Rejected by My Alpha Mate

Missing Pages

Rowan finds me in the library.

Which is impressive, considering I didn’t know the pack even had a library until tonight.

It’s tucked away three floors below the Alpha offices, behind a heavy door with no sign. The corridor leading to it smells like dust and old carpet, not the usual sleek glass and steel.

I only find it because Maisie tells me to.

“If you’re going to keep arguing with people about being a curse,” she says as she stacks dishes, “you might as well know what the old stories actually say.”

“And you know where they hide those?” I ask.

She grins. “Omegas know where everyone hides everything. Go down the service stairs by the west elevator. Third landing. Left. If anyone asks, you’re lost.”

“That part won’t be a lie,” I say.

So I go.

The door sticks before it opens with a groan that sounds like disapproval on hinges. The room beyond is long and narrow, lined with shelves. Not a modern library—no comfy chairs, no public terminals. This is a storage room for old paper.

And secrets.

I trail my fingers along the spines. Some titles are in English. Some in an older script I recognize from ceremonial banners and nothing else. Treaty volumes. Lineage records. Council minutes bound in thick, humorless books.

Silverblood doesn’t appear on any of the visible labels.

Of course it doesn’t.

“You’re looking in the wrong section,” a voice says.

I start.

Rowan stands in the aisle behind me, as if he’s always been there. Tweed jacket, silver hair, tired eyes that miss very little.

“You move quietly for someone whose joints probably complain in the rain,” I say.

He snorts, the sound dry as old paper.

“You think I’d leave those stories where anyone could pull them down?” he asks.

“Funny,” I say. “That’s what I was worried about.”

He studies me for a moment, then nods toward the back of the room.

“Come,” he says. “If you’re determined to dig in the mud, better you do it where I can see what you’re pulling up.”

“Is that a gardening metaphor?” I ask. “I thought your domain was archives, not agriculture.”

“Archives are just gardens for paper,” he says. “Some weeds are older than others.”

We weave between shelves until the light from the bare bulbs thins. At the far end, there’s a metal cabinet with a lock.

Rowan unlocks it with a key from his pocket.

Inside, instead of neat rows of files, there’s a mess of loose folders and rolled scrolls. The kind of chaos that says someone knows exactly where everything is as long as no one else touches it.

He pulls out a slim, leather‑bound volume and a bundle of brittle pages.

“Sit,” he says, nodding at a small table I hadn’t noticed.

I sit.

He lays the items down carefully, like they might combust if jostled.

“What is this?” I ask.

“The things your elders prefer to call superstition when it’s convenient,” he says. “And prophecy when it isn’t.”

He opens the book first.

The script inside is older, the ink faded. He flips to a section marked with a ribbon.

“This is the oldest written reference we have to Silverblood,” he says.

The word is there, in curling letters. My skin crawls seeing it on the page instead of just on people’s tongues.

“Translation, please,” I say.

He clears his throat.

“‘When the Moon’s light sinks into flesh instead of fur,’” he reads, “‘and silver runs in the veins of one who should not hold it, the pack will stand at a crossroads. She will be curse, if treated as curse. She will be balance, if trusted as balance. She will be weapon, if wielded as such.’”

He glances up at me.

“That’s vague,” I say. “Even for prophecy.”

“Prophecy is never as precise as people pretend,” he says. “They like to act as if the words come with instructions. They don’t.”

He taps the page.

“However,” he says, “it does not say, as some would have you believe, that Silverblood always destroys.”

“It says she can be what people make her,” I say.

“In so many words,” he says.

“So this whole time,” I say slowly, “while they were telling me I’m a walking apocalypse, they left out the part where I’m also a potential… balance?”

The word tastes strange in my mouth.

“They left out many parts,” he says. “Fear edits.”

He closes the book and picks up the bundle of loose pages.

“These are treaty fragments,” he says. “Old agreements with other packs. There used to be a full copy. It went missing a long time ago.”

He opens to a specific sheet, yellowed and torn.

“Here,” he says, pointing.

The writing is cramped, as if the scribe was trying to fit more into less space. My eyes track the lines until I hit a phrase that might as well be underlined in blood.

“…Silverblood Luna of Northbridge,” it reads, “whose power unmade the city at…”

The rest of the line is ripped away.

My heart stutters.

