Rejected Twice

Chapter two- The Beta’s Shame

“Shame is not given to you by others.

It is given to you by the people who were supposed to love you.”

Lia’s pov

I have one memory of my mother that I have never told anyone.

I was four years old. She was braiding my hair in the kitchen—slowly, the way she did everything, like the world would wait for her—and she said, without looking up: “Lia, kindness is not a flaw. Don’t let them make you believe it is.”

Three months later, she was dead. And for the next eighteen years, every single person in Red Moon Pack worked very hard to make me believe she was wrong.

Today was no different.

The training yard smelled like sweat and dirt and something metallic that I’d learned early was the smell of dominance—the pheromone wolves release when they’re competing, when they want something badly enough to bleed for it. It coated the air every morning by six a.m. By six fifteen, everyone was already better at this than me.

I hit the ground for the fourth time.

Not hard. Not dramatically. Just the quiet, inevitable way a person lands when they’ve stopped being surprised by falling. My palms pressed into the packed earth and I stared at a small gray stone an inch from my nose and thought: get up. You always get up.

I got up.

“Again,” said Trainer Brock.

Brock was forty-three, built like a door, and had the emotional range of a weather forecast: either clear or coming storm. He’d been training Red Moon’s younger wolves for eleven years. In eleven years, he had never once told me I’d done something well. I used to think it was a teaching philosophy. Now I understood it was just the truth as he saw it: I wasn’t worth the breath.

My sparring partner was my brother Cael.

Seventeen. Already broader than me. Already faster. He had the gift that all the Albert men seemed to be born with—the ability to switch off whatever they felt and replace it with the thing that won. He looked at me across the three feet of dirt between us and I saw it happen: the click behind his eyes. The part of him that forgot I was his sister.

He came at me low and fast.

I read the angle wrong. I always read the angle wrong. I went left when I should have gone right and his shoulder caught me square in the sternum and I went down again, fifth time, and this time I didn’t get up immediately because the air had left my body and taken most of my dignity with it.

The other trainees had stopped pretending to train.

They were watching. Twenty wolves between fourteen and twenty-three, standing in a rough circle that had gradually, naturally formed around me the way crowds form around accidents. I could hear the particular silence of people who are relieved that what is happening to someone else is not happening to them.

And then I heard the footsteps I’d been dreading since I woke up.

Measured. Deliberate. Each one placed like punctuation.

My father.

Giovanni Albert crossed the training yard in no hurry at all, hands folded behind his back, wearing the dark gray of Beta authority that he never took off, even on days that weren’t meant for ceremony. Every wolf in the yard straightened. Brock stood taller. Even Cael, who had just put me on the ground, reset his posture like he was afraid of being caught enjoying it.

My father stopped at the edge of the circle and looked down at me.

I was still on the ground.

I want to say I stood immediately. That I met his gaze with fire and refused to give him the image. But my ribs were screaming and there’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being someone’s repeated disappointment—it lives in the joints, not the muscles, and that morning it had settled somewhere deep in my knees.

So I was on the ground when he looked at me.

And that was all he needed.

“How many times?” he asked Brock. Not me. Brock.

“Five, Beta.”

“In how long?”

“Seven minutes.”

Giovanni nodded slowly, the way a judge nods when the evidence confirms what he already believed. He turned to the watching trainees then—made sure they were all paying attention before he spoke again, because Giovanni Albert never wasted a lesson.

“This,” he said, “is what happens when sentiment replaces instinct. When a wolf decides that feeling something matters more than surviving it.” He finally looked at me. “Get up, Lia.”

I got up.

“Why do you fall?”

I knew better than to answer. Any answer I gave would become evidence.

“I’ll tell you why,” he said, since I’d made the mistake of silence. “Because you hesitate. Every single time, before you commit to a move, you pause. Half a second. Less. But a half-second is a lifetime in a real fight, and you know what lives in that pause?” He looked at the trainees. “Someone tell her.”

A boy near the back said it quietly, like he was sorry: “Death, Beta.”

