The Alpha Rejected the wrong luna

What the Mark Means

The stone under her cheek was the only thing that felt real.

Wren couldn't get her legs to answer her. Every time she tried to push herself up, the fire under her skin surged and pulled her back down, and somewhere above her the crowd's voices had turned into a single overlapping roar that she couldn't separate into words. She caught pieces of it anyway. Someone shouting for the healer. Someone else shouting for the opposite of a healer.

"Hold her down," Cassian said, and this time she felt hands on her shoulders, on her wrists, more than two people's worth, all of them pressing her into the stone like she might come apart if they let go.

"Get away from her." That was Ronan, closer than he should have been, his voice cutting through the noise with an authority she hadn't heard from him a minute ago when he was busy throwing her away in front of everyone.

"You rejected the bond." His father's voice, cold and satisfied even now. "She's not your concern anymore."

"She's dying on my dais."

"She's not dying." Cassian's hand pressed harder against her collarbone, and Wren felt fabric tear at her shoulder where his grip caught it, and then his voice changed, dropped into something private even though he wasn't bothering to lower it. "Look at her skin."

The pain sharpened into something with an edge to it, a line of heat that traced itself across her collarbone like a brand pressed from the inside, and Wren twisted against the hands holding her because it didn't feel like injury anymore, it felt like a door being forced open in a wall she hadn't known was there. Someone gasped. Then several people did.

"That's not possible." The Alpha's voice, and for the first time all night it had lost its certainty. "That bloodline is finished. I watched it finish."

"Apparently not thoroughly enough." Cassian didn't sound afraid. He sounded like a man doing arithmetic he didn't like the answer to.

Wren forced her eyes open. The world came back in pieces, firelight and smoke and too many faces staring down at her like she was a corpse that had sat up in its own funeral, and she caught Ronan's face among them, pale under the black ceremonial collar, staring not at her eyes but lower, at whatever was happening to her skin.

"What is that," he said, and it wasn't a question aimed at anyone in particular.

"Kill her." That came from deeper in the crowd, one of the elders, and it landed with a weight that made Wren's stomach drop even through the pain. "If that's the Thornhollow mark, she doesn't leave this circle alive."

"On what grounds?" Ronan again, and now he'd stepped between her and the elder's line of sight, close enough that she could see the muscle working in his jaw. "She's a kitchen girl who fainted at a ceremony."

"She's the last loose thread from a m******e your father swore was finished," the elder said. "Ask him why his enforcer looks like he's seen a ghost."

Every head that turned toward Cassian gave Wren half a second where nobody was holding her down hard enough, and she used it, dragging herself back from the hands on her wrists with a strength that surprised even her, scrambling backward across the stone until her spine hit the low wall at the dais edge. The mark on her collarbone had stopped burning and started glowing instead, a thin gold line visible even through torn fabric, and when she looked down at it her own hands didn't feel like her hands anymore. Her nails had gone dark at the tips, not claws, not yet, but close enough that the healer standing nearby took a full step back.

"Somebody answer the question," Ronan said, low, not moving from where he stood between Wren and the rest of the dais. "What is that mark."

Cassian's face had gone the color of old ash. "It doesn't matter what it is. What matters is that she doesn't leave this pack's territory able to tell anyone what she saw here tonight."

"You're talking about killing her." Ronan said it slowly, like he was testing whether the words made sense out loud. "An hour ago she was nobody. Now she's worth killing."

"An hour ago we didn't know what she was." Cassian's hand went to his belt, to the blade every enforcer carried whether or not the pack was at peace, and Wren's whole body went cold in a way the mark's heat couldn't touch. "That's the problem, Ronan. Now we do."

Two guards moved at his signal, closing in on either side of the low wall where she'd backed herself into a corner with nowhere left to go, and Wren's mind went white and empty of anything except the animal understanding that she was about to die on the same stone where she'd just been rejected in front of everyone she'd ever known.

Ronan didn't move toward his father. He didn't move toward the elders calling for her blood either.

He moved toward her, put himself bodily between the guards and the wall at her back, and said the last thing Wren expected to hear from the mouth that had just publicly discarded her.

"Touch her and you'll answer to me, not him."