Rejected by My Alpha Mate

What They Do to Messengers

The girl from the kitchen disappears on a Tuesday.

It takes me until Wednesday to understand what that means.

At first, it’s just a gap.

No flour‑smudged smile when I slip in through the service door. No quick, conspiratorial, “You should’ve heard what they said after you left.” No mug of tea pressed into my hands like a small act of rebellion.

The other omegas move faster, quieter. Their eyes skitter away when I look at them. The kitchen feels like a mouth that’s bitten its own tongue and is trying very hard not to taste the blood.

“Where’s Maisie?” I ask the older woman at the sink.

She doesn’t look up.

“Shift rotation,” she says shortly. “We’re busy.”

It’s a lie. A terrible one.

I know because no one has ever bothered lying to me about omegas before.

I peel vegetables in silence until my hands ache, then retreat before my questions get anyone in trouble.

I tell myself she’s off duty. Resting. Visiting family.

Then I walk past the notice board by the service stairs and see a neatly printed name under a new assignment:

Omega Maisie Hart — status: recovering — medical wing restricted.

Recovering.

Medical wing.

A chill knots in my stomach.

Hunters know an awful lot about you.

I take the stairs two at a time.

***

The medic wing smells like antiseptic and silver. I’m starting to hate it.

“You can’t just walk in,” the guard at the door says, stepping in front of me.

“I can,” I say. “Watch.”

“Alpha’s orders,” he says, jaw tight. “Restricted access. Only family and command.”

“Guess which one of those categories is a technicality in my favor,” I say.

Before he can reply, a voice comes from inside.

“Let her in.”

Rowan stands just past the doorway, hands folded behind his back. The guard hesitates, then steps aside.

“Thank you,” I say to Rowan as I pass.

“Don’t,” he says. “You’ll change your mind once you see.”

That does nothing good to my heart rate.

He leads me down the corridor. The rooms here are small, white‑walled, too bright. I catch glimpses as we pass—bandaged arms, sleeping faces, the occasional flash of a silver sheen where a wound refuses to close.

He stops at a door halfway down.

“Prepare yourself,” he says quietly.

“For what?” I ask.

He looks at me, eyes old and tired.

“Consequences,” he says.

He opens the door.

Maisie lies on the bed, propped up on pillows. Her usually quick hands are motionless on the covers. Her skin looks wrong without flour—washed pale, almost grey. Dark bruises bloom under her eyes like someone painted sleeplessness on.

Her wrists are bandaged. Silver burns creep up from under the gauze, angry and red.

A thin, high keening sound is happening in the room. It takes me a second to realize it’s mine.

“Hey,” she says.

Her voice is raw and scratched. But it’s her.

“You look terrible,” I say, because if I say anything else I’m going to start screaming.

She laughs, then winces. “Thanks. You always know how to make a girl feel special.”

I step closer carefully, like she might shatter.

“What happened?” I ask. “Who did this? When?”

“Yesterday,” Rowan says quietly. “She never came back from a morning errand. Patrol found her dumped near the old service road. Alive. Barely.”

I swallow hard. The mark on my wrist thrums, but it’s an echo, not a current. Whatever happened is over. For now.

“Hunters?” I ask.

“Not rogues,” he says. “The wounds are precise. The burns… deliberate.”

I look at Maisie’s wrists again. The pattern is ugly and familiar—rings of silver contact, pressed and held, not slashed. Testing. Measuring.

My stomach turns.

“Did they—” I can’t finish the sentence.

“Talk?” Maisie croaks. “Oh yeah. A lot.”

Her eyes flick to Rowan.

He nods and steps back, giving us space.

“You shouldn’t—” Maisie starts, then coughs. “You shouldn’t be here. They’ll say I’m infecting you with my bad decisions.”

“Please,” I say. “I invented bad decisions.”

She smiles, faint and pained.

“They wanted to know everything,” she says. “About you.”

The words land like blows.

“What did you tell them?” I ask, hating myself for asking and hating myself more for needing to know.

“Nothing important,” she says. “Nothing you didn’t already give them yourself.”

