The Alpha’s Rejected Moonborn

Gone

They came at dawn.

I heard them before I saw them, boots on the stairs, too many at once, moving with the kind of purpose that had nothing to do with morning routine. I was already awake.

My door opened without a knock, the way it always did now.

Three men filed in behind Dad, and this time there was no pretense of politeness. They went through everything,the mattress was stripped and turned. The floorboards were pried up one by one and examined before being hammered back down, harder than before. My wardrobe was emptied onto the floor, garment by garment, seams checked, linings searched with careful, practiced fingers. Even the frame of my window was tested, as though I might have hollowed it out myself and hidden silver inside the wood.

I stood against the wall with my arms crossed, watching twelve years of careful hiding survive one more morning.

Luckily they found nothing. Because there was nothing to find not there, not anymore.

When it was over, the room looked like a storm had passed through it, and Dad stood in the wreckage with an expression I had learned to read too well over the years. Not relief,frustration wearing relief’s mask.

“Nothing,” one of the men said, unnecessary, since it was obvious.

Dad didn’t answer right away. He walked to the window, the same way he had the morning he told me my mother was gone, and looked out at the training grounds below as though the answer might be written somewhere in the frost on the grass.

“Leave us,” he said finally.

The men filed out all but one, who lingered near the door, waiting on some signal I couldn’t read. I stayed where I was, arms still crossed, waiting for whatever came next.

“You think I don’t know what you’re doing,” He said, without turning around. “Moving it. Every time we search, moving it somewhere new.”

“I don’t have it.”

“You’ve said that for twelve years.” He turned then, and for the first time in a long while, the anger on his face had gone slack, worn down into something closer to exhaustion. “I used to believe that but not any more,Elena I need that bracelet more than anything you can think of.”I kept my face still.

“If it’s not in this house,” he said, “then there are only two places it can be. Either you have found a hiding place clever enough to survive four searches in twelve years” his eyes moved over me slowly, “or she still has it. Wherever she is.”

“She’s been gone twelve years.”

“Wolves survive longer than that in the wild, when they have to.” He didn’t look at me when he said it. He was already moving toward the door, already finished with me.

He paused at the threshold, close to the man still waiting there, and spoke not to me. His voice dropped low, the kind of low that assumes a closing door is distance enough to be safe.

“She wouldn’t have survived it clean,” he said. “Not after what I did to her before she left.”

The man murmured something I couldn’t make out. Dad’s answer came even quieter.

“Twelve years in those woods, carrying that. She’s either dead already, or wishing she was.”

The door swung shut behind them.

I stood alone in the wreckage of my room, my pulse still not settled, turning the words over until they lost their shape.

‘What did you do to her.’

She wasn’t banished,she didn’t betray the pack. He did this to her.

I had spent twelve years believing my mother ran from him,abandoning me. For the first time, I understood she might have been running from something he did to her,this wasn’t the pack at all,it was him.

By midday, a new search party had assembled in the courtyard, different from the household men who had torn my room apart that morning. These were trackers, the kind of wolves who spent their lives reading broken branches and half-buried scent trails. I watched from my window as Dad addressed them, his voice too low for me to make out the words, though I didn’t need to hear them to understand.

‘Find her. Find what’s left of her,Anything belonging to her bring it.’

They left before nightfall, a dozen wolves moving into the treeline in loose formation, and I stood at the glass long after they had disappeared from sight, one hand pressed flat against my chest where the pendant had once rested, warm against my skin.

The search party returned four days later with nothing no body, no trail worth following, no sign that a woman had walked those woods twelve years ago and simply never stopped. Dad said little about it afterward,he didn’t send them out again.

I noticed the shift in him almost immediately,the late-night questions stopped. The careful watching in the halls eased, not because he had given up, I understood, but because his attention had found somewhere else to go.

My birthday was three weeks away.

I heard him say my name to the healer in a tone I hadn’t heard from him in years something almost like hope. I heard him telling the household staff to prepare for a celebration larger than any I could remember, larger, I suspected, than any Draven had seen in a generation.

He took a pause on the search of the pendant and was awaiting my transformation,like it was his last hope.

And some nights lying awake with the pendant hidden, I wasn’t certain which version of him attention frightened me more.