Rejected by My Alpha Mate

Silver on the Road

The road looks harmless in daylight.

Just a strip of asphalt cutting through trees, ditches filled with last week’s rain, the occasional piece of litter humans toss when they think no one sees.

By the time we come back along it, night has sharpened every edge.

The council event runs late. Too many speeches. Too many hands. Too many lies.

I’m tired in a way that feels deeper than muscle. My feet ache in the borrowed heels Mara shoved on me at the last minute. My face hurts from smiling. My head rings with phrases like “ongoing cooperation” and “public safety framework.”

I just want to go home, peel the dress off, and sit in the dark until my brain stops buzzing.

Instead, we get ambushed.

Of course we do.

***

We’re halfway back to the tower when the first sign of wrongness hits.

It’s not the mark this time.

It’s the silence.

One second we’re rattling along to the low hum of engine and distant city noise. The next, the car’s soundscape flattens. My ears pop.

“Do you hear that?” I ask.

“Hear what?” Mara says from the seat opposite. “You realizing those shoes were a mistake?”

“The lack of—” I start.

Then the mark on my wrist ignites.

“Damon,” I say sharply.

He’s already moving.

“Down,” he snaps.

The world explodes.

***

Later, I’ll try to remember the exact sequence.

The crunch of tires over something that isn’t asphalt. The flash of silver under the headlight beam. The driver’s curse cut off by a deafening bang as the front of the car lifts and slams down.

For now, it’s a mess of impact and sound.

Windows shatter. Glass sprays. My head hits leather, then nothing, then hard plastic. My ears ring like a siren swallowed my skull.

Someone yells. Mara. The driver. I can’t tell.

“Get down!” Damon roars again.

I’m already there, half on the floor, hands over my head as another blast rips through the night. The vehicle behind us screams—metal on metal—as it swerves.

Then come the bullets.

They hit the car with a teeth‑aching whine. Silver. I don’t need anyone to tell me. The mark knows. My bones know. The air itself recoils.

“Out!” Damon’s voice cuts through the chaos. “Out, now!”

The car door jerks open. Hands grab my arm, hauling me into the ditch. Cold mud splashes up my legs. My heels sink and die an instant death.

I sprawl, dress torn, hair full of glass. The night is a mess of muzzle flashes and shouted commands.

“Cover left!” someone yells.

“Grenade—”

The world pitches sideways as a concussive wave hits. Sound implodes. For a second, there’s nothing but white.

I come back to myself on my back, staring up at the torn‑open sky. Smoke curls over the road. The burning smell of explosives mixes with damp earth and the hot metallic tang of blood.

My ears ring so hard it hurts to think.

“Evelyn.”

The word swims through the noise, too close to be an echo.

Damon crouches over me, one hand braced near my head, the other on my shoulder. His suit jacket is streaked with mud and glass. A line of blood trickles down his temple.

“Can you hear me?” he demands.

“Unfortunately,” I croak.

Relief flashes over his face, fast and fierce.

“Stay low,” he says. “Do not stand up. Do not—”

“Run toward the bullets, I know,” I say.

He almost smiles, then his expression shutters.

“Mark?” he asks.

It’s burning.

Not the warning flare from before. Not the hum from the council chamber.

This is a rolling boil, heat surging up my arm in waves. The air around me feels thick. The world sharpens at the edges.

“Everywhere,” I say. “It feels like everywhere.”

“Good,” he says grimly. “Because they are.”

He ducks as another volley of bullets shreds the air above us.

Shapes move in the tree line. Dark figures. Muzzles flashing. Sonic grenades screech, distorting what little sound my ears are still catching.

Our warriors return fire, but the angle is bad. The road, the ditch, the trees—they all conspire to turn this into a killing corridor.

A thought slices through the panic:

They planned this.

The timing. The route. The explosives. The sonic dampening that made the city noise vanish.

They knew exactly when we’d leave the council event.

They knew where we’d drive.

They knew I would be here.

“We have to move,” Damon says. “They’ll pin us here and pick us off.”

“Move where?” I demand, coughing.

“Back into the trees,” he says. “Cover. Different angles.”

“Into the place they already trapped?” I say.

“We don’t have a choice,” he says.

A bullet shatters what’s left of the windshield above us. Glass rains down.

He drags me deeper into the ditch, using the carcass of the car as partial cover.

