress with somebody else's wine drying down the front. I had promised myself that nothing bearing its colors would ever cross my threshold again. It had just crossed it in an envelope. Tied to a child's tooth. Like a threat. Or a prayer. The envelope contained a photograph and a note. In the photograph, a girl of perhaps six lay on an infirmary cot. Dark lines spread from her collarbone like roots beneath thin soil. Behind her stood Tessa Reed, older than the girl I remembered, holding a paper with that morning's date. The note was in Tessa's blunt handwriting. Her name is June. Her mother says she stopped breathing twice last night. This fell out when her jaw locked. I know what asking costs you. I am asking anyway. Beneath that, in smaller letters: The marks look like the ones in your mother's book. I sat down so abruptly that the stool complained. My mother had left me a leather notebook, three recipes, and a reputation for dying badly. The notebook had burned during the winter fever when I was seven. I remembered very little of it except pressed flowers and the drawing of a black vein. I remembered Tessa making sure I ate after the funeral. The shop bell rang. Mrs. Bellamy entered with her usual empty bottle. "You look terrible," she said. "Thank you." She put the bottle down and studied the photograph without reaching for it. That was why I liked her. Humans could be cruel, but some of them understood doors. "Family?" "Something like that." "The kind you visit, or the kind you escaped?" I folded the note. "Apparently both." By noon, she had agreed to collect the post and water the basil. I wrote instructions for every patient due that week, counted the shop money twice, and put six hundred dollars into a separate envelope for the landlord. Leaving a life required more paperwork when you had built it yourself. At the bottom of my wardrobe lay the bag I had carried out of Silvercrest. I took a different one. On the train, I tried Tessa's number. The call broke twice before she answered. "Tell me she is alive." "She is." I closed my eyes. "Elena—" "Does he know you sent it?" The silence told me before she did. "He authorized the courier." Outside the window, the city became warehouses, then fields. My reflection looked composed. I had spent four years teaching it that trick. "I am coming for the child," I said. "I know." "If anyone calls me omega, I leave." "I will tell them." "If anyone touches my bag—" "I will break their fingers myself." That almost made me smile. The line crackled. In the background, something metallic fell, followed by a scream that cut off too quickly. "Tessa?" "I have to go. Take the east road. Not the north. Promise me." Then she was gone. I hired a driver at the last station. He knew the valley but refused to pass the abandoned sawmill. "Wolves," he said, as if that explained everything. It explained enough. I walked the final mile with my boots sinking into wet leaves. The woods were wrong. No squirrels argued overhead. No patrol scent marked the boundary stones. Three of the old silver-belled ward posts stood crooked, their bells removed. When I was a child, the bells had sung whenever a stranger crossed. Now there was only rain. I found a scrap of red fabric caught on a thorn. Farther on, a stretcher lay abandoned beneath a cedar, one canvas handle snapped. Someone had scrubbed the road. Water had not reached the blood between the stones. The first wolf appeared at the bend. He was gray, thin through the flanks, with a bandage tied above one foreleg. He watched me for a long moment, then shifted behind a tree. A young man emerged wearing patrol trousers and no shirt. "Name?" "Elena Vance." He stopped fastening his belt. People always did something small when they recognized my name. Looked away. Smiled. Checked whether anyone important was listening. This boy merely looked relieved. "You came." I had prepared for hatred. I had not prepared for that. "Is June Reed in the infirmary?" "June Miller. Yes. East wing." "Then let me through." He lifted a radio. "The healer is here." Not the omega. Not the rejected girl. I adjusted the strap cutting into my shoulder and followed him. Silvercrest's gates rose out of the mist, black iron set between stone pillars. One carved wolf had lost its head. A sheet covered something long beside the guardhouse, and the wind lifted its edge just enough to show a boot. Beyond the bars, the courtyard smelled of smoke and boiled linen. I had imagined this moment in shameful detail. Sometimes Kael begged. Sometimes I was beautiful enough to hurt him. Once, during a winter when the shop nearly failed, I had imagined arriving with another man's ring on my hand. In none of those fantasies had a wagon of wounded men stood between us. "Wait here," the guard said. "I am not waiting while—" The training-yard doors opened. A group of soldiers stepped aside, and Kael Donovan came down the shallow stairs carrying a bloodstained coat. He was twenty-eight now. I had known he would be, of course. I had counted his birthdays in spite of myself. Knowing did nothing to prepare me for the white scar at his temple or the exhaustion beneath his eyes. His hair was shorter. His shoulders were broader. On his left hand, where a mated Alpha wore a bond ring, there was nothing. I hated noticing. For one terrible second, my body forgot the courtyard, the child, the train ticket folded in my pocket. It remembered a hand hovering beside mine at a feast. A voice asking whether I liked the music. The certainty, brief and bright, that I had been seen. Then it remembered the rejection. Kael stopped on the other side of the gate. Something changed in his face. Not softness. Something more painful and less useful. "Elena." I kept my hands at my sides. "Open the gate." His gaze moved over my coat, my bag, the place at my throat where a mating mark had never been. Behind him, an old man stepped into view beneath the portico. Marcus Donovan. Still watching. Still making other people do the dirty part. Kael saw me recognize his father. The gate began to move. He came close enough that I caught cedar, cold air, and the sharp copper smell on his sleeve. My pulse betrayed me once, hard enough to hurt. Whatever he had meant to say disappeared. His voice carried across the courtyard. "You're not here as my mate. You're here as our weapon."