UNMARKED

Wolfless

Bex

The morning after, the pack had already decided who I was.

I woke to my mother standing in the doorway of my room, not speaking, just watching me with an expression I recognized because I'd worn it myself a thousand times without ever having had a mirror for it.

The specific grief of loving someone you can no longer protect.

"They're calling you wolfless," she said finally, because someone had to say it and she'd rather let it come from her than from a stranger in the yard. "Corwin's already filed it. Omega status, effective this morning."

I'd expected the rejection to hurt in one clean place, the way a cut hurts- sharp, locatable, something you could press a hand against. Instead it spread, dull and total, into every part of the morning: the way the kitchen went quiet when I walked in, the way Ester from three houses down crossed to the far side of the path rather than pass close to me, the way no one quite looked at me and everyone, somehow, was still looking.

I told myself I didn't care what they called me. That lasted until midday, when I passed two boys my age near the training yard and heard one of them say, low enough to think I couldn't hear, “wonder what he saw”. Not “wonder why he rejected her”. Wonder what he saw, as if I were a locked room someone had glanced into and immediately shut again.

That was the moment the shame stopped being something done to me and became something I started doing to myself. Because underneath the anger, underneath the humiliation, some small and traitorous part of me agreed with them. Kade hadn't looked at me like I was ordinary. He'd looked at me like I was wrong, and wrong things get left standing alone in clearings.

I found the mark that evening, alone in my room with the door locked, which had become a habit already, one day into this new life. A thin, dark line just beneath my collarbone, following no shape I recognized, not a burn, not a bruise, just there, as if it had always been and I'd simply never had a reason to look.

I told no one. I didn't have the language yet to explain it even to myself, and some old instinct. The exact one, maybe, that had kept me quiet my whole childhood while I waited for a wolf that never came told me that whatever this was, showing it to anyone would only prove them right.

So I covered it, and I said nothing, and I let the pack believe whatever story was easiest for them.

It was easier, that first week, to be nothing.

Nothing doesn't get talked about at dinner tables. Nothing doesn't earn second glances in the yard.

I had no idea yet how wrong I was about what I'd become.