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

Mate

Kaigso pov

"Again," I said. "Torres, your flank's wide open every time you pivot."

Torres reset his stance in the mud and ran the drill again. Better this time. I didn't tell him that. Praise made men soft, and soft men died out here, and I had buried enough soldiers in this pack to know exactly what that cost looked like up close.

"You're an ass," Cooper muttered beside me.

"Noted."

"They'd all walk into fire for you. You know that."

"They should walk into fire because it keeps them alive when it matters. Not because they like me."

Cooper huffed, half a laugh, and didn't push it, because he knew as well as I did that both things were true at once. I ran these men harder than any other general in the north ran his patrols, and every single one of them still saluted me like they meant it. I didn't need them to like me. I needed them to come home to their mates and their pups at the end of a night like this one. Harsh was cheaper than a funeral. I'd learned that lesson early, and I'd never once regretted the trade.

I was midway through correcting Torres again when the wind shifted.

*****

The scent hit me before I understood what it was.

Mate.

I went completely still, and for one full second the entire world narrowed down to that single word. Five years since my first shift, five years of knowing I'd recognize her the moment it happened, and there it was, unmistakable, cutting straight through the rain like the rain wasn't even there.

Every picture I'd never let myself build out loud came rushing up at once. Cooking together in a kitchen that had sat empty since my parents died. Teaching her to dance badly at the alpha's autumn gathering while she laughed at my footwork. A house that actually felt like a house again, instead of a place I just kept clean and came back to because I had nowhere else to be.

Ren surged up under my skin, desperate, delighted, screaming at me to shift so we could run faster. *Shift. Now. We need to get there.*

"No." I said it out loud, low enough that only Cooper caught it. I wanted to meet her on two feet. Clothed, if I had any say in the matter, with actual words ready instead of a mouth full of teeth and nothing to offer but fur.

"General?"

"Stay here." I was already moving.

I ran hard, faster than I had any business running on two legs, and somewhere in the second mile I realized exactly where the scent was pulling me. Not deeper into pack land. Toward the border. Past it, even, out where our territory markers gave way to nothing anybody claimed.

There was something underneath the scent too. A bitterness, faint but unmistakable to a nose trained since childhood to sort friend from threat. I knew that bitterness. I'd smelled it on the two rogues who murdered my parents when I was young enough that the memory had never fully healed over, only scarred.

Rogue. My mate was a rogue.

Something ugly reared up in my chest, old grief wearing new anger, and for three full strides I actually slowed down, some furious, wounded part of me demanding to know why in the goddess's name she would do this. Why hand me the one thing I'd waited my whole life for, wrapped in the exact thing I'd spent that same life hating.

I didn't stop running. Whatever she was, she was still mine. The goddess didn't make mistakes even when I couldn't make sense of her reasoning, and I'd rather find out what her damn plan was than turn my back on it over old grief I hadn't finished carrying.

I broke through the last stretch of trees at a dead sprint and found her standing in a clearing, soaked to the bone, dead still, watching me the way you watch something that might kill you.

She was beautiful. That registered first, before anything else had the chance to catch up. Short curly hair, cut in a rough, undeniably masculine style, plastered flat with rain. Blue eyes, sharp, guarded, something dangerous hiding behind them that I couldn't name yet and desperately wanted to.

Then my eyes kept moving, and the beauty curdled into something closer to horror.

Flat chest under a soaked, threadbare shirt. No curve anywhere. No softness. Just lean, hard muscle over a frame built for surviving, not for anything I'd ever pictured in all those stupid daydreams about a kitchen and a house full of warmth. Fairly tall. Half starved. Unmistakably, undeniably male.

"Oh, hell no." It tore out of me before I could stop it. "No. Absolute hell no."

He didn't flinch. Didn't move an inch, actually, just stood there in the rain with his jaw set and his knife gripped tight in one shaking hand, watching me lose my mind like he was fully prepared to put me on the ground if I so much as twitched wrong.

Ren, infuriatingly calm even now, offered one single thought and refused to elaborate further. *He's not scared of you. Notice that.*

I wasn't in any mood to notice anything. I tipped my head back and screamed the rest of it at the sky, loud enough that birds tore out of the trees behind him. "Five years! FIVE YEARS I waited for you! I never once complained, never asked for anything, and this is what you send me? A scrawny, half starved ROGUE MAN? Do you have any damn idea what rogues took from me? And this is your idea of a joke? Some sick, twisted joke you've been saving up this whole time?"

Nothing answered. Nothing ever did. That had never stopped me believing before, and it didn't stop the fury now, it just left it with nowhere to go but back down at him.

"What," I snapped, still shaking with it, "do you have to say for yourself."

"Nothing." Flat. Unbothered. "Didn't ask for this either."

That, somehow, made it worse and better at the same time, and it made me even angrier that it did.

"Of course you didn't." I dragged both hands down my face, hard enough to hurt. "Nobody asks for a curse like this. Do you have any idea what you've done to me? Twenty two years old, I've waited my whole damn life to feel exactly what I felt back there on patrol, and it turns out the goddess's idea of a joke is handing me a rogue with a smart mouth and not a single feminine bone in his entire body. Un-be-liev-able."

I paced two full circles in the mud, cursing under my breath in every language I half remembered from the old texts, before I made myself stop and actually look at him again. Soaked. Shaking. Barely upright. Whatever he'd survived to get here, it had clearly cost him everything he had left.

"You're my problem now," I said, mostly to myself, still furious, still reeling, still cursing the goddess under my breath even as the words came out. "Whatever the hell that ends up meaning."

"Didn't ask to be anyone's problem."

"Doesn't matter what you asked for. It's what you damn well are now." I dragged a hand down my face again, hard, and looked up at the sky one more time, just in case the goddess had anything left to say for herself.

She didn't.

"Unbelievable," I muttered, to nobody, to everybody, to whatever cruel sense of humor had decided this was the shape my mate would take. "Absolutely unbelievable."