The Discarded Luna

Alpha king knelt

"Elara…. I, Alpha King Rhydian Vale of the Northern pack, propose you be my fated Luna. My mate. My equal. Not my ornament, not my comfort, not the woman who lives in my house." His hands closed into fists on his knees. "Say no and I'll take my men and go tonight and you will never hear my name again. But I am asking. On my knees. In front of everyone. Because you have spent three years being unloved."

The answer to his word died in my mouth as I stare at him and everyone around me.

Reject. I had gotten that far to reject Alpha Kade my mate with those words. I, Elara Voss, reject — and then the scar along my spine had split open with light, and every window in the Alpha's house had gone white, and the sound that came out of me had not been a human sound at all.

Now the courtyard was silent seeing the almighty Alpha king Rhydian knee before me.

Silver still crawled over my forearms like water running uphill. The gravel under my bare feet had fused in a ring, glassy and warm. At Seraphine's throat, the Blackthorn moonstone hung in two clean halves, the chain still fastened, the stone dead as a chipped tooth.

And every wolf in Blackthorn was on their surprise face taking the whole moment at once.

The elders. The warriors who'd never once said good morning to me. Dorian, forehead nearly to the stone. Old Maeve, weeping into her sleeve. Two hundred heads looking in my direction.

They had never been surprised this much before.

Kade was on one knee too, fighting it, thigh trembling, teeth bared like a dog trying to stand against the rejection.

But it was the other man I couldn't stop looking at.

Alpha King Rhydian Vale had not fallen. He had knelt deliberately, both knees, in the center of the courtyard, in front of his beta and friend and two hundred of his enemies. He had unbuckled himself and laid his pride on the ground beside him with the hilt turned toward me, which was a thing I had only ever read about in the old covenant books.

The butcher of the North. The man who razed three packs in a single winter. Kneeling in the frost in a black coat, looking up at me like I was weather he'd been waiting his whole life to stand out in.

And he was waiting for my response

I saw it in his eyes. I saw it in the muscle at the corner of his jaw. Alpha King Rhydian Vale, who had walked into this territory uninvited and unafraid, was waiting now.

"Elara Voss." His voice carried. It always carried. But it wasn't smooth now. It had a c***k down the middle of it. "I came here for a border. I'm not leaving with one."

Somebody in the crowd made a small, strangled sound.

"Three days ago I smelled you from ten miles out on the road and I told my Beta it was moonfire in the wind and he told me I was dreaming." His throat worked. "You have been starving in this house. Drugged in this house. Buried in this house. And you still put yourself between your mate and my anger the first night I sat at his table."

"Rhydian—" My voice came out wrecked. "Get up."

"No." He said it almost gently. "Let them see it."

Then he lifted his chin, and in front of his Alpha Kade, in front of my pack, the Alpha King knelt down to claim me.

The silver on my arms guttered like a candle.

I opened my mouth and nothing came out.

Because I was surprised as well, standing at the edge of a bonfire while a young Alpha with a struck-axe jaw put his mouth to my throat and told me I'd never be alone another day of my life.

That was alpha king Rhydian promise to me.

I was twenty-two and sewing my own ceremony dress because no one had sent word to the seamstress. I was pouring tea into the roses and watching them blacken by morning. I was standing outside a nursery door in the dark, listening to my mate be told that the pup he was raising as his brother's had his own eyes, and hearing him say keep your voice down.

Three years, four months, and eighteen days, and he had never once asked me a single question about what I wanted. And this man — this stranger, this monster, this Alpha king— had asked me my name in a greenhouse at dawn like it was worth the breath.

I looked at Kade.

He was staring at me. And I watched him understand, finally, what he had been holding all this time. I watched three years arrive in his face at once.

"Elara," he said hoarsely. "Don't."

I turned back to the Alpha king in the frost.

"Yes." The word rang off the courtyard walls. "I, Elara Voss, accept you as my mate. I accept the Moon Goddess's bond between us. Rise, Rhydian Vale."

The sound the light made when it took was like a held breath let go.

It went through me and it went through him, and I saw it hit — saw his shoulders jerk, saw his eyes close for one bare second like a man walking out of a blizzard into a warm room. Something new lit up in my chest. Not the small stupid animal joy I'd had with Kade. Something with weight.

Rhydian stood. He picked up himself with gladness that I've accepted him, He did not look at Kade at all.

And Kade Ashborne is broken.

"You whore."

It came out of him like a rupture. He was on his feet, wolf rolling in his voice, and the crowd flinched back around him.

"Three years I fed you. Three years I housed a rogue's runt daughter with a wolf so weak she couldn't shift on a full moon, and this is what you are using to pay me in return" He jabbed a finger at me, spit flying. "You opened your legs for him. Under my roof. In my house. You seduced an Alpha King while you were still my Luna,"

"I asked you for a ceremony for three years, Kade."

"You're a b***h in heat, that's all you ever—"

"Alpha Kade."

One word. Rhydian didn't shout it. He didn't have to. It landed like a door closing in a stone room, and every wolf in that courtyard felt their knees go soft again, and Kade Ashborne's mouth snapped shut with an audible click of teeth.

Rhydian walked forward. Slow. Boots crunching frost. He stopped a handspan from Kade's face.

"You will not speak to my mate that way." Quiet. Almost polite. "Not in this life. You had three years to say one kind thing to her and you spent every one of them saying nothing at all. So you have used up your words, Ashborne. All of them." He tilted his head. "And if you ever call her that again I'll be wiping your pack out and every living existence of it,” He let that sit.

Then he turned and walked back to me, and every trace of the winter went out of his face.

"Go inside," he said softly. "Rest and eat something that isn't from that woman's hands." His thumb brushed the frost off my cheekbone, one second, gone. "Be ready at first light. We're going to my pack tomorrow morning, and you never have to see this pack again."

He was already walking to his convoy when Seraphine screamed.

Not a pretty scream. A raw one — from the terrace, both halves of the broken moonstone in her fist, Tobin nowhere in sight.

"You don't understand what you

just did!" she shrieked. "You can't take her north — Kade, tell her! Tell her whose daughter she is!”