The Alpha Rejected Me, So I Built My Own Kingdom

THE OATH AND THE LIE

I asked him.

Not because the voice told me to — I did not trust the voice, the warm patient thing behind the moon that knew my name and called me little one like a doting grandfather, because nothing that comfortable had ever, in my whole life, turned out to be safe. I asked Kael because I had learned a long time ago that the only protection a nothing-girl has is knowing exactly where she stands.

"You're bound by oath to kill me," I said. The old witch had been dismissed; the guards had withdrawn; it was only the two of us now, the King and the weapon, the snow falling soundless beyond the glass. "So. Are you going to?"

Kael had moved to the window. In the grey storm-light his profile was all hard angles, and his hands were clasped behind his back like a man holding himself very still on purpose.

"If I intended to kill you," he said, "I would have done it in the forest. It would have been cleaner. No one would ever have known a Celestial drew breath again, and my oath would be kept, and the world would stay asleep." He turned. His pale eyes found mine. "I carried you four days instead. I put you in my own household. I let an old man kneel to you on my floor. Does that strike you as the behavior of a man planning an execution?"

"It strikes me," I said carefully, "as the behavior of a man who hasn't decided yet."

The corner of his mouth moved — not a smile. The ghost of where a smile would go on a face that had stopped making them. "You're sharper than you look."

"I look like nothing. It's a low bar."

Now something did flicker in him, quick and gone — surprise, maybe, that the half-dead girl from the dead lands had a tongue. He crossed the room slowly and stopped at the foot of the bed, and the cold weight of him filled the space, and I made myself hold his gaze even though every instinct I had was screaming to look at the floor like a good nothing-girl should.

"I'll tell you the truth," Kael said, "because you'll smell a lie eventually — your kind always could — and I would rather you trusted the one man on this continent currently choosing not to slit your throat." He paused. "When I found you, I felt something I had not felt in two hundred years. The pull. The bond. The Moon, telling me that one is yours." His jaw tightened like the words cost him. "My mate died a long time ago. I swore on her body I would never feel that pull again. I burned the part of me that could. And then a starved, rejected, wolfless girl looks up at me out of the dirt, and it comes roaring back like nothing was ever broken at all." His voice dropped, rough. "So no. I am not going to kill you. I find I am — incapable of it. The Moon has made certain of that. You are my mate, Celestial. The bond does not lie."

And there it was: the thing he believed, said plainly, the foundation he was building everything on.

I should have felt something. Three days ago, a king telling me I was his fated mate would have been the answer to a prayer I'd prayed for six years. Now I just felt the splinter the Elder had left in me, working deeper.

The Moon stopped speaking to me when my mate died, he'd said in the forest, and I made certain it would never speak again.

"How," I said slowly, "do you feel a fated bond to a Celestial?"

Kael frowned. "What?"

"You said the Celestials could call the moon itself. Could turn cities to glass. Could be sealed away because the world couldn't survive their power." I sat up straighter. The furnace under my ribs turned over, attentive, as if it, too, wanted to hear his answer. "Your kind, the pack wolves, the Lycans — you get your mates from the Moon. The Moon chooses. The Moon assigns. But my kind — if we were so much stronger, so much closer to her — why would the Moon get to choose for us? Why would creatures who could command the moon be handed mates like ordinary wolves?"

For the first time, Kael Nightshade had no answer.

I watched the certainty in his face stutter. Watched the foundation crack, just slightly — the cold mind of him turning the question over and finding, underneath, a hole he had never thought to look into, because for two centuries he had grieved a bond and would have given anything to feel it again, and now it had come back and he had needed it to be real.

"The bond does not lie," he said again. But it came out a half-beat slower.

"Maybe," I said. "Or maybe you don't know what you're feeling. Maybe nobody alive does — because the last people who could have told you the truth about how Celestial bonds work were all put in the ground three hundred years ago, by your father's seal." I held his eyes. "You want me to be your mate, my lord, because you've been starving for two hundred years and I'm the first thing that's looked like food. That's not the Moon. That's grief. And I have had quite enough, this week, of men deciding what I am to suit themselves."

The silence after that was enormous.

I had just told the most feared king on the continent that he was wrong, in his own fortress, while I sat helpless in his bed and his guards stood within a shout. A smarter girl would have agreed with him. A safer girl would have let him believe whatever kept his sword sheathed.

But I was done being safe. Safe was Morag's word for a banked fire. Safe was six years of an unfinished sentence. Safe was nothing.

Kael looked at me for a long, long moment.

And then — and I swear the old witch would have fainted to see it — the Lycan King inclined his head. Barely. A fraction. The smallest acknowledgment a king can give and still call it surrender.

"You may be right," he said, very low. "And if you are, it changes everything." He turned back toward the window and the falling snow, and his next words were so quiet I almost missed them. "Because if no one chose this — if the Moon did not hand you to me — then I have wanted you, from the dirt of that forest, entirely on my own. And that, Celestial," he said, "is far more dangerous for both of us than any bond."

He left without another word.

And alone in that impossible bed, with the furnace breathing under my ribs and the snow falling soundless beyond the glass, I pressed my hand over the silver mark on my shoulder and thought: I have to get out of here. Before he decides what I am. Before I decide what he is.

"Run if you like," the voice behind the moon agreed, warm and amused and utterly unconcerned. "But you'll come back to me in the end, little queen. They all come back to the moon."

For the first time, I answered it.

I'm not yours either, I told the dark. I'm not anyone's. And before this is done, I'm going to make every single one of you understand that.

The voice went quiet.

But I could have sworn, just before it did, that it laughed — delighted, as if I'd said exactly the right thing.

As if I'd said exactly what it had been waiting three hundred years to hear.