The Alpha’s Rejected Moonborn

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Years passed.

I was no longer the eight-year-old who had sat frozen in bed while men searched the house for my mother. The pendant had stayed with me the entire time , moved from pocket to hidden floorboard to the lining of an old coat, always somewhere new whenever I felt eyes on me. I never wore it,I never spoke of it. But I never forgot the warning.

Dad never stopped asking.

Sometimes it was casual, dropped into the middle of a conversation about training or pack business. Sometimes it came late at night when he called me into the study and watched my face too carefully. The questions were always the same.

“Have you ever seen the silver crescent your mother used to wear?”

“No.”

“Did she leave anything with you the night she disappeared?”

“No.”

Every time I answered, his eyes narrowed, just barely, like he didn’t quite believe me but hadn’t caught me in it either. Every time I left the room, I could still feel him watching the door long after it closed.

I started watching him the way he watched me.

I noticed the way his hands sometimes shook when he thought no one was looking. I noticed how often the healer was called to the house in the middle of the night. I noticed that the men who had gone into the woods that first night still reported to him in private, and that none of them ever spoke my mother’s name out loud.

One afternoon I came back from training and found my door already open.

The room was a mess,drawers pulled out,mattress shoved halfway off the frame,books scattered across the floor. The loose floorboard near the window had been pried up and poorly hammered back into place.

Nothing valuable was missing.

“What the f**k”

I stepped inside and shut the door harder than I meant to. My hands were steady as I checked the new hiding place I had started using two months ago a narrow gap behind the old wardrobe that no one ever moved. The pendant was still there, wrapped in cloth.

‘Fuck.’

I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the wreckage, jaw tight.

He was still looking.

After all these years, he was still looking.

That night I waited until the house went quiet, then slipped downstairs. Voices came from the study , dad and one of the men who had been part of the original search party.

I pressed my back flat against the wall beside the door, fingers digging into the wood paneling. I could hear my own breathing and forced it slower, quieter.

“She’s older now,” the man said. “If Seraphina left it with her, she would have given it to you by now ”

Dad’s voice was low and rough. “Or she was told never to give anyone”.

A floorboard creaked under my bare foot. I froze, every muscle locking, neither of them stopped talking. I stayed completely still until the sound settled, then slowly shifted my weight back.

“You think the mother got a message to her?”

There was a pause before Dad answered , long enough that I wondered if he was choosing his words, or doubting them.

“I don’t know what she got to her and I don’t care” he said finally. “But if that pendant is still in this house, there is only one place left it could be.Search her room again tomorrow,every board,every seam. And this time, do not be careful.”

I felt the floor tilt under me. I stepped back one careful pace at a time, palm still flat against the paneling until I was far enough to turn, and made it to my room without a sound.

I stood with my back against the closed door, breath still ragged, and looked at the wardrobe where the pendant still sat behind two months of false safety.

Tomorrow they would tear the boards up,tomorrow they would not be careful.

And I had one night to find somewhere he would never think to look before the search began, and before I ran out of places left to hide.