Rejected Twice

CHAPTER ONE Worthless Daughter “The cruelest thing a father can do is teach roken.” The summons came at dawn. No knock. No warning. Just my father’s beta standing in my doorway, silver eyes flat, holding the folded black cloth they only used for one thing. A Judgment summons. My stomach dropped so fast I had to grip the bedpost. I hadn’t slept. I’d spent the night listening to the wind rattle the single window of my room—the smallest in the Beta’s quarters, the one that faced the wall instead of the forest. The one they’d given me after my mother died, as if the view itself was something I didn’t deserve. “You have twenty minutes,” the beta said. He didn’t look at me when he said it. “Beta Giovanni requests your presence in the Courtyard.” Requests. As if I had a choice. I dressed in silence. Gray top, dark jeans, boots worn thin at the heel. I didn’t bother with my hair. There was no version of me that would walk into that courtyard and be found worthy, so I stopped trying to find one. I knew what a public Judgment meant. Every wolf in Red Moon Pack would be there. Standing in rows like soldiers, watching, waiting for Beta Giovanni Albert to speak. My father held these every few months—small ceremonies he’d invented himself, outside pack law, outside Alpha sanction. He called them “corrections.” Moments to remind the pack what weakness looked like. He’d just never used one for his own blood before. The courtyard was already full when I stepped outside. A hundred wolves arranged in a horseshoe curve, their breath rising in small clouds in the cold morning air. The elders stood at the back. The warriors at the front. Children pressed between parents, eyes wide, sensing the gravity without understanding it. And my father stood at the center, hands folded behind his back, face composed into the expression I’d feared my entire life: calm. Giovanni Albert was most dangerous when he was calm. He didn’t look at me until I stopped six feet away. Then his eyes moved to mine, slow and deliberate, and I felt the weight of them the way you feel a blade—not the pain, not yet, just the cold press of steel before it decides what to do. “You’re late,” he said. “I was told I had twenty minutes.” “You were told you had twenty minutes to be ready. Not twenty minutes to arrive.” He turned to address the pack, and just like that, I stopped existing as a person and became a demonstration. “This is what I have called you to witness this morning. Not discipline. Not correction. Clarity.” The pack was completely silent. Not even the wind moved. “For three years,” my father continued, his voice carrying the deep, practiced authority of a man who had held command for two decades, “I have watched this girl fail to become what our pack requires. I have given her training. Patience. Time. And in return, she has given us hesitation. Softness. Sentiment.” He paused. “She wept the first time she drew blood in sparring. Wept. In front of her peers.” Someone in the crowd shifted. My brother Dax—nineteen, broad-shouldered, already half the warrior my father wanted him to be—looked at the ground. Not in shame for me. In embarrassment. That was the moment I understood. This wasn’t a surprise to him. None of them. “I have a responsibility to this pack,” my father said. “To its survival. To its strength. Beta blood is not simply a title. It is a standard. And Lia Albert does not meet it.” My name in his mouth had always sounded like a mispronunciation. Like he’d intended to name something else and I’d arrived instead. “She cannot lead,” he continued. “She cannot fight. She cannot even hold her emotions in a room full of wolves who are watching her right now to see if she’ll cry.” I didn’t cry. I want that on the record—whatever record the universe keeps of humiliations survived. I pressed my nails into my palm hard enough to feel the sting, and I stood there, and I did not cry. “So I am making a decision,” Giovanni said, and something in his tone shifted then, dropped half a register, and I felt the wolves around me go very still, the way wolves go still before something irreversible happens. “Effective this morning, Lia Albert is removed from Beta household standing. She is granted rogue status and asked to leave Red Moon territory.” The word landed like a physical blow. Rogue. Not reassigned. Not demoted. Rogue. Packless. Unprotected. A wolf without territory was a wolf any predator could legally claim, challenge, or kill. Rogue status wasn’t a punishment in the official sense—it was an erasure. He wasn’t disciplining me. He was making me disappear. I heard the murmur move through the crowd. Felt a hundred gazes recalibrate, that subtle shift when someone goes from being a person to being a cautionary tale. Even the children felt it. One small girl near the front took a step back, like rogue was something contagious. “Do you have anything to say?” my father asked. He always asked. That was part of the ceremony. Offering the condemned a voice right at the moment he’d made sure it didn’t matter. I looked at him. Really looked, the way I hadn’t allowed myself to in years, searching for something—one crack in that composed face, one flicker of something that might have once been fatherhood. I had his nose, people said. His cheekbones. I’d spent my childhood hoping that meant something. It didn’t. “No,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected. “I have nothing to say to you.” The distinction was deliberate. Not nothing to say. Nothing to say to ‘you.’ He heard it. I saw the twitch at the corner of his mouth—not quite anger, something closer to surprise, like a man who’d been collecting debts for years and just discovered the account had been closed. “Then you have until noon.” He turned away. That was it. Twenty-two years. Noon. The pack began to disperse. No one met my eyes. Not my brothers. Not the women who had trained beside me. Not the elders who had known my mother. I stood in the emptying courtyard and watched them all find somewhere else to be, and I thought: this is what it feels like to become a ghost while you’re still breathing. I went back to my room. Packed what fit in a single bag—one change of clothes, a water canteen, the small photograph of my mother I’d kept tucked beneath my mattress since I was nine. She was smiling in it. I’d always wondered what had made her smile like that, open and unguarded, so different from everything this pack rewarded. I’d wondered if she’d have been banished too, eventually. At eleven fifty-eight, I walked out of Red Moon territory on my own terms, two minutes before my father’s deadline. Because I was done letting that man set the clock on my life. I ran. Not out of fear—or maybe out of fear, but the clean kind, the kind that moves your feet and clears your head and tells you that forward is the only direction left. My wolf rose to the surface easily, faster than she’d ever come in training, like she’d been waiting for this, like being free of Red Moon had unlocked something in her that years of being told she was wrong had suppressed. I ran until the territory markers were long behind me. Until the pine trees gave way to oak and the ground changed texture underfoot. Until I crossed a ridge I didn’t recognize and realized I’d gone farther than I’d ever been alone. That’s when I smelled it. Not danger. Something stranger than danger. Something warm and electric and completely foreign, pulling at something low in my chest the way a current pulls at a swimmer—irresistible and slightly terrifying and impossible to name. I stopped. The trees ahead were different. Older. The border markers were carved in stone rather than wood—a deliberate choice, permanent, a statement. I’d never been to Crosswood territory. But every wolf in the region knew the marks. I was standing at the edge of an Alpha’s lands. I should have turned back. Every instinct I’d been trained with said ‘turn back.’ Rogue wolves who crossed Alpha territory without invitation disappeared. But that pull in my chest had become something else now. A certainty. The kind that didn’t come from my mind at all but from somewhere older, deeper—the part of a wolf that predates language and logic and fathers who hold public Judgments. I took one step across the border. And then I heard the footsteps. More than one set. Moving fast. Surrounding me from three sides with the practiced precision of wolves who had done this before. Who had been trained to do exactly this. I turned slowly, heart hammering, and counted four warriors stepping out of the tree line. Large. Scarred. Wearing the marks of Crosswood on their arms. And behind them, walking without urgency, without any of the aggressive posturing his warriors projected, came a man whose presence hit me like stepping into a wall of heat. He was tall. Dark-haired. Maybe twenty-seven. He had the kind of face that had been weathered by decision rather than age, jaw set, eyes the color of winter bark—a gray-brown that missed nothing. He moved like someone who had never once in his life needed to prove he was dangerous. He stopped ten feet away and looked at me. Just looked, assessing, unhurried. And then the feeling in my chest—the pull, the current, the thing I had no name for—detonated. My wolf knew before I did. She surged forward inside me with a recognition so violent it brought me to my knees in the dirt. Mate. This man was my fated mate. And from the way the color drained from his face, then flooded back—he felt it too. He stared at me for a long, suspended moment. The warriors went very still. Somewhere in the canopy above us, a bird took flight. Then Angus Everett, Alpha of Crosswood, opened his mouth. And what he said next would take three years to survive.