CHAPTER FOUR

Sages’s POV

Two days passed and I didn’t hear a single word from Ethan.

I told myself that was fine. I told myself that was exactly what I wanted, that rejecting him had been the right choice, the strong choice, the choice a girl who respected herself would make. I repeated it to myself so many times it almost started to sound true.

But the bond didn’t care what I told myself.

It sat in my chest like a bruise that wouldn’t heal, a dull ache that flared up at random moments while I was brushing my teeth, while I was walking to the clinic, while I was lying awake at two in the morning staring at my ceiling. Nobody warns you that rejecting a mate doesn’t just cut the connection clean. It just leaves it there, broken and throbbing, a wound that refuses to close. I kept waiting for the ache to fade with each passing day. It never did. If anything, it got louder, like my own body was arguing with the decision my mouth had made.

My mother noticed something was wrong, though she didn’t ask directly. She wasn’t the type to ask directly about anything that mattered. Instead she left little comments hanging in the air over breakfast, testing the water without actually stepping in it.

“I heard there was some commotion at the gathering,” she said Tuesday morning, not looking up from her coffee.

“Did you,” I said, not really a question.

“People are saying you rejected the Alpha.”

“People say a lot of things.”

She didn’t push further and I didn’t offer anything else. That was how most of our conversations went,  half-said things floating between us, neither of us brave enough to grab hold of them and pull them out into the open where we should  have to actually deal with what was inside.

I left for the pack clinic early, grateful for an excuse to leave the house. The walk there usually helped clear my head but that morning my thoughts kept circling back to the clearing, to the look on Ethan’s face, to the way the whole pack had gone silent and watched me like I was in a car crash they couldn’t look away from.

Dr. Jasmine barely looked up when I came in, which was exactly what I needed. I spent the morning buried in restocking supplies and filing old patient notes, the kind of mindless work that let my hands move while my brain stayed as blank as I could force it to be. For a while, it almost worked. There’s something about repetitive tasks that quiets the noise in your head, even if it never fully shuts it off.

It was around noon when I overheard the conversation that changed everything.

I had stepped into the small back room to grab more bandages and the storage closet next to it had its door cracked open. Two voices drifted through,  Mrs. Whitfield’s unmistakable sharp tone and another voice I recognized after a second as Aunt Ruth, my mother’s older sister, who rarely came around anymore. She and my mother had a falling out years ago, something neither of them ever fully explained to me and I hadn’t seen her at a pack event since I was a teenager.

I wasn’t trying to listen. I want to be clear about that. I was just standing there, reaching for a box on the shelf and the words reached me whether I wanted them to or not.

“…still can’t believe they let that poor girl carry the blame all this time,” Aunt Ruth was saying, her voice low, careful. “It wasn’t even close to what everyone thinks happened.”

“Keep your voice down,” Mrs. Whitfield hissed. “If this ever got out…”

“It should get out. Five years, Ruth. Five years that girl has walked around this pack like she’s cursed and nobody’s had the decency to tell her the truth.”

My hand froze on the box of bandages. Something cold crawled up the back of my neck and I didn’t move, didn’t breathe, afraid that even the smallest sound might make them stop talking.

“You know what would happen if people knew what Vanessa was really doing that night,” Mrs. Whitfield said. “What it would do to the family. To the pack’s trust, even. Some things are better left buried.”

“Buried,” Aunt Ruth repeated bitterly. “That’s a funny word for what you’re really talking about.”

There was a pause, long enough that I thought maybe they had noticed me standing there but then Mrs. Whitfield spoke again, quieter this time, like she was afraid the walls themselves might repeat it.

“Vanessa wasn’t protecting Sage that night. Not really. She was trying to fix her own mess before it caught up with her and she got caught in the middle of the rogue attack because of it, not because she ran in to save her sister like everyone believes.”

Somewhere behind me, a tray of instruments clattered to the floor. I don’t even remember knocking it over. My whole body had gone rigid, ice pouring through every vein I had. Five years. Five years of white roses and silver ribbons and people looking at me like I owed the pack a debt I could never repay, and now two women in a storage closet were tearing that entire story apart like it was nothing.

“What mess?” Aunt Ruth asked. “What are you even talking about?”

“I don’t know all the details,” Mrs. Whitfield admitted. “Only what my sister let slip once, years ago, when she had too much wine. Something about Vanessa being involved with rogues before the attack. Something she never told her parents. And when it all went wrong, she panicked and ran and that’s when the fighting found her.”

“And Sage?”

“Sage was just there. Wrong place, wrong time. The story about Vanessa dying to save her,  I think the family built that after, to make sense of it. To make it mean something.”

I bent down and started picking up the scattered instruments with shaking hands, barely seeing what I was doing. Everything I thought I knew, everything I had carried on my back for five years, every ounce of blame I had swallowed and let poison me from the inside out, none of it was even true.

Dr. Jasmine appeared in the doorway, drawn by the noise. “Sage? You okay?”

I couldn’t answer her. My mind was spinning too fast to make sense of anything, let alone form words. I needed to hear more. I needed to know exactly what my sister had been hiding, what secret was big enough that my own mother would let me take the blame for five straight years rather than speak the truth out loud.

I brushed past Dr. Jasmine without a word and moved closer to the closet door, straining to catch whatever came next.

That’s when I heard Aunt Ruth say one more thing, one sentence that stopped my heart cold in my chest and sent the whole ground shifting beneath my feet.

“And you know who else was involved with those rogues that night? Someone who is still very much alive in this pack. Someone everyone trusts completely.”