Rejected at Seventeen, Crowned by the Lycan King Chapter 09

Rejected at Seventeen, Crowned by the Lycan King Chapter 09 – The Missing Person File

Nothing was taken.

That’s what made it terrifying.

No forced entry. Nothing moved. No cash gone, no weapons gone.

“They weren’t robbing us,” Faith said. “They were looking for something.”

“For what?”

I already knew. I just didn’t want to say it out loud.

I put us on rotating watch, told them nobody leaves the wing alone, and went to report it – and walked straight into

Dorian Vance in the stairwell at six in the morning, in a t-shirt, holding two coffees.

“One of these is for you,” he said. “I was going to leave it at your door like a coward.”

“Somebody’s been in my wing.”

He set the coffees down on the step. “Since when?”

“Ten days. Maybe two weeks. No entry damage.”

“Then it’s someone with a key or someone with training. I’ll pull my own unit’s movement logs. All of them. Including

mine.”

That surprised me. “You’d flag yourself?”

“I’d flag myself.” He met my eyes. “You had a corridor full of my wolves thinking garbage about your women and I

hadn’t noticed. I’d rather be embarrassed than useless.”

“Mate him,” said Nyx.

“Shut up.”

“Sorry?” said Dorian.

“Nothing. Internal management issue.”

He handed me the coffee. Our fingers touched for about a second and a half, and I thought about the oath – and the

one exception written into the oath – and then I remembered I was a girl who’d been thrown away by seven people and rejected by an eighth, and had absolutely no business wanting anything from anyone.

“Four years I’ve been here,” he said. “Nobody’s ever closed a case in ninety minutes. Nobody’s ever knocked out a Commander in front of the King. Who are you, Wren Hale?”

“Nobody,” I said. “Ask my parents.”

I meant it as a joke. It came out flat and ugly, and he heard it.

He didn’t push. That’s the thing about Dorian Vance I keep failing to get over. He picked up his coffee, walked me to the top of the stairs, and said quietly, “For the record, Commander – whoever taught you that you were nobody was lying to you.”

Then Monday came, and the King’s meeting, and everything cracked open.

The King opened with the Thorncross-Greywater resolution. Six Commanders got to hear in detail how the girl they’d spent a year calling “he” had closed a file they’d failed twice.

Then Halloway slid a thin blue folder down the table to me.

“New intake. Missing person, filed by a founding pack. High priority. They’ve offered the Crown a great deal of

money.”

“How long missing?”

“Thirteen months,” Halloway said. “Reported eleven days ago.”

Something in my chest went very still.

“Thirteen months missing,” I repeated. “Reported eleven days ago.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Why the delay?”

Halloway shifted. “The filing pack states that she was living on their territory and they, ah. Failed to observe her

departure.”

Every Commander at that table laughed.

I did not.

I opened the folder.

There’s a specific sound a room makes when everyone in it realizes something at once and nobody wants to speak

first.

A photograph, clipped to the corner. A girl in a green dress with hair to her waist, not smiling, taken at an alliance

dinner thirteen months ago.

HALE, WREN ELEANOR. Age 17 at time of disappearance. Sole daughter of Alpha Marcus and Luna Elowen Hale,

Ironvale.

Reward for information: eight figures.

Attached: personal statement from the family.

I turned the page.

My mother’s handwriting. I’d know it anywhere. She writes her W’s like little waves.

To whoever finds her –

Her name is Wren. She turns eighteen on the eleventh, not the fourth, and I let her celebrate the wrong day her whole

life because I was too proud to admit a mistake.

She takes her coffee with too much sugar. She hates pink. She sleeps on her left side. She answered my questions

for seventeen years and I stopped answering hers for one, and I did it on purpose, and it was the worst decision of my

life, and I cannot tell you why in this letter, because the reason is the same thing that will get her killed.

Please. If she is alive, do not tell anyone you have found her.

Tell me. Only me.

– E. Hale

My hands were completely steady. I have no idea how.

Seven Commanders were watching my face. The King was watching my face. Dorian Vance had gone rigid across

the table.

“Commander Hale,” the King said gently. “Is there something you’d like to tell this room?”

I closed the folder.

“Yes, Your Majesty,” I said. “This one’s mine.”