He Can't Reject Me: My Mate Doesn't Know I'm a Woman

Preference

beta pov

I didn't say much on the walk back from Rylan's office, and Storm, for once, didn't push me to.

Small mercy. I wasn't sure I had a coherent sentence left in me anyway.

He wasn't a criminal. That fact sat differently in my chest than I expected it to, heavier and lighter at the same time, some knot I hadn't realized I was carrying loosening just slightly now that it had an actual answer attached to it. I'd spent the whole walk to Rylan's office half convinced I was about to learn my mate had done something unforgivable to end up rogue, some crime dark enough to explain away the wrongness of the whole situation and give me a clean, simple reason to keep hating it.

Instead I got a boy born into a life he never had a single choice about, surviving something I still didn't have the full shape of, standing in front of an alpha's desk with a knife he'd apparently kept hidden under a blanket all night out of pure habit.

He wasn't like the two rogues who'd killed my parents either. I made myself actually think that through instead of letting the old grief answer for me automatically the way it usually did. Those men had hunted for sport, for the simple pleasure of taking something from someone weaker. Storm looked like he could be dangerous, plenty dangerous if you gave him a reason, but it read differently up close. Not hunger for violence. Just the particular, worn-in readiness of someone who'd had to survive things and had gotten very good at it out of necessity rather than appetite. Self defense worn so deep it looked like a personality instead of a habit.

That should have made this easier. It didn't.

I noticed, somewhere around the time we left Rylan's study, that the bitter edge in his scent, that unmistakable rogue undertone I'd caught the second I found him in the rain, had thinned out considerably. The oath, I realized. Whatever Rylan's ritual actually did beneath the words, it had already started working, stripping away the mark that made a rogue smell like exactly what he was. What was left underneath it hit me harder than I wanted to admit. Just rain now, mostly. Clean, sharp, entirely his. I caught myself breathing it in deeper than I needed to and made myself stop.

Ren, predictably, had opinions about that. *He's not what you were afraid of,* he said, calm as ever, patient in that way that usually meant he thought I was being an i***t and was choosing his words carefully enough not to say it outright. *That should matter to you.*

*It does matter.*

*Does it change anything, though. The actual problem.*

That was the part I didn't have a good answer for.

Because the truth was, I'd spent five years building a very specific picture of what finding my mate was supposed to feel like, and none of that picture had ever included standing in an alpha's study defending a rogue man's honor to my own best friend. I'd pictured a woman. Always. I'd let myself picture children, more than once, more than I ever would have admitted out loud, some version of myself surrounded by a house that wasn't quiet anymore, pups running through a garden I'd built for exactly that reason and never told anyone the real purpose of.

That had always been the dream underneath the dream. Not just a mate. A family. The thing rogues had taken from me the first time, handed back in a shape I couldn't use to build it again.

I went through the stages of it the way you go through anything you're not ready to lose. First I told myself Rylan had gotten something wrong, some mistake in the ritual, some error the goddess would correct if I just gave it another day. Then I was furious, at her, at fate, at every choice that had led a rogue boy across my border on the one night I happened to be patrolling it. After that came the bargaining, quieter, uglier, the part of me that wondered if there was some loophole, some technicality, some way to have the bond without any of what currently came attached to it. Then just a heavy, tired sadness that sat in my chest the whole walk home, grieving something I'd never actually had in the first place, which somehow made it worse instead of easier.

I hadn't reached whatever came after that yet. I wasn't sure I wanted to.

I'd wanted to hate him. That would have been simpler. Easier to sit with fury than with whatever this actually was, watching him walk beside me in careful, guarded silence, giving nothing away, bracing for a rejection I'd already told him wasn't coming. I couldn't manage the hate, no matter how hard I reached for it. What I found instead, underneath all the wreckage of the morning, was something closer to sorrow. For him, mostly. For whatever life had done to a person to make silence and bracing his default setting before anything else.

I was still angry at the goddess. That hadn't gone anywhere. Whatever cruel sense of humor had decided this was the shape my mate would take, I hadn't forgiven her for it, and I doubted I would anytime soon.

Storm walked beside me in silence, hands in his pockets, that same watchful, unreadable calm he wore like armor, and I found myself wondering, not for the first time, what exactly it had cost him to survive whatever he'd survived. Wondering wasn't the same as wanting. I told myself that firmly, more than once, the whole rest of the walk home.

I mostly believed it.