Rejected by My Alpha Mate

First Patrol

They don’t invite me on patrol.

They let me fight for it.

It starts in Damon’s office, because of course it does. That room is where bad ideas go to get turned into orders.

Maps cover one wall—city streets, forest borders, marked in ink and pins. The window looks out over the river, all steel bridges and reflected light. Damon stands with his hands braced on the desk, talking through adjustments to the night routes with Caleb and a couple of squad leaders.

I lean against the bookshelf like a piece of furniture that wandered in.

“Sector three gets the extra pair,” Damon says. “Hunters like the switchback near the service road. I don’t want any patrol there without overlapping coverage.”

“We’re already stretched thin,” one of the leaders says. “We can’t—”

“We can,” Damon says, “or we die tired. Those are the options.”

No one argues with that.

I clear my throat.

Several heads turn. Damon doesn’t. Yet.

“I want in,” I say.

Now he looks.

“No,” he says.

“You didn’t let me finish,” I say.

“I don’t need to,” he says. “The answer is no.”

“You haven’t heard the question,” I say.

“You said you want in,” he says. “That implies you want to be out there. With the people hunters are trying to kill. The answer is no.”

“They’re trying to kill me too,” I say. “That hasn’t stopped them from breaking into my life so far.”

Caleb makes a strangled sound that might be a laugh. Damon’s gaze slices his way. The sound dies.

I push off the bookshelf.

“Right now every warrior who gets near me is a volunteer on a suicide mission,” I say. “They go where you send them, walk into traps set with my name. And I sit in a hallway and peel vegetables while people carve my mark into metal.”

“Watching is a job,” Damon says. “Staying where you’re safest is a job.”

“Safest for who?” I ask. “You? The council? The next patrol that gets hit while I’m counting tiles on the ceiling?”

His jaw flexes.

“You are not trained,” he says.

“I am training,” I say. “Ask Caleb. Ask Jace.”

Caleb lifts his hands. “She’s not the worst rookie I’ve had,” he says. “And her mark notices things before we do.”

“The mark notices things,” Damon says. “Not her.”

It lands harder than he means it to. I feel the sting and watch him see it a heartbeat too late.

“My mark is on my arm,” I say evenly. “It’s not an extra person you can order around separately.”

Silence drops into the room like a stone.

“Regardless,” Damon says after a beat, “you’re not going.”

“You keep saying that like it’s a law,” I say. “It’s a preference. I’m the one who has to live with what happens to people because I wasn’t there.”

“You’re not responsible for hunters’ bullets,” he says. “You didn’t pull the trigger.”

“Tell that to Jace,” I say. “Ask him whose name the dying hunter screamed before he passed out.”

Jace is leaning in the doorway now, sling supporting his injured arm. I didn’t notice him arrive. His brows go up when I mention him.

“I can answer that,” he says. “It was Silverblood.”

“Exactly,” I say. “They’re coming for me. You all can pretend I’m a passive object in this war, but I’m not. I’m a moving target whether I sit in my room or not. The difference is whether I’m helping.”

“Helping how?” Damon demands. “By giving them a bigger prize when they spring their trap?”

“By seeing it before it closes,” I snap. “By feeling it. By being what they already think I am, on our terms instead of theirs.”

The words hang there, hotter than I meant them to.

Damon’s eyes harden. “Our terms,” he repeats.

“You want to use me like a weapon,” I say. “Fine. Let me point. Don’t put me on a shelf and tell me that’s safety.”

That does it.

He slams his palm down on the desk. The maps jump.

“Enough,” he says. “You are not a weapon. You are not bait. You are—”

“A responsibility,” I finish for him. “Yes. You’ve mentioned.”

His nostrils flare.

Caleb coughs into his fist. “With respect, Alpha,” he says carefully, “if we keep treating her like she’s radioactive, the pack’s never going to see her as anything but a disaster waiting to happen.”

“You think sending her out with a patrol will fix that?” Damon asks.

“If she spots one trap before it goes off,” Caleb says, “that’s more than most of us can do with two good eyes.”

All eyes swing back to Damon.

He looks at the map. At me. At the window.

He closes his eyes for a second, then opens them.

“One patrol,” he says. “Controlled. Short route. Heavy escort. No live engagement if it can be avoided.”

My heart knocks hard enough to make me dizzy.

“I—”

“And you follow every command I give you,” he continues, voice like cold steel. “If I say fall back, you fall back. If I say run, you run. If I say down, you hit the ground. You do not improvise. You do not argue. You do not decide your conscience knows better than my tactics.”

“So you want me as a very obedient radar,” I say.

“Yes,” he says. “Or you stay in the hallway.”

I swallow.

“Fine,” I say. “Radar it is.”

He studies me, as if testing whether I mean it. Then he nods once.

“Sector two,” he tells Caleb. “Short loop along the inner forest line. No direct approach to the service road. We’re testing her sensitivity, not handing her to them.”

“Got it,” Caleb says.

Jace straightens. “I’m coming,” he says.

“You’re not,” Damon says without looking at him.

“My arm is bad, not my eyes,” Jace says. “If something goes wrong, you’ll want someone who can report it and not lie about it later.”

“I don’t lie in my reports,” Caleb protests.

“You embellish,” Jace says.

Damon pinches the bridge of his nose.

