Rejected By My Alpha, Alone with his Hair

Chapter 1

Ivy POV

"Say it again," I whispered, "because I don't think I heard you right."

Ronan Blackwood didn't answer. He stood in front of the whole pack, firelight cutting shadows across a face that had gone completely still, like a door closing on the other side of a room.

I'd loved him since I was fourteen. Back then, loving an Alpha's son felt like loving the moon something to look at, never something to have. I was omega-ranked. My mother scrubbed floors in the pack hall for a living. Ronan was the boy who was going to run this whole mountain someday, and I was the girl nobody bothered writing down in the important lists.

Then the moon ceremony happened, and the bond snapped into place between us so hard I nearly dropped to my knees. Every wolf in that clearing felt it. I saw the shock ripple through the crowd, saw my best friend Halsey's mouth fall open, saw Elder Thorne's face twist like he'd swallowed something rotten.

I saw Ronan feel it too. His eyes found mine across the fire, and for one full second, he looked at me like I was the only person standing there.

I let myself believe, for that one second, that everything was about to change.

"Ronan." Elder Thorne's voice cracked through the clearing before either of us could move. "A word. Now."

He didn't come back to me that night.

I waited by the fire until it burned down to coals, until the pack thinned out and the whispers started did you see that, the Marlowe girl, of all people, an omega, can you imagine and I told myself he was handling council business. I told myself Alphas didn't just walk away from a mate bond. I told myself a lot of things that night, standing there in my one good dress with my hands going cold.

Halsey found me an hour later. "Ivy." She grabbed my arm. "Come inside. You're shaking."

"I'm fine."

"You're not fine, you're standing in the dark waiting for a boy who"

"He's not just a boy." My voice came out sharper than I meant. "He's my mate, Halsey. The bond doesn't lie."

Halsey's face did something complicated pity, maybe, or fear on my behalf. "The bond doesn't run this pack. Thorne does. And you know what Thorne's been planning with the Grayfens for two years."

I did know. Everyone knew. Delia Grayfen, oldest daughter of the richest pack on the eastern ridge, promised to Ronan since before either of them had a say in it. An alliance built out of timber contracts and old grudges, not bonds.

I told myself the bond would win anyway. I was twenty years old and I actually believed that.

He sent for me two days later. Not to his quarters to the council hall, where Thorne and two other elders sat like judges at a trial, and Ronan stood at the head of the table with his arms crossed and his jaw so tight I could see the muscle jumping.

"Ivy." He said my name like it cost him something. "I need you to understand this isn't personal."

"Isn't personal." I laughed, and it came out wrong, too high. "You felt what I felt. I know you did. I saw your face."

"What I felt doesn't matter." His eyes wouldn't hold mine now. They kept sliding to Thorne, like he was checking his own words against some script he'd been handed. "This pack needs the Grayfen alliance. Ashen Hollow doesn't survive a border war with Kessler's pack without it. You know that."

"So reject the bond." My chest was caving in and I refused to let it show on my face. "Just like that. Because a council of old men decided I'm not useful enough."

"That's not" For one second something cracked in him, some flicker of the boy who'd looked at me across the fire. Then Thorne cleared his throat, and the door shut again. "Ivy, I am rejecting the mate bond. Formally. For the good of the pack."

The words hit the air and I felt them land in my chest like a physical blow, the kind that knocks the wind straight out of you.

A rejection, spoken out loud by an Alpha, isn't just heartbreak. It's a wound that marks you. Every wolf in that room would feel an echo of it would know, the second they looked at me, exactly what I was. Rejected. Discarded. Not chosen.

I made myself stand up straight. I made myself walk out of that hall without a single tear falling until the door closed behind me.

I got three steps down the hallway before my knees gave out, and Halsey who'd been waiting outside the whole time, because she knew, she always knew caught me before I hit the floor.

"I've got you," she said. "I've got you, Ivy."

I didn't tell her that underneath the humiliation, underneath the fire burning through my chest, there was something else. Something small and sick and cold, sitting low in my stomach since three mornings ago, when I'd woken up nauseous for the third day running and told myself it was nerves.

It wasn't nerves. And by the time Halsey walked me home that night, some part of me already knew it.

I sat on the edge of my bed long after she left, staring at the wall, replaying Ronan's voice in that council hall over and over. This isn't personal. As if the bond hadn't been the most personal thing that had ever happened to either of us. As if I hadn't spent six years loving him quietly, from a distance, never once expecting anything back and the one time the universe decided to give me something, he'd handed it straight to Elder Thorne like it was a burden instead of a gift.

My mother's cough rattled through the wall separating our two rooms, the same dry, tired sound it had made for months now, the sound of a sickness we couldn't afford to treat properly. I pressed my palm flat against my stomach, still perfectly flat, still giving nothing away, and I made myself a promise in the dark.

Whatever was growing there and some frightened, certain part of me already knew exactly what it was it was never going to grow up thinking it wasn't wanted.

Not for one single day. Not the way I just had.