The Rejection
The guard's grip closed around Wren's arm before she understood why, and by the time she pulled against it she was already three steps up the dais, boots skidding on stone polished smooth by better feet than hers.
"I'm not on the list," she said, low enough that only he could hear it. "Check again."
"Alpha's orders. All unclaimed females, kitchen staff included." He didn't look at her when he said it, which told her everything about how much this cost him to care about.
The bonfire threw light across three hundred faces turned toward the dais, and Wren had spent nine years learning how to disappear inside a crowd like this one, and none of it helped her now that she was standing in front of it instead of buried inside it. Ronan Kavaal stood at the center of the platform in the ceremonial black his father made every heir wear, jaw set the way it always was when he had somewhere else he'd rather be. She had seen him from a distance a thousand times. She had never once been close enough to notice that his eyes weren't quite brown, more like the color the forest went right before the sun dropped behind it.
Then his gaze crossed hers and the whole world changed key.
Heat cracked down through her chest like something had been struck with a hammer, and her knees buckled hard enough that the guard had to catch her elbow to keep her upright. Around them the crowd's noise dropped into a single held breath, three hundred people watching the same impossible thing happen at once. Ronan's hand had come up to his own sternum without his permission, fingers curling into the fabric there like he could tear the feeling out through his shirt.
"No," he said.
It wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. The elders on either side of him went rigid, and Wren watched the Alpha's face somewhere behind him twist into something that looked less like shock and more like calculation.
"Ronan." That was his father's voice, flat with warning.
"I said no." He was looking at Wren now, and there was nothing in his expression she could hold onto, no flicker of the thing she'd just felt crack through her own ribs. "This isn't happening. Not with her."
"Say her name," someone in the crowd called out, and it wasn't kind, it was the kind of curiosity that wanted to watch something get worse.
"I don't know her name." His voice carried now, pitched for the whole bonfire circle to hear, and Wren understood with a kind of distant clarity that he was doing this on purpose, making sure every person present heard him say it. "She works the kitchens. She's never shifted a day in her life. Whatever this bond thinks it's doing, I'm not honoring it."
The words landed exactly where he aimed them. Wren felt her face go hot and then cold in the space of one breath, and her hands closed into fists at her sides because it was that or let them shake in front of everyone.
"You don't get to choose your mate, Ronan." That was Cassian Vahn, stepping forward from his place near the Alpha's shoulder, and his voice had none of the mockery of the crowd, only something careful and watching. He was looking at Wren the way a man looks at a debt he thought had already been paid.
"Watch me." Ronan turned to his father instead of to her, like she'd already stopped being a person in the room and become a problem to be managed around. "The alliance with the Marrow pack stands. I'm not throwing seventeen years of my life away because a bond made a mistake."
"It's not a mistake." Wren hadn't meant to speak. The words came out anyway, steadier than she felt, because if she was going to be humiliated in front of the
