Chapter Seven — The Wolf Who Wouldn't Let Go

THE REJECTED MATE IS THE MOON GODDESS'S DAUGHTER

Chapter Seven — The Wolf Who Wouldn't Let Go

Sophia POV

The guards wake me before the sky has properly decided what color it wants to be.

I don't argue. I don't ask for more time. I just get up, my whole body one long, dull ache from yesterday, and go where I'm told, because that's the only thing that's ever actually worked for me.

The kennels again. The same stone, the same cold water, the same smell that never fully leaves my hands no matter how hard I scrub them afterward.

I'm halfway through the second row when I hear it.

A voice — clear, ordinary, unremarkable — saying something about the eastern gate needing repair before the next patrol. I look up automatically, the way you do when someone's talking near you.

There's no one near me.

I straighten slowly, scanning the yard. The nearest guard is standing all the way across the training grounds, easily thirty feet away, talking to another man in a low voice I shouldn't be able to make out at all — and yet I heard every word of it as clearly as if he'd been standing at my shoulder.

I stand there a moment, my heart beating strangely fast.

Exhaustion, I tell myself. Your mind is playing at things.

I go back to scrubbing.

By midmorning I'm sent with a cart of supplies toward the boundary — rope, stakes, tools for mending a section of fence. I'm kneeling to unload the cart when the ground around me unfolds into a whole map of scent I have no business being able to read.

A trail low against the grass just ahead, old and faded, moving north along the fence line.

And another. Sharper. Newer. Moving the opposite direction — south, toward the estate rather than away from it, barely a day old.

Seraphina said the rogue came from the north, that she fled south toward safety.

But if the freshest trail runs south to north, away from the estate, then whatever happened here doesn't quite match how she told it.

I have no proof, no standing to say a word of it — and no real way to know if my own senses are even reading it right. I finish unloading the cart and try not to think about what it means that I noticed at all.

I'm reaching for the last coil of rope when a nail catches my palm — a fast, careless slice, deep enough that I hiss before I can stop myself.

I don't cry out. I press my other hand hard against the cut and keep my head down, waiting for the sting to fade.

It's the strangest thing that stops me — not the pain in my own palm, already dulling, but a sound. Distant. Rhythmic. A heartbeat, fast and hard, coming from somewhere across the field entirely.

Not mine. Mine has already started to slow.

I look up.

Damon has arrived at the boundary with three of his warriors, and he's gripping his own chest, jaw locked tight, like something has struck him there without warning. One of his men asks if he's all right. He waves the question off, but his eyes have already found mine across the distance, confused, searching, like he's trying to work out what just happened to him.

I don't understand it either. I only know that his pain came at the exact moment the nail cut mine.

We stare at each other a long moment — too long, long enough that one of the warriors glances between us before Damon looks away first, says something low about the fence line, and doesn't look at me again.

I go back to my work, my palm throbbing, my mind unable to let go of the sound of a heartbeat that wasn't mine.

That night, back in the basement, I sit with my knees pulled to my chest, palm wrapped in a scrap of cloth, and try to make sense of a day that refuses to add up to anything sensible.

I've told myself, more than once now, that exhaustion explains it. Hearing things too clearly. Smelling things I shouldn't smell. Whatever happened to Damon at the boundary, some coincidence, some trick of timing.

I'm still turning it over when I hear it.

Not from outside. From somewhere inside my own mind.

A voice — young, uncertain, achingly familiar in a way I can't place.

I freeze completely.

Who's there?

Silence for a long moment. Then, soft as breath:

Don't be afraid.

My whole body goes cold.

"I don't have a wolf," I whisper into the dark, needing the sound of my own voice to hold onto something solid. "I've never had one."

A longer pause this time. When the voice comes back, it's quieter, almost wary.

They told you I wasn't here.

The words drop through me like ice water.

Who told me? Why would anyone—

There's no answer. The presence fades the way a scent fades on the wind, leaving nothing behind I can point to and prove.

I sit in the dark a long time, waiting, my heart still pounding too fast, that one sentence turning over and over in my head. They told you I wasn't here. Not "I was sleeping." Not "I was dormant." They told you. As if someone decided, deliberately, that I should never know.

I start to convince myself I imagined it after all.

Then, faint as a held breath, something moves through my mind again. No words. Just a presence — small, wary, entirely unfamiliar, and yet not a stranger at all.

I don't move. I barely breathe.

Something answered me tonight, from somewhere I didn't know existed.

And somewhere across the estate, a man I've spent two days trying to stop feeling anything for is sitting with his hand pressed to a chest that ached for a wound that was never his to carry.

End of Chapter Seven.