“Stay with Jace,” he orders, shoving me toward a cluster of warriors further down. “He’ll—”

“No,” I gasp, grabbing his sleeve. “You need me.”

His eyes blaze.

“This is not the time—”

“My mark sees what you can’t!” I shout over the ringing in my ears. “You said so yourself. Let me do the thing you dragged me out here for.”

His jaw clenches hard enough I can see the muscle jump.

“Fine,” he grits. “But you stay at my back. You do not run ahead. You do not—”

“I know,” I say. “Ground rules. I heard you the first twelve times.”

He curses in a language I don’t know, then pulls me with him along the ditch, bent double.

We scramble up the far side into the cover of the trees. Bullets slam into bark. A sonic blast whines overhead. My teeth vibrate.

In the chaos, features blur—trunks, rocks, shadows. But the mark doesn’t care about any of that. It pulls, compass‑sure, toward the source of the wrongness.

“Left,” I shout, pointing. “High ground. There’s something—”

Damon doesn’t hesitate.

We move like a single, desperate animal—him choosing paths, me yanked along by the invisible thread under my skin.

Up ahead, I catch a glimpse of movement. A figure on a small ridge, half‑hidden behind a tree. Not firing. Watching. Phone raised.

Recording.

Again.

“There!” I snarl. “Camera.”

Damon’s head snaps up.

“Get down!” he roars at the warriors nearby. “Cover fire!”

They lay down a barrage toward the general direction of the ridge. The watcher ducks back, but the phone’s glow lingers like a ghost.

“They’re documenting,” I say, breathless. “Again. They want footage, not just bodies.”

“Let’s make the footage boring,” Damon says. “Stay behind the trees.”

He leans out just enough to fire three precise shots.

A cry comes from the ridge. The phone clatters, skidding down the slope in a small flare of light before going dark.

“One down,” Caleb calls. “Others falling back.”

The gunfire thins. The sonic whine fades.

And just like that, the night shifts.

From kill box to retreat.

Hunters melt back into the forest, leaving the wreckage behind. Broken glass. Bent metal. Blood.

Wolves don’t chase.

Not tonight.

“Hold positions,” Damon orders. “Check for traps. No one moves onto the road without clearance.”

Adrenaline drains out of my muscles all at once. I sag against a tree, dress torn, hair wild, arms shaking.

The mark still burns, but it’s receding. The afterglow of an instinct that did its job and is now sulking about it.

“Evelyn.”

Damon is in front of me suddenly, one hand on my shoulder, the other cupping the side of my face. His fingers tremble, just a little.

“Any injuries?” he demands. “Head? Chest? Legs?”

“Just my pride,” I say weakly. “And maybe my ankles. Heels were a mistake.”

“I told you,” Mara says from somewhere behind him, voice thin but intact. “Practical shoes. You never listen.”

I laugh, and then I can’t stop.

It borders on hysterical, but at least it’s sound.

Damon’s thumb brushes a piece of glass from my cheek. His hand smells like gunpowder and blood.

“You called it,” he says quietly. “Before the first blast. You felt the silence.”

“Mark does good work,” I say.

“You do,” he says.

He doesn’t look away.

For a second, the world narrows to the line of his jaw, the gold of his eyes, the way his shoulders are still braced between me and the road like he can physically hold back whatever else might come.

His hand slips from my cheek to my wrist.

The mark pulses against his fingers, hot and bright.

For one strange second, I feel something that isn’t mine—a bone-deep exhaustion, heavier than my own, and the faint ghost of gunpowder on a tongue that isn’t in my mouth. It’s gone before I can name it. I blink.

Damon’s eyes flick to my face. “What?”

“Nothing,” I say. “Adrenaline.”

He doesn’t look convinced. Neither am I.

“We’re going home,” he says.

“And then what?” I ask.

“Then,” he says, “we make sure the next time they try this, we’re the ones writing the script.”

His words should comfort me.

They don’t.

Because somewhere out there, even as we pick glass out of our skin and count our wounded, someone is already uploading a new video.

Not just of a glowing girl in the woods.

Of that same girl standing beside an Alpha on a city staircase, smiling for the cameras, mark hidden under borrowed jewelry.

Two versions of me, spliced together into whatever story hunters want to tell.

And the worst part is:

They’re both true.