CHAPTER ONE
REJECTED
The drums stopped the moment I walked into the Mate Hall.
I knew that silence. I had heard it for eighteen years in the Blood Moon Pack.
It was the silence that came before someone laughed at Eva, the wolfless omega.
Three hundred wolves were packed into the great hall. The chandeliers were made of antlers. The floor was polished stone. Every girl my age was wearing silk, their hair curled, their mates standing proudly beside them. The air was thick with the scent of happy mates — chocolate, rain, pine, vanilla. Everyone had found their other half.
Everyone except me.
I pulled my cheap blue dress tighter around me. It was my mother's old dress. We could not afford a new one. My mother couldn't come tonight because she was sick in our small hut at the edge of the pack. I had promised her, "Mama, tonight my wolf will finally wake up. Tonight the Moon Goddess will give me a mate and we won't be omegas anymore."
I was lying to myself.
I was born without a wolf. While other pups shifted at age twelve, I never shifted. While other girls heard their wolf whisper inside them, I heard nothing. The pack doctor said I was an anomaly. The Alpha said I was a burden. The other teenagers called me "the human."
But tonight was different. Tonight was my 18th birthday. On every werewolf's 18th birthday, the wolf awakens, even the weakest one. Tonight, the Moon Goddess herself would choose my mate during the Mate Ceremony.
"Look who decided to show up," Jessica, the Beta's daughter, whispered loud enough for everyone to hear. She was wearing a red dress that cost more than my mother's medicine for a year. "Do you really think the Moon Goddess has a mate for a wolfless freak?"
Her friends giggled.
I kept walking. My bare feet hurt inside my old shoes. I kept my eyes on the Alpha stage at the front. Alpha David would be there.
Alpha David Blackwood.
Every girl in Blood Moon Pack had loved him since we were children. He was twenty-six, six feet four, shoulders as broad as a doorway. His black hair was always messy, his green eyes were cold like the forest in winter. He became Alpha at twenty after his father retired. He was ruthless in battle, cold in council, and never smiled.
And I had been secretly in love with him since I was ten years old, when he once found me crying behind the kitchen and gave me his bread without saying a word.
Tonight, I allowed myself to dream. What if? What if the Moon Goddess chose him for me?
The drums started again. Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Like a heartbeat.
The Elders walked in wearing white robes. And behind them, he walked in.
David.
He was wearing a black shirt, sleeves rolled up, showing his tattoo — the Blood Moon Pack mark that covered his entire forearm. He didn't look at anyone. He walked to the center of the stage and stood there, his hands behind his back, looking like a king.
My heart started beating so fast I thought it would jump out of my chest.
And then it happened.
His scent hit me.
Pine trees after rain. And midnight. And something smoky and masculine that I had never smelled before.
My knees almost gave way.
Inside my chest, where there had been silence for eighteen years, something moved. Something woke up. A small, weak howl, but it was there.
"MATE!"
I gasped. My wolf! My wolf had finally woken up!
She was howling, crying, screaming with joy inside me. "MATE! MATE! HE IS OUR MATE! GO TO HIM!"
Tears filled my eyes. The Moon Goddess had heard me. After eighteen years of being nothing, I was something. I was his mate.
David's head snapped up.
His green eyes, which had been looking at the crowd with boredom, suddenly locked onto mine. His nostrils flared. I saw his whole body stiffen. He smelled me too.
For one perfect second, the whole world stopped. It was just me and him. His eyes widened. His lips parted slightly. I saw shock. And something else. Something that looked like disbelief.
He stepped down from the stage.
One step. Two steps. Three steps.
Every eye in the hall followed him. Every whisper died.
He walked straight to me. He stopped one foot away. I could feel the heat from his body. I could see the faint stubble on his jaw.
"Eva?" he said, his voice low, so low only I could hear it. "You..."
"Yes," I whispered, tears rolling down my cheeks. "It's me. It's really me."
Hope was so big in my chest it hurt.
Then his face changed.
The shock disappeared. The coldness came back. Colder than ever.
He looked me up and down, from my cheap dress to my old shoes, to my face that was too thin because we didn't have enough food.
And he stepped back as if I was something dirty.
He turned to the crowd and his voice became loud, Alpha loud, a voice that made every wolf submit.
"I, Alpha David of Blood Moon Pack, reject you, Eva Dawson, daughter of Omega Sarah Dawson, as my mate and Luna."
The words fell like axes.
The hall exploded into gasps.
I couldn't breathe. "What... what did you say?"
"I said," he looked down at me, his green eyes full of disgust, "that I reject you. An Alpha cannot have a wolfless omega as his Luna. You would shame my pack. You are weak. You have no wolf. You are nothing. I, Alpha David, reject you."
No.
No no no.
The bond, the thin, new, beautiful bond that had just formed between us a second ago, snapped.
It felt like someone put a hot claw into my chest and ripped my heart in two.
I screamed. It was not a human scream. It was a wolf scream. My new wolf screamed inside me with pain.
I fell to my knees on the cold stone floor. My vision went black.
Through the ringing in my ears, I heard Jessica laugh. "I told you. Who would want her?"
And the last thing I saw before darkness took me was David turning around and walking back to his stage, without looking back once.
