Marked by the Alpha's Hatred

If you'd told me a year ago that I'd end up standing in a moonlit courtyard, in a dress my aunt probably stole from a clearance rack, getting dumped by a werewolf in front of three hundred people, I would've laughed. Then asked what a werewolf was. Then laughed again. But here we were. "Elara Voss." Kade Ashworth said my name like it tasted bad. Which, fair, considering what he was about to do with it. I stood on the raised stone platform in the Ashwood pack square. Moonlight did its usual dramatic thing through the trees, and hundreds of pack members watched like this was the season finale of something. My best friend Rhea was somewhere in that crowd, probably already plotting my rescue. Or my funeral. With Rhea, it could go either way. Kade was tall in that way that made it feel like the sky was showing off. Dark hair, permanently unimpressed expression, the kind of jaw you could set a level on. Alpha of the Ashwood Pack, twenty four years old, and about to humiliate me in public because his dying father had one last wish, and apparently that wish was please don't let our son mate the weird quiet girl. "I, Kade Ashworth, Alpha of the Ashwood Pack," he said, his voice carrying over the crowd, "reject you, Elara Voss, as my fated mate." There it was. Rejected. By a guy I'd exchanged maybe eleven words with in my whole life, nine of which were "excuse me" and "sorry." The crowd let out a sound like a held breath finally released. Somewhere behind me, someone actually gasped, the way people do in movies, like they hadn't already watched this exact scene play out with three other unlucky omegas before me. Here's the thing about being a weak wolf in a pack that worships strength. Everyone loves to watch you lose. I felt the bond snap. It had been a quiet hum in my chest since I turned eighteen, and now it was gone, replaced by something that felt like static and a stubbed toe at the same time. My whole body went cold, then hot, then cold again. "Congratulations," I said, before my brain could stop my mouth, "on having the emotional range of a parking ticket." A ripple of laughter moved through the crowd, the good kind, at least for me. Kade's jaw twitched. "Elara." "No, really," I continued, apparently having decided tonight was the night to combust spectacularly in public. "Very efficient. Very to the point. I give it a nine out of ten. Docking one point because you didn't even make eye contact." He made eye contact then. Dark eyes, and something moved behind them I didn't have time to name, because the Council Elder standing beside him cleared his throat like the sound alone could restore order to the universe. I turned and walked off the platform before anyone could see my hands shaking. Small mercy, nobody claps for a rejection ceremony. It's not that kind of show. I made it exactly to the tree line before my vision went strange. Not blurry. Sharp, too sharp, like someone had swapped my eyeballs for a much more capable pair. Colors I didn't have names for. Rhea's footsteps behind me, three separate heartbeats in the distance that I had no business hearing. I caught my reflection in a puddle at my feet. My eyes were black. All the way black. No white, no brown, nothing. Just endless black, like someone had spilled ink into two very startled eye shaped holes. "Okay," I whispered to the puddle. "That's new."