THE REJECTED Luna's Revenge

Chapter 4: Five Years

Five years is long enough to rebuild a pack house stone by stone. It is long enough to learn old rites from cracked leather journals by candlelight because there was no one left alive to teach them properly. It is long enough for a rejected bride to become something the wider territory had started, cautiously, to call Alpha Nightshade — a name whispered more than spoken, the way people speak of weather systems still gathering strength offshore.

It was not long enough to stop feeling the old, frayed thread in her chest on the nights she let herself think about it, which was why Selene had gotten very good, over five years, at simply not letting herself think about it.

She stood now on the training ground behind the rebuilt pack house, watching two of her wolves spar in the grey early light, and allowed herself exactly the amount of nostalgia the moment deserved, which was none. Nightshade Pack numbered forty-three members now, most of them strays and outcasts from other territories who'd heard rumors of a rebuilding pack that asked only loyalty and offered, in return, something rarer than most Alphas bothered with: a fair hearing.

"Rowan's footwork is sloppy," said Kael, her Beta, coming to stand beside her with two mugs of coffee. He was broad-shouldered, quiet, one of the first three wolves who'd found her on the mountain in the early days when Nightshade was nothing but a ruin and a girl too stubborn to leave it. He'd stayed through all of it — the collapsed east wing, the winter they nearly lost the whole pack to a fever no doctor from any allied territory would treat because the name Nightshade still made people nervous, the slow grinding work of building something out of nothing at all.

"His footwork's fine," Selene said, accepting the coffee. "He's distracted. His mate had their pup two nights ago."

Kael huffed something like a laugh. "You keep track of everyone's business."

"It's my business to keep track. That's the job." She watched Rowan take a hit he should have seen coming and shrugged it off without complaint — a small, ordinary moment of a pack functioning the way a pack was supposed to, wolves who trusted their Alpha enough to fight sloppy in front of her without fear of what it would cost them. Five years ago she hadn't understood, at the altar in that white dress, what it actually meant to be wanted by a pack rather than merely useful to one. She understood it now down to the bone.

"The Council sent another summons," Kael said, in the careful tone he used for things he suspected she wouldn't want to hear. "Full territorial gathering, three weeks out. Every recognized pack Alpha required to attend in person this time. No proxies."

Selene's grip on the coffee mug didn't change, though something behind her ribs did — the old thread, stirring in its sleep. "Recognized," she repeated. "Since when is Nightshade recognized?"

"Since about eight months ago, according to the paperwork, though nobody bothered telling us until now." Kael's mouth twisted. "The Council's had to acknowledge you whether they like it or not. Forty-three wolves, defended border, functioning economy, five years of nothing but clean conduct on record. You've made it very hard for them to keep pretending Nightshade doesn't exist."

"And Ashwood?" She kept her voice as level as the question deserved and no more.

"Ashwood will be there. Every founding pack will be there, Selene, that's the entire point of a full territorial gathering. It's the first one in over a decade." Kael watched her face with the particular attention of a Beta who had learned, over five years, exactly which of his Alpha's silences to worry about. "You don't have to go."

"I know I don't have to."

"But you're going to."

Selene set the coffee mug down on the fence post and looked out at the mountain behind her pack house — hers now, every stone of it, rebuilt with her own hands and her wolves' loyalty and nineteen years of buried grief finally put to use instead of left to rot. She thought about the last time she'd stood in a room full of every major pack in the territory. She thought about a white dress and a formal, treaty-reading voice announcing to three hundred witnesses that she brought nothing a pack could want.

Five years ago she had walked out of that room a rejected girl with nothing behind her name but a broken engagement and a story people liked to repeat over dinner. Whatever room the Council gathering happened in, whoever else stood inside it, she would walk into that one as Alpha Nightshade, founder of a rebuilt bloodline, leader of forty-three loyal wolves and the first Nightshade Alpha to stand in a Council hall in nineteen years.

Let them look.

"I'm going," she said. "And Kael — I want the pack colors ready. All of them. If we're walking into that hall as a recognized pack, we're walking in looking like one."

Kael's mouth curved, something that wasn't quite a smile but lived in the same neighborhood. "You've been waiting five years for this invitation."

"I've been waiting five years for a lot of things," Selene said, and didn't elaborate, because some truths were hers alone to hold, at least until she decided otherwise. She thought of Damian Ashford's face at the altar, the flat arithmetic in his eyes, the way he'd looked at Corinne Voss like a man who'd finally stopped pretending to want anything else.

She wondered, distantly, curiously, whether the frayed thread in her chest would recognize him the moment she walked into that hall. Whether five years and a rebuilt bloodline had done anything at all to quiet a bond that refused, against all reason, to fully die.

She would find out in three weeks.

For now, she turned back toward her pack house — grey stone, ivy trimmed back now instead of choking the walls, windows that lit at night with something older and warmer than electric light — and went to prepare her wolves for the first time in nineteen years that the name Nightshade would walk, unhidden, into a room that had once tried very hard to make sure it never existed at all.