The Alpha Rejected Me, Then the Lycan King Knelt

They dressed me in white and told me it was for the crowning. I believed them. That is the part I will never forgive myself for—not the betrayal that came after, but the small, hopeful girl who stood in front of the mirror in the Blackthorn keep and let three handmaids braid moonflowers into her hair, certain that tonight her patience would finally be rewarded. "You look like a Luna," the youngest whispered. I almost wept. For six years I had been Cassian Blackthorn's wife in name and his shadow in practice—healing his warriors, balancing his grain stores, memorizing the scent of every wolf who might one day betray him. I had waited to be chosen the way you wait for spring in a country that only knows winter. Tonight, under the full Blood Moon, the pack would name their Alpha, and their Alpha would name me at his side. I pressed my palm to my stomach, where a secret no bigger than a heartbeat was still mine alone, and I let myself hope. The great hall smelled of pine sap and hot iron and three hundred wolves holding their breath. Cassian stood on the Moon dais in black and silver, and he was beautiful the way a drawn blade is beautiful, all edge and reflected light. When he looked at me across that sea of faces, my wolf stirred inside my ribs, warm and certain. Almost there, she told me. He is almost ours. Then the Beta guards took my arms. I thought it was ceremony. I let them walk me up the dais steps. I let them turn me to face the pack. It was only when the cold of the altar stone bit through the thin white silk at my back that the first thread of fear unspooled in me. "Cassian?" His name came out small. He would not meet my eyes. High Priest Malrec did instead—old Malrec of the Moon Council, with his silver robes and his patient smile, stepping from the shadows behind the throne like he had been waiting there my whole life. "Elara Blackthorn," he intoned, and the hall went silent enough to hear the torches breathe. "You have always given so much to this pack. Tonight the Moon asks for the last gift." "What gift?" But my body already knew. The straps came down over my wrists, silver-lined, searing where they touched. My wolf lunged against the inside of my skin, suddenly frantic. At the edge of the dais, half-hidden in Cassian's own cloak, stood Seraphine. My sister—not by blood, but by the roof my adoptive parents had shared with her when she came to us small and sick and unable to shift. Seraphine, who had cried in my arms through a hundred fevers. Seraphine, who could never call a wolf of her own. She looked up at me now with wet, luminous eyes, and I mistook that look for pity. It was hunger. "She is dying," Cassian said. His voice finally reached me, low and reasonable, the voice he used to talk men out of war and women out of grief. He came to stand over me, and up close I could see the sweat on his temples, the tremor in his jaw. He wanted me to understand. That was the cruelest thing—he genuinely wanted my blessing. "Seraphine's body has no wolf to anchor it. The Council found a way. A wolf-core can be moved, Elara. Given." He swallowed. "Yours is the strongest in this pack. Strong enough to save her. Strong enough that no one will ever question whether the Blackthorn Alpha rules with the Moon's favor." The room tilted. "You want to take her out of me." "I want to save two lives with one." He crouched, bringing his face level with mine, and lowered his voice until it was only for us. "You lose a wolf. I could lose an entire throne. Do you understand what happens to a new Alpha whose own foster-daughter withers and dies at his coronation? They will say the Moon cursed me. They will tear this pack apart before the moon sets." "I am your mate." Something crossed his face then—guilt, maybe, or the memory of one. "You are the only person here strong enough to forgive me." I have replayed that sentence ten thousand times. He did not say I love her more. He did not say I never loved you. He said I was strong enough to forgive him, and he was right, and he used it like a knife. "No." I pulled against the straps and felt them cut. "Cassian, listen to me—there are things you don't know, things I have to tell you—" Our children. The words crowded up my throat. If he knew, surely—surely— "Begin," said Malrec. "No—Cassian, stop—" He stood. He stepped back. He turned his beautiful face away and looked instead at Seraphine, and in the space between one breath and the next I finally saw the truth I had been too faithful to see for six years: he had already chosen. Long before tonight. I had simply been useful for the waiting. Malrec laid both hands on my chest. I cannot describe the pain and stay honest, so I will only tell you what my wolf did. She did not go quietly. She threw herself against the cage of me, again and again, howling in a register no human throat could make, and I felt her claws rake down the inside of my own soul trying to hold on. The silver in the straps sang. The Blood Moon poured through the high windows and turned everything the color of an old wound. Somewhere very far away, three hundred wolves made no sound at all, and Seraphine began, softly, to laugh, or to cry—by then I could no longer tell the difference between the two. The priest's hands glowed. Something in the center of my chest—the warm certain thing that had been with me since I was a child, the second heartbeat I had never had to think about because it had simply always been mine—began to tear. My wolf screamed my name. Not Elara Blackthorn. Not Luna. A truer name, an older one, one I did not even know I owned—she screamed it once, the way you scream for someone across a burning house, and then the tether between us stretched thin and white and snapped. And she was gone. The silence she left was so total that I thought I had died. No warmth. No second breath beneath my breath. No low voice at the back of my mind that had answered me every day of my life. Just a cold, ringing hollow where half my self had been, and the taste of blood, and Malrec straightening with a fistful of light cupped tenderly in his palms as though he held a newborn. He carried it to Seraphine. I watched my wolf—my wolf—sink into my sister's frail chest like a stone into black water. I watched her spine arch. I watched her gasp, and shudder, and open eyes that were suddenly, impossibly, wolf-gold. The pack erupted. They were cheering. Someone was actually cheering. For one heartbeat Cassian's eyes found mine over the roar—and I saw it land in him, the thing he had told himself would not happen. He had expected relief. He had expected a grateful, dying girl saved, a throne secured, a debt he could pay off slowly across a long and comfortable reign. He had not expected me to look at him like a stranger. His mouth opened. Whatever he meant to say, the cheering swallowed it, and he let it be swallowed, because a new Alpha does not flinch on the night of his crowning. I lay on the cold altar in my ruined white silk and could not feel the cold, could not feel my own fear, could not feel the tears that were apparently running into my hair. I reached for her out of pure reflex, the way you reach for a railing that isn't there— —and found nothing. For the first time in twenty-four years, when I called for my wolf, no one answered.