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

Rules

kagiso pov

I put together something to eat while the water ran in the next room, mostly because it gave my hands something to do besides sit there stewing over the entire disaster of my night.

It wasn't much. Bread, cheese, the leftover stew from two nights ago that I hadn't gotten around to finishing. I wasn't running a kitchen fit for a king, and he didn't strike me as someone who'd care either way.

I found a shirt and a pair of pants in the back of my wardrobe, the smallest ones I owned, and even those looked like they'd swallow him whole. I left them folded outside the washroom door along with a towel, knocked once, hard, and didn't wait around for a response before retreating back to the kitchen.

Never used a shower before.

I turned that over in my head more times than I wanted to admit while I worked. What kind of life did a person live, never once standing under running water. I'd heard stories about the Hollow, everyone had, but stories were easy to file away as exaggeration, easier still to ignore when they didn't have a face attached to them yet. Now I had a face. Now I had a scrawny, exhausted stranger standing in my washroom asking, in a voice that cost him visibly to use, which handle did what.

Ren, unhelpfully, kept circling back to it. *He grew up like that. However long "that" was. However bad it actually got.*

I didn't want to think about it. Thinking about it made the anger sitting in my chest complicated in ways I didn't have the patience for tonight. I found myself wondering it anyway, standing there over the stew, unable to stop turning it over. How does a man survive that. How does anyone come out the other side of a life like that still standing, still sharp enough to hold a knife steady in front of a stranger twice his size.

And underneath that, a colder thought I liked even less. Rogue camps like the Hollow were mostly men. I knew that much from patrol reports and old stories both. Women who ended up there didn't fare well, used the way men in a lawless place tended to use anyone weaker than themselves, and worn down hard enough by it that few of them carried a pregnancy to term, let alone raised a pup old enough to see a first shift. Pups born into that world simply didn't survive it in any real numbers. Not because the goddess withheld her blessing. Because the Hollow itself wasn't built to let anything fragile live long enough to grow.

He'd survived it anyway. Whatever that actually meant, I didn't have the full shape of it yet, and some stubborn, unwelcome part of me wanted to.

He came out eventually, hair still damp, wearing my clothes rolled twice at the cuffs and still hanging off him like a sack. He looked, if I was honest, faintly ridiculous. I didn't say that. Some instinct I didn't examine too closely told me it wouldn't land the way I intended.

"Eat," I said instead, nodding at the plate on the table. "Before it gets cold."

He sat. Didn't wait for an invitation, didn't check if I minded, just pulled the plate toward himself and started eating like the food might vanish if he slowed down. Fast. Efficient. One arm braced loosely around the plate, the way you guard something you've learned the hard way not to trust will still be there in a minute.

I'd seen men eat like that before. Soldiers, mostly, back from campaigns where rations ran thin. I'd never seen someone eat like that over bread and cheese in the safety of an actual house.

"Slow down," I said, sharper than I meant it, mostly because watching it did something to my chest I didn't want to name. "Nobody's taking it from you."

He didn't slow down. Didn't even look up. "Force of habit."

"It's a bad one."

"Duly noted." He kept eating at the same pace anyway, and I let it go, because pushing clearly wasn't going to change seventeen or twenty years of habit in one meal, and honestly, what right did I have to lecture him on bad habits tonight of all nights.

*****

Once the plate was empty, I showed him the guest room without much ceremony, just a jerk of my head and enough words to get the point across.

"You're in here." I pushed the door open. Small room, narrow bed, a window that didn't open far enough to be useful to anyone trying to escape or break in, which I'd chosen on purpose years ago and had never once needed until tonight. "Door locks from the inside. Bolt's stiff, you have to really put your weight into it, but it holds."

He looked at the door like he was assessing it for something other than privacy. Exits, probably. I recognized the calculation by now.

"Nobody's coming in here uninvited," I said, before he could ask, or worse, not ask and just lie awake all night bracing for it. "Not me. Not anyone else in this pack. You lock that door, it stays locked until you open it yourself."

"And if I don't trust that."

"Then you don't sleep much tonight. Your choice." I wasn't going to pretty it up for him. He didn't seem like the kind of person who wanted it pretty. "I'm not in the business of convincing people to trust me. I'm in the business of making sure the door actually holds when they decide to."

Something flickered across his face, there and gone too fast to name, and he stepped inside without another word.

I shut the door behind him and stood in the hallway a moment, listening to the bolt slide home on the other side, harder than strictly necessary, like he wanted to make sure I heard it.

*****

I reached out to the alpha through the mind-link before I let myself think too hard about how to phrase any of it.

*We need to talk. Tonight, if you're still awake.*

*Kagiso?* Amusement, faint, threading through even a two word response. He always could tell when something had gone sideways in my life just from the tone of a thought. *This about the patrol you abandoned mid drill?*

*Don't.*

*Torres said you grabbed a tree like it insulted your mother.*

*I found my mate.*

That got his attention properly. I felt the shift in him even through the link, the amusement dropping away fast. *That's good news. Why do you sound like it isn't.*

*Because he's a rogue,* I said. *And he's a man. And I have spent the last two hours cursing at the sky about it, and I am extremely tired, and I need you to not make this worse than it already is.*

A long pause. *You're serious.*

*Do I sound like I'm joking.*

*You never joke. That's the whole problem with you.* Another pause, longer this time, and I could feel him working through it, weighing pack law against whatever instinct was telling him this conversation needed careful handling. *Bring him to me tomorrow. I'll want to see him myself before anyone else in this pack starts asking questions you don't want asked yet.*

*Fine.*

*Kagiso.* Something gentler now, the kind of tone he only used when he actually meant to be my friend instead of my alpha. *You alright?*

*No,* I said honestly, because there wasn't much point lying to him about it. *I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing. Tomorrow. I'll bring him tomorrow.*

I cut the link before he could say anything else useful, mostly because I didn't have the patience left tonight for useful, and sat back down at my own table in my own empty kitchen, and let myself, finally, just sit there in the wreck of the day without trying to fix a single part of it.