REJECTED BY THE PRINCE, CLAIMED BY HIS RUTHLESS UNCLE.

CHAPTER THREE:THE PAIN AFTER THE REJECTION

She did not remember leaving the courtyard. She did not remember the walk back through the palace corridors, or climbing the stairs to her room, or closing the door behind her. She only became aware of herself again sometime later, sitting on the edge of her bed in the dark, her whole body strangely still, as though movement itself required more courage than she currently possessed.

Outside her window, she could still hear the distant murmur of the crowd, the ceremony continuing without her, the scandal already being reshaped into gossip that would spread through the kingdom by morning. Somewhere out there, Cassian was likely still holding Selena's hand, accepting congratulations for a choice everyone would eventually decide was romantic rather than cruel.

Liana pressed her hand against her chest, right below her collarbone, where she had felt something strange and warm bloom the moment the High Priestess spoke her name — a mark, she now realized, though she hadn't dared look at it yet. She was almost afraid to. It felt like the last remaining proof that the bond had been real, that she hadn't imagined the brief, impossible moment when she'd believed her life was about to change.

She finally worked up the courage to loosen the collar of her dress and look down.

A small silver crescent moon shimmered faintly against her skin, delicate and strange and beautiful, glowing with a soft light that pulsed once, twice, like a heartbeat that didn't belong to her.

She stared at it for a long time.

A knock sounded at her door, so soft she almost didn't hear it. She didn't answer. A moment later it opened anyway, and Mabel's familiar silhouette stepped into the room, carrying a single candle whose flame threw trembling shadows across the walls.

"Oh, child," the old healer murmured, crossing the room to sit beside her. "I am so sorry."

Liana said nothing. There didn't seem to be words for what she was feeling — grief, humiliation, a strange hollow shock that hadn't yet given way to real pain, though she suspected it was coming.

"The council is in an uproar," Mabel continued gently. "The elders say a rejection like this hasn't happened in generations. They're saying it could anger the Moon Goddess herself."

"Good," Liana whispered, and was startled by the bitterness in her own voice. "Let her be angry. She's the one who chose me for a man who looked at me like I was something he'd stepped in."

Mabel's hand found hers in the dark and squeezed gently. "You are not nothing, Liana. Whatever that foolish boy thinks, whatever this kingdom has always told you — you are not nothing."

Liana wanted, more than anything, to believe her. But sitting there in the darkness with her mate mark glowing faintly against her skin, a mark meant for a man who had just humiliated her in front of the entire kingdom, it was hard to feel like anything other than exactly what she had always been.

Forgotten. Overlooked. Unwanted.

She had no way of knowing, as she sat there in the quiet aftermath of her own public destruction, that the worst was not yet over — that ancient laws older than the kingdom itself were already stirring into motion, that the crops in the southern fields had already begun, inexplicably, to wilt, and that somewhere far to the north, in a territory ruled by a man the entire kingdom feared, a decision was about to be made that would change the course of her life forever.

She only knew that the hope she had carried for so long had been extinguished in the space of a single sentence, and that she had no idea, yet, how to survive the darkness that came after.