Claimed By The Banished Alpha

Chapter 8: Not Good Enough

Sylvia Fenris’ POV

I don’t remember the walk back to my dorm. I remember Edwina's hand on my back, Nina cursing Rand's name with words that would have gotten her expelled if a teacher had heard, and Maria saying nothing at all, just sitting close enough that I knew she was there.

They took turns bringing me water, tea, and a blanket, as if I had been physically wounded badly, I really felt the humiliation in front of the entire academy. It was as if I should have possessed the power to reverse everything.

In a sense, I had been rejected. Public rejection is more than heartbreak. Honestly, it hurts a lot. That’s a mark. An open wound for the world to see. Though the wound will heal, the scar will always be there to remind me of it.

By the next morning, half the students wouldn't look me in the eyes, and the other half looked at me with open pity, which was somehow worse for me to endure.

Pity meant they had already written the end of my story. Omega was thrown away, a sad footnote to someone else's bid for power.

I heard snippets of conversations everywhere I went, girls I had never spoken to, boys who used to nod at me in the hallway, all of a sudden experts on what my life should look like from here. It is very heartbreaking, seeing myself in such a situation.

I didn't eat breakfast. I missed my first class. I sat back behind the old training barn that no one ever went to anymore, knees to my chest, and let myself cry until there was nothing left, until the tears dried into something harder and colder, sitting in my chest, a stone where my heart used to be.

“Not worth it,” I encouraged myself.

I rolled the word around in my head until it sounded less like an insult and more like a dare.

He’d said it in front of everyone, because he wanted it to define me. He desired the whole dynasty to remember me as the girl who wasn’t good enough for the Alpha-Heir.

I decided somewhere in the dirt behind that barn I would never be defined by his words, rather, I will be remembered as something else entirely.

If Rand thought I was weak, soft, frigid, or dispensable, I would be something he couldn't name.

Something that could not be denied because it no longer needed anyone's permission to live.

I wiped my face and stood up on legs that still shook and walked straight to the one person on campus who might actually help me become that person.

I hunted down Coach Aldric that afternoon, the retired warrior who taught the advanced combat electives no one under third year was allowed to take.

I walked over to him as he was sewing up a training dummy's stuffing, a gray-streaked and scarred wolf, the sort who had been in enough real fights that he didn't need to talk about them anymore.

"I want more training," I said to him.

"Anything you give me. I don't care how hard it is.”

He looked at me for a long moment, taking in my swollen eyes, my clenched jaw, and the dirt on my knees.

“Heartbreak makes fools or fighters,” he said at last. "What are you going to be, girl?” He enquired.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But I’m done being the first.”

Something moved in his weather-beaten face, not quite a smile, but near enough, a hint of something like respect he wasn't used to showing students.

He agreed to train me before dawn, when no one else would see, when the courtyard was only for the desperate enough to be up that early.

I didn't tell my friends. I didn't say anything to anybody because I decided to keep it a secret to myself.

I began to wake at five, running the tree line until my lungs burned, learning how to call my wolf forward with something other than fear, something more like purpose.

Some mornings, I'd pass out in the dirt before the sun even crested the treeline, and Coach Aldric would stand over me, arms crossed, telling me to get back up.

I always have every single time for my training, even when my body screamed at me to stop.

It is the fourth morning. I am exhausted, raw, sweat cooling on my skin in the gray light before dawn, and Thoros is waiting by the fence at the edge of the training field, as if he knew just where to find me, though I had told no one where I would be.

"You are avoiding me," he said.

I'm training. I wiped the sweat from my face, not letting him see how much his presence still unsettled every cell in my body, how my pulse had picked up the second I recognized his silhouette against the fence posts.

"That's different. Unless you've come all the way out here to tell me that's not true."

“Sylvia,” he said my name low, deliberately, as if it cost him something just to shape the syllables, his usual confidence nowhere to be found.

“There’s something I need to tell you, and I don’t think you’re going to want to hear it.”

There was something in his voice that made my hair rise on my arms, an instinct older than reason.

"Huh?"

He turned his back to me, to the dark line of trees beyond the fence, to the territory that had once been his family’s before the Crescent Moon Clan ripped it from them, his jaw working as if chewing on words too heavy to speak easily.

I thought for a moment that he might just walk away instead, the way he had that first night on the porch, but he didn't. Whatever the cost, he would stay.

“It’s about your mother,” he said. "How did she die?"

The ground tilted beneath my feet, the whole training field tipping sideways, the fence and the trees and the grey morning sky all swimming together.

"What about my mum?” I asked.

He turned to face me, and for the first time since I had known him, Thoros Myr looked afraid; his iron composure cracked at the edges.

“I was there,” he said. The night she died. I was in it.”

The words hung in the cold morning air between us, too heavy for either of us to move past, and for a moment neither of us said anything at all.