THE ALPHA CEO'S REJECTED MATE

Sloane POV Everyone at the Blood Moon Gala had a wolf except me. I could tell. It was like walking into a party where everybody already knew the inside joke. They all had this low, easy hum under their skin, and I had nothing. Twenty-four years old, squeezed into a borrowed navy dress that kept pinching my ribs, holding one thin flute of champagne I wasn’t allowed to finish. “One sip, Miss Marlowe,” said Elder Hargrove, appearing beside me. Behind him was servant carrying a tray of wine glasses. “Ceremonial.” “I know, sir.” “Just making sure.” He gave my glass a long look, like I might sneak a gulp, and moved on. Too much alcohol could dull the wolf senses and turn a first shift into a mess, so the elders guarded the trays like hawks. That was tradition. Tradition in Redwater has a lot of rules and not many jokes. “Is that her?” someone whispered behind me. “The Marlowe girl?” “Twenty-four and not a whisper. Poor thing.” “Shh. She’ll hear you.” I heard. People always forget that dormant doesn’t mean deaf. “Drink up, Marlowe,” said Karen from Accounting. She leaned against the marble bar in a bright pink dress, smiling at me the way you smile at a stray dog. Her bleach-blonde curls were piled into a lopsided updo held together by about fifty bobby pins, one unlucky sneeze from collapsing. “Maybe the moon will be nice to you tonight.” I glanced at her hair, then down at my glass. “Maybe it’ll do your hair a favor.” She didn’t laugh. Tough crowd. I shrugged and turned my attention elsewhere ignoring the looks she was giving me. In Redwater, eighteen is when the spark takes root. A warm presence settles in your mind, and that’s your wolf introducing themselves. By nineteen your scent turns from human to wolf, and the whole pack can smell it from a mile away. I never got the spark. When eighteen came and went, my head stayed quiet. By twenty, the elders had sniffed me, shrugged, and filed me under dormant. Hunan but not human, that’s what I smelled like to every wolf in town. My mother had been human too, or that was the story, before she died when I was seventeen. Redwater's luna took me in, probably to keep up her reputation of a kind hearted queen. I was fed, housed, and reminded of it every single day. These days I worked in the marketing office at Calloway Timber, which mostly meant fixing the Alpha’s typos. Thorne Industries owned a huge chunk of the company, so my paychecks technically came from a man I’d never met. Seven minutes to midnight. I set my glass on a passing tray and wiped my palms on the dress. Breathe, Sloane. You stand here, you smile, and then yo go home, eat cereal for dinner and forget this happened. That was the plan. Then the moonlight hit the glass. Every wolf in the ballroom turned toward the tall windows at the same second. Silver light poured in from the windows across the marble and the white roses that were used as decorations in the large hall. A woman near the stairs gasped, spun around, and threw herself at a man twice her size. “Oh my God,” said a girl behind me. “Is that what she smells like?” “Harper, breathe.” "Why does she smell like nothing?” a little boy asked, loud and clear. “Eli. Don’t point.” That’s how it works. The moonlight awakens your wolf, your senses becomes hyper, your wolf finds your mate, and the whole room gets to watch. All I smelled was floor wax, wine and roses. Dormants don’t have the heightened senses. We get to stand there while everybody else has their miracle. Then the crowd started to part. “Where’s he going?” “That’s not the way to the stage.” “Brent? Brent, where are you…” Brent Calloway was walking straight toward me. Alpha of the Redwater Pack. Twenty-seven, black jacket, hair that cost more than my rent. He’d been raised to believe the sun came up because he asked it to. Once, he’d made me redo the seating chart for his birthday six times because his cousin “felt disrespected.” He stopped three feet away. His nostrils flared. His face went through disbelief, then disgust, then plain wounded pride, like a waiter had brought him the wrong dish. “You,” he said. “Brent, darling.” His mother, the Luna, caught up with a hand on her pearls. “Maybe not here.” “Oh, here is perfect, Mother." Then he turned back to me "I don't know what sick game the moon goddess is playing but you can't be my mate." Something tugged behind my ribs. A thin thread, pulling my chest toward his. It felt like being tied to a dinghy by a man who didn’t know how to row. Oh no. Of all the people on earth, why did it have to be him. “Sloane Marlowe.” Brent said it loud enough for the back row. “The Moon Goddess must have a sick sense of humor. Of all the wolves in this pack, she gives me the wolfless she- wolf.” “Oh my God,” someone breathed. “It can’t be her.” “It’s her.” Karen made a sound like a happy kettle. “I, Brent Calloway, Alpha of the Redwater Pack, reject you as my mate.” Nobody moved. Somewhere behind me, a champagne flute clinked against a tray. I felt a sharp pain in my chest as he said those words of rejection. I knew what came next. Everyone did. The rejected wolf says the four words back, the bond snaps, and she goes home with a hole in her chest for the rest of her life. Brent was already smirking, waiting for the tears. He was enjoying seeing me in pain. Probably hoping I'd kneel and beg him to take me back. Well, I'd be glad to disappoint him. I straightened my back looked straight to his face and gathered my emotions. I thought about the seating chart. I thought about every email I’d rewritten so he wouldn’t look stupid, every birthday cake I’d picked up on my lunch break, every “orphan” said in that annoying voice of his. And I felt something I hadn’t expected at all. Relief. “I accept your rejection,” I said while trying to ignore the increasing pain in my chest. I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of seeing me in pain. I even smiled a little. “Did she just…” “She said it.” “She said it so quickly.” Karen’s glass hit the floor and broke. Brent’s smirk slid right off. “That’s… you’re supposed to take a minute.” “Was there a minute I was supposed to take?” “It’s shock,” a woman whispered. “She’s in shock.” “She’s not in shock,” said an old man, sounding amused. “She’s smiling" It wasn’t dramatic. A small, clean snap behind my breastbone, and that was it. Just like that the pain ceased and instead I felt lighter, like someone had opened a window in a room that was stuffy. “You ungrateful little…” Brent started while holding his chest. I didn’t stay for the end. I turned around and walked out of the ballroom with my chin up, across the lobby, through the glass doors, onto the cold stone steps. Two hundred wolves watched me go and not one of them stopped me. My legs held until the last step. Then I sat down on the freezing stone and started to laugh, the shaky kind that was very close to crying. What a night. And in the hollow place in my mind, a soa, something stirred. A low, rolling warmth, like a cat stretching in the sun. What a night indeed. The voice was deep and soft, and it was coming from inside my own head. That was beautifully done. My laugh died. Who said that?