Rejected by the Alpha, Loved by a Human

CHAPTER 3

WREN'S POV

I was at the window before Sawyer finished the sentence, my palm flat against the cold glass, searching the tree line for a shape I already knew was coming.

She stepped out of the dark a minute later — Delphine, fully shifted back to human. Alone. No guards. No enforcers. Just her, standing at the edge of Sawyer's porch light with her arms wrapped around herself like she was the one who'd been out in the cold.

"Let her in," I told Sawyer, before he could ask who was standing in his yard at one in the morning. "She's not dangerous. She's my friend."

He looked between us for a second too long, the paramedic in him clearly cataloguing every reason this was a terrible idea, and then he opened the door anyway.

Delphine didn't wait for permission. She crossed the room and pulled me into a hug so hard it hurt the torn place under my ribs, and when she pulled back, her eyes were red-rimmed and furious.

"You scared the life out of me," she said. "You just vanished, Wren. You half-shifted in front of the whole pack and ran into the dark, and nobody went after you—"

"Nobody?" That stopped me. "Kade didn't—"

"Kade couldn't." Delphine's jaw tightened. "The second you were gone, the Elders pulled him into council. Closed doors. I only got out to look for you because I told them I was going to hunt, and technically that wasn't even a lie."

Sawyer had gone very still by the kitchen counter, watching us with the careful blankness of someone deciding, in real time, how much of this he was allowed to understand.

"Delphine." I switched to a mind link communication so Sawyer wouldn’t hear. "Why would the Elders need a closed council the same night Kade rejects me? That's not — that's not how it works. Rejections don't need a vote."

"I know." She glanced at Sawyer, then back at me, and continued speaking through our mind link. "That's not the only thing that's not how it works. Wren — I've known Kade since we were pups. I have never, not once, seen him look at anyone the way he looked at you three weeks ago. And tonight he stood up in front of the whole pack and rejected you like he was reading it off a card."

My chest went tight in a different way than the bond-tear, sharper, more like hope, which was somehow worse.

"You think someone made him do it?"

"I think," Delphine said carefully, "that Elara Voss didn't look happy standing next to him either. I think her father's guards didn't take their hands off their belts the entire ceremony, and I think the Voss pack has been circling Ashwood for six months, talking about alliance, and I think it is very, very convenient that the strongest bond Ashwood's had in a generation got severed the same season the Voss pack started asking for one of ours."

Sawyer cleared his throat. "I'm going to go ahead and admit I feel like I am intruding," he said, "but it sounds like you two need a minute, and I need coffee that isn't decaf. I'll be in the kitchen. Door's open if either of you need me."

He left with more grace than I expected from a man who'd found a half-shifted stranger dying in a ditch six hours ago and was now hosting a wolf council meeting in his living room. Delphine watched him go, then turned back to me with her eyebrows raised.

"Human," she said.

"Paramedic. He found me on the road." I wasn't in the mood for it. "Delphine, focus. If someone forced Kade's hand — if this wasn't really his choice—"

"Then he still did it." Delphine's voice gentled, but she didn't take it back. "Whatever's really going on, he still stood there and rejected you in front of everyone, Wren. Whatever the reason, that's real. The tear in your chest is real. I need you to be careful with your heart before you're careful with the truth, because right now I don't know which one is going to break you faster."

She was right, and I hated that she was right, and underneath both of those feelings sat the fact I still hadn't told her.

"There's something else," I said. "Something I didn't get to tell him before the ceremony."

Delphine's face changed the second she understood, the way it does when someone you love hands you the thing that explains everything and nothing all at once.

"Wren." Her voice dropped to almost nothing. "Are you—"

The window behind us shattered.

Not glass from a rock. Glass from something moving fast and low and deliberate, a dark shape crashing through the frame in a spray of wood splinters and cold night air, already shifting mid-fall, already snarling before its paws hit the floor.

A Voss enforcer. Full wolf, teeth bared, eyes locked on me.

Delphine was moving before I could scream, shoving me behind her, already tearing out of her own clothes to meet him shifted. Somewhere in the kitchen, I heard Sawyer's chair scrape back hard and fast, and heard him say my name once, sharp with a fear that had nothing to do with paramedic training and everything to do with a man realizing, in the space of one breath, that the world he thought he lived in wasn't the real one at all.