“Death,” my father confirmed. He turned back to me. “You pause because you are thinking about consequence. About how it will feel. About whether you will hurt him or he will hurt you. That is not a wolf. That is a liability.”

A liability.

His own daughter. A liability.

I pressed my thumbnail into the side of my index finger and focused on that small bright pain and said nothing.

“When your mother was alive,” he continued, and the yard went absolutely silent because he never mentioned her, “I believed her gentleness would balance your upbringing. That there was room in this pack for a different kind of strength.” He paused. “I was wrong. Gentleness without power is just weakness with better posture.”

Something happened in my chest when he said that.

Not pain. I was past pain by then, the way you go past cold when you’ve been outside long enough. Something harder. Something that had been soft clay for twenty-two years and had just, quietly, in the space between one breath and the next, started to calcify.

“Brock,” my father said. “We’re done here.”

He meant with training. He meant me. The session wasn’t over—everyone else would keep sparring for another forty minutes—but I was done. Dismissed. Brock nodded and turned away and the trainees turned away and just like that I became invisible in the middle of twenty people.

I thought that was it.

I thought he’d walk away and I’d go back to the quarters and press my face into my pillow and add this to the collection of days I was trying to outlast.

But he stopped.

Three steps away, he stopped, and when he turned back his face had shifted into something I hadn’t seen before. Not contempt. Something more careful than contempt. The face of a man who has made a decision he’s been delaying for a long time and has finally, that morning, decided to stop delaying.

“Come to my study at four,” he said quietly. Just to me. “We need to discuss your position here.”

He left.

I stood in the training yard with dirt on my palms and the ghost of impact still ringing through my sternum, and I watched him walk away, and I thought: position. Not future. Not path. Position. Like I was a piece on a board he was deciding whether to keep.

Cael appeared beside me.

I hadn’t heard him approach. He stood close enough that only I could hear him when he said, very quietly, “He already told Dax.”

I looked at him. “Told Dax what?”

My brother’s jaw worked. He was seventeen and not yet old enough to have learned how to make his face still when something mattered. I saw it cross his features—guilt, maybe. Or the closest thing to it he could manage.

“You’re leaving tonight.”

The words didn’t reach me immediately. They arrived the way bad news sometimes does, at a slight delay, like the sound of thunder after lightning.

Tonight.

“What do you mean, leaving?”

“He’s calling it a trial separation from the pack.” Cael swallowed. “Rogue status. To force—” he stopped. Started again. “He thinks time outside the territory will either break you or fix you. Those were his words.”

Break you or fix you.

As if I were a tool with a manufacturing defect.

I looked at my brother—really looked, searching for the boy who used to share food with me under the table when I was too slow to get any, the boy who once cried when I got hurt and then spent a year pretending he hadn’t—and I tried to find something in his expression that resembled an objection.

There wasn’t one.

“Did you argue with him?” I asked.

Cael looked away. That was my answer.

I walked back to the quarters. Climbed the stairs. Sat on the edge of my bed and looked at the single photograph of my mother and thought about everything she’d ever said to me in those four short years I had her, and I tried to find the thing she would tell me to do right now.

Kindness is not a flaw.

Except it had cost me everything. My standing. My family. My home. And in four hours, it was going to cost me the territory I’d been born in.

I picked up the photograph. Tucked it into the inside pocket of my jacket, right against my ribs, where it had lived since I was nine years old.

I did not cry.

I did not pack. Not yet. Instead I sat very still for a long time and felt something rearranging itself inside me—something that had been oriented toward my father, toward his approval, toward the version of myself he might one day accept, slowly, degree by degree, swinging away. Like a compass needle that has just found north for the first time.

He could call the meeting at four.

He could use his careful words and his Beta voice and his judgment that was never actually about me but about what I represented to his standing, his legacy, his image in a pack that measured worth in violence.

But something had just changed in that training yard.

And whatever happened at four o’clock, whatever my father said from behind his heavy oak desk—

I wasn’t going to let him be the one to decide how this story ended.

What I didn’t know yet was that someone else had already made that decision for both of us.

And his name was Angus Everett.