“Maisie—”

“They knew, Evelyn,” she says. “They knew where your room used to be. They knew it moved. They knew you sit near the end of the table and drink water instead of wine. They knew you picked up extra shifts in the kitchen because you couldn’t sleep. They knew—”

Her voice cracks.

“They knew the way you hold your wrist when it burns,” she whispers.

I grip the rail of the bed so hard my knuckles ache.

“How?” I ask. “We don’t have spies. We have cameras. Guards. Wolves.”

“We have phones,” Rowan says from the corner. “And social media. And a world in which nothing truly stays private.”

“We don’t exactly livestream council meetings,” I say.

“No,” he says. “But hunters don’t need live footage when they can assemble a mosaic from smaller pieces. A barback’s gossip here. A maid’s complaint there. A guard’s brag.”

Maisie swallows.

“They showed me things,” she says. “Comments. Posts. Little videos. People talking about the ‘wolfless girl with the mark’ under fake names. Humans. Wolves. I don’t know. They had a whole file. They just needed a few… clarifications.”

Tears burn at the back of my eyes.

“What did they do when you didn’t give them what they wanted?” I ask softly.

She looks at her wrists.

“They prayed harder,” she says.

The room tilts.

“Rowan,” I say, voice thin. “I need—”

A chair appears behind me. I sink into it before my knees make their own decisions.

“They’re not just hunting you,” Maisie says. “They’re studying you. They think if they understand you enough, they can… copy it. Or stop it. Or control it. They kept calling you an opportunity. A test case.”

I want to throw up.

“I’m so sorry,” I say. The words feel useless. Sandbag walls against a flood.

“Hey,” she says. “Don’t.”

“If it weren’t for me—”

“If it weren’t for you, they’d just hurt someone else to get to you,” she says. “At least this way, I got to decide how much they learned.”

“You shouldn’t have had to decide anything,” I say.

She smiles, small and fierce.

“Welcome to being part of the story,” she whispers. “You don’t get to sit this one out and still be real.”

Silence stretches.

“They kept saying,” she adds after a moment, “that the Silverblood always comes back to finish what she started. Like it was a script. Like they were waiting for you to hit your cues.”

My hand curls unconsciously over my wrist.

“Did you tell Damon?” I ask Rowan without looking away from Maisie.

“He knows she was taken,” Rowan says. “He knows she was hurt. He does not yet know the… theological details. I wanted you to hear them first.”

Because they’re mine.

Because every new piece of this twisted liturgy sticks to me, not to him.

“You’re going to make him furious,” Maisie says. “He hates when people hurt the people he thinks are his.”

The word his lands awkwardly in my chest.

“You’re one of his too,” I say.

She smiles faintly. “Different box on his spreadsheet.”

“You’re not a box,” I say.

“Neither are you,” she says. “Try to remember that when they line up with pens.”

Her eyes flutter. Exhaustion drags at her features.

“You should rest,” I say. “I’ll… I’ll make sure they know. About the social media. The file.”

She snorts, sleepy. “Of course you will. You never shut up.”

“It’s my worst quality,” I say.

“It’s my favorite,” she murmurs.

Her eyes close.

I sit there a while longer, listening to the beep of the monitor and the soft rasp of her breathing. Rowan stands by the door, a silent sentinel.

She looks smaller without her voice in the room. Like whoever she is when no one needs her humor is this — grey skin, bandaged wrists, the careful work of breathing. Maisie, who always had something to say, sleeping in a room that smells like silver and antiseptic and the particular aftermath of something that should not have happened to her.

I didn't bring this to her. I know that. And I can't give it back.

Eventually, I stand.

“I’m going to kill them,” I say.

It comes out calm. Matter‑of‑fact.

“That is one possible response,” Rowan says.

“You disapprove?” I ask.

“I disapprove of plans made in the first thirty minutes of rage,” he says. “But I also disapprove of letting people become target practice because others were too polite to be angry.”

Fair.

I push past him into the hall.

Hunters were always monsters in my head. Distant. Faceless. A shape in the trees with a gun.

Now they’re something else too.

People who look at a girl like Maisie and see leverage.

I know from experience what it feels like to be treated as something less than a person.

It doesn’t make me forgiving.

It makes me hungry.

For once, not to be the only one paying for their curiosity.