“That’s it?” I ask. “No date? No details? Just ‘she unmade a city’ and fade to black?”

“There were more pages,” Rowan says quietly. “They’re gone.”

“Convenient,” I say.

“Or deliberate,” he says.

I look up at him sharply.

“You think someone tore it out,” I say.

“I think,” he says, “that history has hands. And some of them have claws.”

My skin prickles.

“Do you know which city?” I ask. “How she did it?”

“No,” he says. “That’s the point. The absence is its own kind of threat. People fill it with the worst thing they can imagine.”

“And then they paste it over me,” I say.

He doesn’t deny it.

“When you said sacrifice in the council,” I say, voice low, “you weren’t just objecting on principle.”

He exhales through his nose.

“Once, a long time ago,” he says, “a Silverblood Luna stood where you stand now and faced a war she could not win by ordinary means. She chose to end it in a way that left no survivors to argue with her decision. Not here. Not in that city.”

Gooseflesh ripples along my arms.

“You don’t know that,” I say. “The page is missing.”

“I know what the old stories say,” he says. “The ones that never made it onto paper. I know what our elders are afraid of when they look at you and see a girl who already thinks about throwing herself to the wolves to save everyone else.”

My throat closes up.

“I haven’t—” I start.

He looks at me.

I shut my mouth.

“I am not here to tell you what to do,” he says softly. “I have done too much telling and not enough listening in my life. But I am here to make sure you understand that this path has been walked once. And that the people who want to ‘cleanse’ you would very much like it if you chose the same end yourself, so they don’t have to dirty their hands.”

Anger burns away some of the cold.

“So they can say it was my choice,” I say. “Not theirs.”

“Exactly,” he says.

I stare at the torn edge.

“What would you do?” I ask. “If you were me.”

“I’m not,” he says. “And that’s the point. My choices have always come with power already in my hands. Yours…” He gestures to my wrist. “Yours are being made while everyone else tries to grab your fingers.”

I rub the mark.

“Why are you showing me this?” I ask. “You could have kept it locked up and let them keep telling the version where I’m a walking bomb and that’s all.”

“Because you keep showing up,” he says simply. “At councils. At borders. In rooms you weren’t invited to. It would be… cowardice, on my part, to let you keep walking blind.”

“You were there when they suggested the cleansing,” I say. “You didn’t tell them about this version.”

“They don’t listen to me the way they used to,” he says. “They hear an old man who’s gone soft. They hear someone who still believes in treaties. They do not hear warning until it’s already screaming.”

“So you tell me instead,” I say.

“So I tell the one person whose choice actually matters,” he says.

The room feels very small.

“You think I’m going to have to decide,” I say. “Between being curse, weapon, balance.”

“You already are deciding,” he says. “Every time you choose who to stand beside. Who to save. Who to let bleed. Every time you open your mouth in that chamber.”

I laugh, hollow. “That’s a lot of responsibility to put on someone who was scrubbing floors two weeks ago.”

“Power doesn’t ask if you’re ready,” he says. “It simply arrives.”

He closes the treaty fragment folder and slides it back into the cabinet.

“I can’t give you the missing page,” he says. “But I can give you this much: the last Silverblood Luna chose for herself. Don’t let anyone steal that from you this time.”

“This time,” I repeat.

“History,” he says dryly, “has a habit of repeating until someone learns the lesson.”

“What if the lesson is ‘don’t exist’?” I ask.

He actually smiles at that, faint and sad.

“Then the Moon has a cruel sense of humor,” he says. “Because here you are.”

We sit in silence for a moment, surrounded by other people’s words.

“Will you be in the next council?” I ask.

“If they let me,” he says.

“Then when they talk about sacrifice again,” I say, “maybe mention that your records say I could also be balance.”

“They’ll say I’m romanticizing,” he says.

“Let them,” I say. “Someone should.”

He inclines his head.

“Later,” he says as he rises, echoing the word he mouthed after the blood‑seal. “We’re still in the middle of the story.”

“Stories with missing pages are hard to finish,” I say.

“Then don’t let this one go missing,” he says, nodding at my wrist. “Write it yourself.”

He leaves me there with the echoes and the dust.

I look down at the faint gleam under my skin.

Curse. Balance. Weapon.

I don’t know which one I want less.

But for the first time, I know I have a say.