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

Oath

Storm pov

Someone banged on the door hard enough to rattle it in its frame, and I was awake and reaching for my knife, already gripped tight under the blanket where I'd kept it all night, before my eyes had even properly opened.

"Up," Kagiso called through the wood, voice rough with sleep and already irritated with the day. "We're seeing the alpha this morning. Don't make either of us late."

"Wonderful," I muttered, to nobody, and dragged myself upright, knife still in hand out of pure habit even though nothing in the room had given me a single reason to need it.

He was in the kitchen by the time I emerged, hair still damp from his own shower, scowling at a piece of bread like it had personally offended him. He didn't look at me directly. Just shoved a plate my way and jerked his chin toward the door.

"Eat fast. We walk."

*He's grumpy in the morning,* Sunny observed, entirely too delighted about it. *Good to know.*

*Focus,* I told her.

*I am focused. On how grumpy he is.*

I ate fast, mostly because arguing with an empty stomach felt like a losing strategy for whatever the day had planned, tucked the knife into my belt where it belonged, and followed him out into a morning that smelled like wet earth and woodsmoke.

That was when I actually saw his house properly for the first time, in daylight instead of rain and panic. It was small. Practical. Stone foundation, wood walls gone silver with age and weather, a chimney that had clearly seen more winters than either of us had been alive. Nothing about it announced that a general lived there. If anything it looked like the kind of house a man built when he wanted to be left alone.

Tucked around the side, half hidden behind a low stone wall that kept it out of sight from the main path, was a garden.

I stopped walking. I couldn't help it.

Rows of vegetables, neat and clearly tended by hand, herbs growing thick along one edge, everything arranged with a care that didn't match the man currently scowling at his own bread twenty feet away.

"What," he said, catching me staring.

"Nothing." I kept walking. "Just didn't peg you as someone who gardens."

"I'm not a gardener." He said it too fast, color rising slightly at the back of his neck, which was the first genuinely interesting thing I'd learned about him all morning. "It's practical. Fresh food, less reliance on the pack stores, one less thing to worry about running out of during a bad winter. That's all it is."

*That,* Sunny said, entirely too pleased with herself, *is absolutely not all it is. Also, he's blushing.*

*He's not blushing.*

*He's a little bit blushing.*

I didn't argue with her further, mostly because I agreed, and mostly because it wasn't my business to push a man who clearly wanted the subject dropped as fast as possible.

*****

The walk to the pack house woke the rest of the pack up around us, and it was strange, watching a place actually function like this. Wolves moving between houses that all had real walls and real doors. Pups chasing each other across a training green while an exhausted looking woman called after them. Two older wolves arguing cheerfully over the price of something at a stall that smelled like fresh bread.

Nobody in the Hollow had lived like this. Nobody in the Hollow had the luxury of arguing over bread prices instead of who got to eat first.

People noticed us. Heads turning, conversations dropping into whispers the second we passed, eyes tracking me with open curiosity that made my spine go rigid out of pure habit. Nobody approached, though. Whatever they thought of the rogue walking beside their beta, they clearly thought better of saying it to his face.

"They stare a lot," I said.

"They're curious. Not hostile." He didn't slow his pace. "Different things."

"Feels the same from here."

"It isn't." He said it firmly enough that I let it go, filing that away too.

*****

The alpha's house was bigger than the others, though not by much, more a matter of size than grandeur. The man who opened the door before we even knocked was tall, dark haired, built like he could bench press a small building, and the second his eyes landed on Kagiso his entire face broke into a grin that had absolutely nothing to do with alpha authority and everything to do with genuine, unfiltered delight.

"There he is," he said. "The tree assaulter himself."

"I hate you, Rylan," Kagiso said, ears going faintly red.

"Torres told everyone. I want you to know that. Everyone." Rylan's eyes moved to me, curious but not unkind, and something flickered across his face for half a second, quick and strange, gone before I could name it. He looked almost as confused by it as I felt watching it happen. "Huh."

*That's strange,* Sunny said, quiet now, none of her usual teasing in it. *That felt like something. Familiar. I don't know why.*

*Family, maybe,* I thought, half joking, mostly not, and shoved the thought aside before it could go anywhere useful.

His eyes were the same sharp blue as mine. I noticed it and dismissed it in the same breath, telling myself plenty of people had blue eyes, telling myself it meant nothing at all.

"What," Kagiso said, catching the look on Rylan's face.

"Nothing." Rylan shook it off, visibly, and gestured us both inside. "Come in. Let's get this sorted before the whole pack starts making up their own version of the story."

*****

His study was warm, sunlight actually reaching through real glass windows, and he settled behind his desk with the easy authority of someone who'd done this a thousand times before, though the humor from the doorway hadn't fully left his eyes yet.

"Alright." Rylan folded his hands. "Let's start simple. What's your name."

Silence. I watched, out of the corner of my eye, Kagiso's mouth open and then shut again, some visible calculation happening behind his eyes before he clearly realized he didn't actually have an answer to give.

