Rejected Luna: The Cruel King of Ironfang MC

Chapter Two: Ironfang

I scrambled backward in the mud.

It did nothing. He didn't move, didn't reach for me, just stayed crouched there with his forearms on his knees, watching me retreat like he had all the time in the world and I was something mildly interesting that had washed up at his feet.

"You're trembling," he observed.

"I'm freezing."

"You're afraid." His storm-colored eyes moved over me, unhurried. "Of me. Smart. But not of them." He tilted his head toward Crescent Hollow, toward the distant warm glow of the celebration. "They're the ones who threw you to the rogues in the rain, little wolf. I'm just the one who stopped to look."

"Don't call me that."

"Rogue?" The not-kind smile again. "That's what you are now. The second they crossed you over that line, you stopped being theirs and started being no one's." He rose to his full height, and he was so much bigger standing that I felt the size of him like a pressure against my skin. "Out here, no one's is the most dangerous thing you can be."

Behind him, the other riders had cut their engines. A dozen men in Ironfang leather, silent, waiting on him. One of them leaner, all sharp angles, a scar through his eyebrow watched me with an expression that wasn't hunger. The rest watched me like wolves watch a wounded deer.

"Cain." The scarred one spoke. "We don't have time for strays."

"We have exactly as much time as I say we have, Roan." Cain didn't look away from me. "What's your name?"

I lifted my chin. It was the only thing about me that still worked. "Why do you care?"

Something flickered across his face. Amusement, maybe. Or approval. "Because in about four hours, every wolf at that party is going to wake up sober and realize what their Alpha just did was stupid." He crouched again, slower this time, bringing those eyes level with mine. "He rejected a fated mate. Severed her from the pack. Do you know what that makes you?"

"Nothing." My voice cracked. "It makes me nothing."

"It makes you free." He said it like a curse and a blessing at once. "No pack law binds you. No Alpha commands you. No bond chains you to a man who knelt for someone else." His ringed hand came up, and one cold finger tipped my chin until I had no choice but to look at him. "And it makes you the single most useful weapon I've found in ten years."

My breath caught. "Weapon."

"You hate them." Not a question. He could see it smell it, maybe, the way grief had already started curdling into something harder in my chest. "You want them to pay. Every face in that crowd that watched and did nothing. The friend who took your place. The Alpha who threw you in the mud." His voice dropped, low and intimate, a thing meant only for me. "I can give you that, little wolf. I can give you everything they took and a great deal they don't know they have left to lose."

"And what do you want in return?" Because nothing about this man said free.

His smile widened, and this time it reached his eyes, and somehow that was so much worse.

"You," Cain said simply. "Your loyalty. Your name on Ironfang's books. You stop being no one's." His thumb brushed my jaw, once, almost gentle, the cruelest thing he'd done yet. "And you become mine."

Every instinct I had screamed run. He was dangerous in a way Damien had never been Damien hurt you with ambition and pretended it was duty; this man would hurt you and never bother to pretend at all. I knew, kneeling in that mud, that saying yes to Cain Marrok was the worst decision of my life.

But I thought of Celeste's red dress.

I thought of Damien's empty eyes. You are a Beta's daughter with no name.

I thought of two hundred wolves watching in silence as they dragged me out by the arms.

"If I say yes," I whispered, "do they pay?"

"Every last one of them."

The rain came down harder. Somewhere behind me, my old life burned its lanterns and danced.

"Then yes," I said.

Cain stood, and he held out one ringed hand to pull me up out of the mud and just before I took it, before I sealed whatever bargain I'd just struck with the devil of Ironfang MC, he said the thing that stopped my blood cold.

"Good girl, Wren."

I went still. "I never told you my name."

The cruel king of Ironfang only smiled, and pulled me up onto my feet, and into the dark.