Rejected by the Alpha, Claimed by His Wolf

I loved him for three years and never once said it out loud, and I am going to tell you why before I tell you what he did, because otherwise the rest of this will make me sound like something I am not. An omega does not walk up to an Alpha's son and tell him he belongs to her. I watched a girl try it when I was sixteen. Sera. She said it in the washhouse, to two people she trusted, and by the end of that week her bunk was stripped and nobody in the compound used her name again. So I kept it. I kept it through three winters of mending nets with my hands in cold water. I kept it through every meal at the long table where he sat at the far end and did not look at me. I kept it so well that when Elder Hollis came down to the shed in the grey light and stood in my doorway with his hands behind his back and told me to be at the rite, I said yes, and I waited until he was gone, and then I put my face in my hands and shook for a while, in a shed where nobody could see me do it. I knew what the rite was for. Everyone knew. A man does not sit in the Alpha's seat with an open bond. The pack started gathering at dusk. By the time the moon cleared the ridge there were two hundred of them standing in the field behind the hall, and every one of them turned to watch me come up the hill. I had washed the tar off my hands in the harbor. I had put on the only dress I owned that did not have a patch on it, which was a stupid thing to do, because a dress changes nothing. I wore it anyway, because I wanted him to look at me one time before he did it. Two hundred faces. I kept mine straight ahead and did not let them have one thing. The field sits behind the hall on ground the pack keeps cleared. There is a stone in the middle of it, knee high, with writing cut into the top that a hundred years of hands have worn almost flat. Hollis stood beside the stone with the book open. Past him, up on the platform, the Alpha's chair sat empty. Then Kade Mercer came up the steps at the far end of the field, and my whole body turned over. He was twenty-seven. Black coat, collar up, the scar down the left side of his jaw pale in the moonlight. He did not look at the crowd. He did not look at Hollis. He walked to the chair, turned, sat down, and only then did his eyes come to rest on me, and it went through me like water finding a c***k. The field went quiet the way water goes quiet before it freezes. "Willa Dain," Hollis said. I walked to the stone. My legs worked. I have no idea how. "Do you hold an unclaimed bond to this man," Hollis said. "Yes." Somebody at the back of the field laughed, and somebody else told them to shut up. "Speak it plain." "I hold an unclaimed bond to Kade Mercer." My voice did not shake. I will never understand why. "Three years." The murmur went round the field and died. Three years. Three years of me mending their nets and eating at the end of their table and sleeping in the cold wing with the orphans, and never once opening my mouth about the only thing in that compound that was mine. Kade stood up out of the chair. He came down off the platform and across the field. The crowd opened for him without being asked. He stopped on the other side of the stone, close enough that I could see the thread coming loose at the cuff of his coat, and he looked at me for a long time. Long enough that people started shifting their feet. Then he said it. "I, Kade Mercer, of the Mercer line, reject the bond between myself and Willa Dain." I am not going to pretend I took it well. My ears went. There was a high sound in them and the field went soft at the edges, and I put my hand down flat on the stone because my legs had stopped being interested in the job. The old writing was under my palm, worn smooth and cold. I looked up at him and did not say one word. Something in my chest came apart. Not fast. It took about a minute, like a rope fraying strand by strand, and I stood there and felt every strand of it go. "I reject you," he said again, quieter. That one was not for the crowd. That one was for me, and only me, and he said it looking straight into my face. I have thought about that second sentence more than anything else in my life. Then he turned and walked back up to the chair and sat down, and I was still standing at the stone with my hand on it. Hollis closed the book. "The bond is severed. The woman's claim is finished. She keeps her place in the compound until the elders say otherwise, and she does not come to the hall." Nobody cheered. It was not that kind of rite. The crowd came apart in one slow wave and turned back toward the food and the fires, and I stood in the middle of the field with my hand on the stone until I could make my legs take my weight again. Kade was in the chair. He was not watching me. He was looking at the ridge, at nothing, and one hand was gripping the arm of the chair hard enough that the leather had gone white under his fingers. I went down the hill. Everything I owned fit in a canvas bag under my bunk in the cold wing. What did not fit was the boat. There is a boat at the end of the west dock, twenty-two feet, older than I am, with a tarp over the engine. It leaks along the port seam. I have never fixed it, because fixing it would have meant admitting to myself that I intended to keep it, and in that compound you do not admit you want to keep anything. I lay on my bunk that night with my boots still on, listening to the orphans breathe, and I told myself it was finished. The bond was cut. Whatever I had carried for three years had been taken out of me in front of two hundred people, and I was lighter now. I did not feel lighter. I felt like somebody had gone through my chest with a spoon. Sometime past the middle of the night the cold wing went still. Not quiet. Still. The way a room goes when something has walked into it. I turned my head toward the window. It is a foot square and set high in the wall, and I had left the shutter open for air. Something was on the other side of it. I lay flat and did not move. Whatever was out there was big. Moonlight came in through the gap around it in a thin ring, and the shape of the gap was wrong, too low, too wide, and there was a smell coming in that I could not place. Wet ground. Pine. Something older underneath. Then it shifted, and one eye came into the frame. Yellow. Far too much of it, and set in a face that was not a face, and running down past the eye, along the jaw, a white line of old scar tissue. I have known that scar my whole life. I saw it an hour ago on a man in a black coat, sitting in a chair at the top of the hill. I could not breathe. I lay there with my hands flat on the blanket and my heart going so hard I thought the orphans would hear it, and the thing at the window did not growl. It did not scratch the shutter. It did not try the door. It stayed. After a while I understood that it was not watching me. It was watching the door. It stayed until the sky went grey. Then it was gone without a sound, and I lay there until the light was full, and I did not sleep, and I did not once take my eyes off the door. In the morning I went to the window. The ground under it was soft from the rain. There were prints in it, wide as both my hands. They came from the tree line, crossed the yard, and stopped directly under the sill. They did not go back.