Rylan noticed too. His grin came back, wide and delighted. "You don't know his name."

"I've been slightly occupied." Kagiso's jaw tightened, color climbing fast up his neck. "It's not exactly the first thing on my mind after finding out my mate is a man."

"Sure, sure." Rylan wasn't buying it for a second. "Most people manage introductions before the second day, is all I'm saying."

"Nobody asked you."

"You're my beta. I get to comment." Rylan looked far too pleased with himself, and I filed away, with some private amusement of my own, that apparently even a general with a temper like a lit fuse could be reduced to sputtering by the right amount of teasing from the right person.

"Storm," I said, before either of them could keep going. "Storm Walters."

"Walters." Rylan repeated it, testing the shape of it. "Family name?"

"Mother's name. Willow Walters. Didn't have a father's name worth using."

He nodded at that, easy enough, and turned to the computer on the corner of his desk, pulling up the registry as he spoke. "Alright, Storm Walters. Let's see." He typed as he talked, eyes scanning the screen, scrolling slow through record after record. "Every pack within three territories reports its banishments into this system. Name, crime, date. Goes back eighteen years." He kept scrolling as he read. "Nothing under Walters. Nothing under Storm either, name or description matching."

"Why were you banished," Kagiso asked, before Rylan could look up from the screen, and I felt the weight of the question land differently than the others had.

"Nobody threw me out of anywhere." I said it plainly, for the first time out loud, to anyone. "I was born into it. Grew up a rogue. Didn't commit any crime, other than being born in the wrong place."

Both of them went still at that. Rylan's hand stopped moving on the mouse.

A rogue child was rare. I watched that land on both their faces at once, the same slow recalculation, the same unspoken question neither of them asked out loud yet.

"Your mother?" Rylan said, gentler now.

"She was banished." I kept it flat, kept it short. "That's the whole story I have for either of you."

He didn't push further, though I could tell he wanted to, and closed the screen slowly. "Alright. Here's where we stand. Your record, or lack of one, is clean. I don't have grounds to turn you away." He glanced at Kagiso. "Beta. You're vouching for him."

"FINE." It came out of Kagiso like an explosion, loud enough that I actually flinched. "He stays. Obviously he stays. What exactly is my other option, Rylan? Leaving him to wander the damn border alone where anyone could find him? I'm not doing that. I refuse to do that. So yes, fine, he stays, he's mine to deal with, and I would like it noted for the record that none of this is because I want it this way."

"Nobody said you wanted it," Rylan said, far too calmly, clearly enjoying every second of this.

"You were THINKING it."

"I wasn't, actually, but go off."

Kagiso made a sound in his throat like a kettle reaching full boil and crossed his arms so hard I heard his shirt strain at the seams.

Rylan let the silence sit a moment, visibly recovering from his own amusement, before he turned back to me with something more businesslike settling over his face.

"There's one more thing I'd want, if he's staying," he said. "A temporary oath. Nothing permanent, nothing binding beyond what either of you agree to."

"What does it actually do."

"A few things." He held up a hand, counting them off. "It means he won't smell like a rogue to anyone in this pack anymore. That matters more than it sounds like it should. A rogue scent puts wolves on edge without them even meaning it to, some old instinct nobody can fully train out. Sworn in, that edge disappears. Nobody flinches when he walks past. Nobody treats him like a threat that wandered in off the border. That alone will make his life considerably easier here."

"Appreciated," I said, and meant it more than I let show.

"It's temporary," Rylan added, before I could ask. "Nothing permanent about it. You can walk away whenever you decide to. But the moment you cross back off pack land, whatever it gives you here stops working entirely. It only holds while you're standing on Havenbrook soil."

"And if the two of you ever decide to make this permanent," Rylan added, entirely too casually, "the oath's not what does that. That's a different bond entirely. A mark, formal, the kind that doesn't come off with distance or time.Then we can formal accept you into the pack"

Kagiso went red from his collar to his hairline in under a second.

"RYLAN."

"What? I'm being informative."

"You are being a menace."

"I contain multitudes." Rylan didn't even bother hiding the grin this time. "Relax. Nobody's marking anybody today."

Kagiso looked, briefly, like he wanted the floor to open up and swallow him whole. I decided, watching him splutter, that this was easily the most entertaining thing that had happened to me in several years.

Neither of them knew, not really, that someone actually was looking. Not the vague, general assumption of it that came with being a rogue on the run, but the specific, active certainty I carried in my chest every single hour since I'd crossed that border, that Vorath's men were already searching, already close, already patient in the particular way my father's men were trained to be. I hadn't told either of them that. I wasn't sure yet if I planned to.

"Fine," I said instead. "Temporary. I can leave whenever I want."

"Whenever you want," Rylan agreed.

"He's not going anywhere," Kagiso said, low, arms still crossed, still visibly annoyed at his own generosity. "He's my problem now. Which means he stays here, where I can actually keep an eye on him, until we work out what any of this is."

I didn't argue with that, mostly because some small, unwelcome part of me didn't entirely want to.