Rejected as Weak: The Alpha Wants Me Back

Something Is Draining You

I finished Noah Bell's pre-Shift check just after seven and sent him off to breakfast with his hands steadier than when I'd arrived. He had been wound tight when I walked in—pacing, rubbing his arms, flinching at sounds no one else heard. By the time I left, he was sitting on the edge of his bed, breathing slowly, his eyes focused somewhere calm.

“You'll be there later?” he asked.

“I'll be there later,” I said, because I always said it, and because I meant it.

The corridor outside the youth dorm was cold. I walked toward the training hall, where the younger wolves would already be gathering for their morning session. My bag hung heavy on one shoulder, and the strap seemed to pull harder than it should have. I adjusted it twice. It didn’t help.

Halfway down the stairs, the edge of my vision narrowed.

I stopped and put a hand on the wall. The cold concrete felt distant, like my palm was wrapped in cloth. For a second, the fluorescent lights overhead buzzed too loudly, and I could hear every footstep in the building at once. My fingers trembled against the wall. I blinked, and the narrowing receded, but the headache behind my eyes stayed, pressing low and mean.

I told myself to keep moving. I had a schedule. I had young wolves waiting. The fatigue was nothing new.

I made it three more steps before my knee buckled—not dramatically, just a small dip, like the floor had tilted. I caught myself on the railing and stood there, breathing, waiting for the world to settle.

“Mara.”

I turned. Dr. Elin Grant was coming up the stairs with a tablet tucked under her arm and a cup of coffee in one hand. She looked at me the way she looked at supply shortages and questionable test results—sharp, focused, not yet alarmed but close.

“How long have you been standing there?” she asked.

“I'm fine,” I said. “I didn't sleep much. That's all.”

“Come with me.”

“Elin, I have group stabilization at nine. The younger wolves are already waiting.”

“You're not going to the training hall like this.” She took my arm, not roughly, and turned me back toward the medical wing. “The session can start without you. You almost went down on the stairs. I'm not arguing about this.”

I didn't have the energy to argue. I let her lead me.

The medical wing smelled like antiseptic and old paper. Elin sat me on an exam table and set her coffee aside. She checked my pulse, my pupils, my temperature. She frowned at her tablet and scrolled through something I couldn't see.

“When did this episode start?” she asked.

“It's not an episode. I'm just tired. I've been tired since before the assembly.” I paused. “Since before everything.”

She didn't answer right away. She pulled up a different screen, tapped twice, and set the tablet down beside my leg. Her face had changed—not worried, exactly. More like she was working through a math problem that didn't add up.

“I've been going back through your records,” she said. “Your symptoms have been consistent for years. Fatigue. Headaches. Weakness. Dizziness. But here's the part I should have caught sooner.” She turned the tablet toward me, though I didn't understand the columns. “They aren't consistent in the way chronic fatigue should be.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you have bad weeks and better weeks. Sometimes you recover faster than someone with your history should. Sometimes you crash for no reason I can find.” She looked at me, and her eyes were too serious. “Last summer, you spent three days in bed after a week of intensive Shift training. Two weeks later, you were working a long emergency support shift and stayed upright for eighteen hours. That's not simple low stamina.”

I pulled my sleeve down over my wrist. “People bounce back differently.”

“People don't bounce back like this.” Elin sat on the stool across from me and leaned forward. “The rejection yesterday didn't cause this. I want to be clear about that. This has been building for years. I've been calling it baseline physical weakness because that's what your file says, and because you've never once told me how bad it actually gets.”

“It's not that bad,” I said, automatically.

She didn’t blink. “You almost fell on the stairs. Your hands are still shaking. And you were about to go stabilize a room full of young wolves like nothing was wrong.”

I looked down. My hands were shaking. I hadn't noticed.

“Something is draining you,” Elin said.

The words sat in the small room, heavy and strange.

“That doesn't make sense,” I said. “I'm not sick. I've always been like this.”

“Maybe that's what you've always believed.” She stood and picked up her tablet again. “But I've been treating you for years, and I'm telling you—this isn't normal tiredness. I don't know what it is yet. But I know you can't keep going like this.”

Before I could answer, someone knocked on the door.

Elin frowned and crossed to it. A young man from the youth center stood in the hallway, out of breath and already looking past her toward me.

“Sorry, Dr. Grant. We need Mara downstairs. The younger kids are getting restless, and a few of them are asking for her. We can't start the session until she's there.”

I started to slide off the exam table. Habit. My feet touched the floor before I'd even decided to move.

“Tell them she’ll be there later,” Elin said.

The man hesitated. “They’re waiting for her now.”

“Then they can wait.”

Elin closed the door before he could argue. She turned back to me, and I was still half-standing, one hand on the table, ready to go.

“Sit down, Mara,” she said. “You’re staying here for the next hour. I’m checking you again before you go anywhere.”

I sat back down slowly. “What about the afternoon? Vera’s introduction is today.”

“We’ll decide after I see whether you stabilize.” She pulled the stool closer and sat down. “Right now, you’re not going anywhere.”

The world outside the door went quiet, then faded into the distant hum of the medical wing.

“What do you think it is?” I asked.

Elin looked at me for a long moment. “I don’t know yet. But I know one thing: this didn’t start with Rowan. It started long before he rejected you. And I should have stopped accepting your explanation a long time ago.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. Some small, frightened part of me wanted to argue that I was just weak, just tired, just like I’d always been. But my hands were still trembling, and I could still feel the phantom tilt of the stairs beneath my feet.

Whatever was happening to me, I couldn’t call it normal anymore.