THE LUNA THEY ABANDONED

The moon ceremony was supposed to be the best night of my life. I stood at the edge of the circle with the rest of the unmated wolves, my hands pressed flat against my thighs so no one would see them shaking. Firelight moved across the clearing in long orange ribbons. Somewhere behind me, my aunt was already crying happy tears, the kind she'd been saving up since I was sixteen and first caught Killian's scent across a crowded pack meeting. Tonight the Alpha would claim his mate in front of the whole pack. Everyone assumed it would be me. I assumed it would be me. Killian walked the circle slowly, the way he always did before he said anything important, like his words needed the extra few seconds to line up right. He was beautiful in the way storms are beautiful, right before they take the roof off your house. I used to think that was romantic. Now I think I should have paid more attention to the second half of that thought. He stopped in front of me. I felt the pack's attention shift like a physical weight, two hundred pairs of eyes swinging toward us at once. My mother's friend Delia actually let out a small, delighted gasp. I remember thinking, absurdly, that I should smile. That this was the part where I was supposed to smile. "Selene Ashworth." Killian's voice carried without him raising it — Alpha voices always did. "You've been proposed as my intended mate by pack tradition and personal history." "I have," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt. "I reject that claim." For a second I thought I'd misheard him. I actually turned my head slightly, like the words might make more sense from a different angle. The fire cracked. Somewhere a child laughed at something unrelated, too young to understand what had just happened in the silence around him. "I reject you as my mate," Killian said again, louder now, so nobody in the back rows could pretend they hadn't heard it either. "You are not fit to stand as Luna of this pack." The pain arrived before the humiliation did. It started in my chest, right over my heart, a heat that felt like someone had pressed a brand there and left it. I heard myself make a sound I didn't recognize as mine. My knees buckled. I caught myself on nothing, on air, and somehow stayed standing, because two hundred people were watching and some stubborn animal part of me refused to go down in front of them. I looked up and Vivienne Marsh was already stepping into the circle from the other side, dressed like she'd known this was coming, like the dress had been picked out days ago. Maybe it had. "You can't do this," I said. Not loud. I don't think I could have gotten loud even if I'd tried — the burning in my chest had climbed into my throat. "Killian. You can't just—" "It's done, Selene." He didn't look at me when he said it. That was somehow worse than the rejection itself, worse than the mark spreading hot lines down toward my ribs. He could reject me. He could humiliate me in front of everyone who'd ever called me pack. But he couldn't even look at me while he did it. I turned in place, slow, and watched two hundred people find something else to look at. That's the part nobody tells you about a public rejection. It isn't just the Alpha turning away from you. It's everyone else deciding, in the space of about four seconds, that turning away from you too is the safer bet. Delia, who used to braid flowers into my hair when I was nine, found something fascinating about the tree line. My cousin Reid, who I'd covered for a hundred times when he snuck out to meet a boy from the neighboring pack, suddenly needed to check on the fire. Nobody's back is more thorough than a wolf's back when they've decided you're already gone. "Selene Ashworth." That was Marcus, the pack's second, stepping forward with the particular gentleness people use right before they say something cruel. "By pack law, a rejected wolf without rank or claim forfeits residence on pack land. You'll need to be gone by sunrise." "By sunrise," I repeated. Like saying it back would make it make more sense. "I'll have someone escort you to collect your things." He said it like he was doing me a favor. Maybe, in the flattest possible reading of pack law, he was. I looked for my mother in the crowd and didn't find her. She'd died three years ago, so I don't know what I expected. Old habit, maybe — some part of me still checking the same spot in every crowd where she used to stand, arms crossed, ready to catch my eye and roll hers at whatever nonsense the elders were doing that night. She used to say pack law was written by people who never once imagined it might be used against someone they loved. I used to think she was being dramatic. Standing in that clearing with my chest on fire, I understood, a few years too late, that she'd simply been right. There was nobody standing in that spot now. There was nobody standing anywhere near me, actually, in a widening, deliberate circle, like I might be contagious. Killian had already turned to Vivienne. I watched him take her hand the way he used to reach for mine — automatic, easy, like his fingers already knew the shape of hers. I wondered, distantly, almost like it was happening to someone else, whether he'd practiced that. Whether any of it had been real, or whether I'd spent six years being sweet on a story I told myself because it was easier than admitting he'd never quite chosen me at all. The burn under my collarbone flared hard enough that I gasped, and when I looked down, I could see it — a mark, silvery and raw, spreading across my skin like frost eating a window. I pressed my hand over it. That didn't help. Nothing about tonight was going to help. I walked back to the house I'd grown up in with my chin up, because if I was going to be pack-less by morning, I wasn't going to give any of them the satisfaction of watching me fall apart on the way there. I made it exactly to the tree line before my knees gave out for real, and I sat down hard in the dirt at the edge of the clearing, out of the firelight, out of sight, and let myself shake. Behind me, faintly, I could hear the ceremony continuing without me. Someone had already started the drums for Killian and Vivienne. Nobody had missed a beat. Nobody was coming. I looked down at the mark again. It hadn't stopped spreading. If anything, in the dark, away from the fire, I could see it more clearly — thin silver lines branching out from my heart like something was trying to climb its way out of me. I didn't know yet that real rejection marks were supposed to fade to a dull, ordinary scar within the hour, or that mine wasn't fading because it wasn't the kind of mark this pack had ever actually seen before. I didn't know yet that it wasn't a wound. I didn't know yet that it was a key. By sunrise, pack law said, I had to be gone. I intended to be. I had no idea yet how far gone I was actually about to be — or that the girl walking out through those gates at dawn with nothing but a duffel bag and a burning chest had no idea what she actually was.