“Fine,” he says. “Jace, you ride. You don’t fight. You don’t bleed. I already had to explain one silver‑soaked warrior to the council; I’m not doing it twice.”

“Yes, Alpha,” Jace says, entirely too chipper for someone with a half‑healed bullet wound.

***

The forest feels different when you step into it on purpose.

Last time I was out here, it was under a full moon with a child’s scream tearing the world apart. This time, the sky is a steady grey, the trees damp from a recent rain. The air smells like wet earth, pine, and the faint wrongness of old blood I can’t quite forget.

We move in a loose V—Damon at the point, Caleb and another warrior to the sides, me just behind Damon’s right shoulder, Jace bringing up the rear.

Every step is a negotiation between my instincts and his orders.

“Eyes up,” Damon says quietly. “Listen first, then look.”

I do.

Birds. Wind threading through branches. The distant hum of traffic from the city side. No howls. No human voices. The mark on my wrist is a low, steady heat, like a coal banked under ash.

“Anything?” Caleb asks after a while.

“Mostly trees,” I say.

He smiles without looking back. “Good. I’d be worried if the trees started talking.”

“They might,” Jace mutters. “If hunters are hiding in them.”

“That’s still hunters talking,” I say. “The trees are just providing acoustics.”

We weave between trunks, following a path I recognize from maps and memories. Damon keeps us off the exact tracks that got hit last time, angling just inside, close enough to see the old ground without stepping on it.

The mark twitches once when we pass the spot where the traps were.

“Here,” I say softly.

Damon lifts a hand. The patrol halts.

“Feel anything?” he asks.

“Residual,” I say. “Like a bruise where the traps sat. They’re gone, but the place remembers.”

“Fancy way of saying you’re spooked,” Jace says lightly.

“You were the one bleeding here,” I remind him. “You don’t get to mock my goosebumps.”

He chuckles.

Damon crouches, fingers skimming the damp earth. “No new metal scent,” he says. “No disturbed soil.”

“They could have set them farther out,” the other warrior says.

“They could have set them anywhere,” Damon says. “That’s why we’re walking.”

I take a breath and let it out slow, focusing on the pull of the mark the way I did in training. On the way it warmed when hunters whispered in the city. On the way it flared like a struck match when a child screamed.

Nothing like that now.

Just the faint hum of pack territory. The edge of the wild. The sense that this line between tower and forest is thinner than it looks.

“Clear,” I say.

We move on.

Minutes stretch. The forest presses in, familiar and strange at once. I’ve seen it from windows, from the edge of pack‑approved paths. I’ve run through it in panic. I’ve never walked it like this—deliberate, searching, part of a unit.

“How’s your breathing?” Damon asks quietly at one point, without turning.

“I can still insult you,” I say. “So pretty good.”

“That’s not a medical metric,” he says.

“It is for me,” I say.

The corner of his mouth twitches.

We loop back eventually, angling toward the tower from a different side. No rogues. No hunters. Just mud on our boots and tension in our shoulders.

“This was pointless,” the other warrior mutters.

“Pointless would have been staying home,” Jace says. “Now we know there’s nothing on this route. That’s data.”

“Hunters can move traps,” the warrior says. “By the time we come back, they could be—”

The mark spikes.

Heat lances up my arm, sharp and sudden.

I stop dead.

“Evelyn,” Damon says.

“Wait,” I breathe.

The others freeze.

I close my eyes, not because he told me to, but because the forest feels louder that way. I focus on the burn. On the direction.

Left.

Downhill, toward a shallow dip where water collects after rain. The air there smells thicker. Wrong.

“There,” I say, pointing. “Something’s off.”

Damon doesn’t argue. He signals with two fingers, and we fan out carefully, steps light.

At first, I don’t see anything.

Then the angle shifts, and a glint of metal winks from under a pile of leaves near a fallen log.

Caleb swears under his breath.

“Good catch,” he says.

Damon raises a hand. “No one touch it,” he says. “Circle.”

We do. From this angle, I can see the trap’s teeth just under the leaf litter, waiting for weight.

The mark thrums like a struck chord.

“Same make?” Damon asks Caleb.

Caleb crouches carefully, gloved, and peels back a little more cover.

“Same,” he says grimly. “And—”

He turns it just enough for us to see the underside.

The symbol stares up at us. My mark, scratched into steel.

My stomach lurches.

“They reset the field quicker than we thought,” Jace says.

“No,” Damon says. “This is a new placement. Different angle. They’re adjusting to our adjustments.”

“They’re watching us,” I say quietly.

He nods once.

The knowledge sits heavy in the clearing.

Then Caleb’s gaze flicks to me.

“If you hadn’t felt it,” he says, “we would’ve walked right into that on the next loop.”

The other warrior shudders. “I almost did this time.”

Damon looks at me.

There’s no triumph in his eyes. Just the acknowledgement of a calculation that landed where he needed it to.

“We mark this spot and clear it properly,” he says. “Then we adjust again.”

He doesn’t say You were right.

He doesn’t have to.

The mark on my wrist cools back to a simmer, like it’s satisfied with having been included.

We head back toward the tower as the light begins to fade, and for the first time since this started, I don’t feel entirely like a piece of cargo being shuffled between rooms.

I feel like I walked into the dark and brought something back besides more fear.