Reject Me Once, Regret Me Forever

Chapter 3 — The Night Before

**POV: Aria Silverfang**

I smiled through the whole day.

I smiled at the envoy from Thornheart. I could smell them before I entered the hall—strange wolves on my pack's territory, their scent sharp and foreign. Three of them. High-ranked. Alpha's men. Their eyes tracked me the way predators track prey, assessing the Silverfang girl who was being traded for their protection.

I smiled at my father. I smiled at the servants who laced me into the ceremonial dress for the blessing. I smiled when they took it off me again. I ate the lunch they brought me. I drank the tea.

And all day, my wolf watched from behind my eyes.

She measured every scent. Every footstep. Every door that opened and closed. She was learning the house again—the routes, the blind spots, the moments when the pack's attention drifted.

At dusk, I slipped back to my room. I locked the door.

I stripped off the ceremonial dress. The silk smelled of other people's hands—the seamstress, the maid, my sister who had touched it while crying. I hung it on its hook and did not look at it again.

I pulled on the dark wool. I tied the knife to my thigh. I slung the satchel across my body. I pulled up the hood.

The wedding was at moonrise. The moon was not up yet.

I went to the window. Two stories down to the kitchen garden. Beyond it, the pine forest. Beyond the forest, the border—the line where Silverfang territory ended and Thornheart land began.

My wolf pushed against my ribs. The border was where no pack's wolves patrolled at dusk. The border was where no one would find my scent until morning.

I swung one leg over the sill.

"Aria?"

My blood went cold. My wolf went still.

I turned. Seraphine stood in the doorway. She had come back—for the tea tray, for a ribbon, for one more look at the sister she was selling. Her eyes went to the satchel. To the dark cloak. To the knife at my thigh.

The room changed. The air between us went sharp with her fear.

"Where do you think you're going?" she said.

She stepped in and shut the door. "You're not leaving. You're not leaving me to face Father. You're not—"

"Seraphine." I kept my voice low. "Step aside."

"No." She walked toward me. "I will call Father. I will call the guards. I will—"

"You won't."

She stopped a pace away. Her scent was wild now—anger and terror and something else. Desperation.

"If you call them," I said, "I will tell Father what I saw you and Lucian doing in the stables last winter. I will tell him you have been sneaking out to meet a guard for years. I will tell the Beta who is going to marry you off next season. I will tell the whole pack."

The color left her face. The guilt smell bloomed under her skin like a bruise.

"You're lying," she whispered.

"Try me."

She stared at me. I watched her weigh it—her sister's life against her own. I watched her decide.

Her shoulders dropped.

"Go," she said. Flat. Dead. "Go, Aria. Run. And don't ever come back."

"I won't."

I climbed onto the sill. I looked at her one more time. The scent of her—jasmine and fear and relief she thought she was hiding—would stay with me for the rest of my life.

"Seraphine," I said. "If anyone asks, tell them his bride ran. Tell them you do not know why. Tell them anything but my name."

She did not answer.

I dropped.

---

The fall hit harder than I expected. I landed in the rose bed, thorns raking my arms, and rolled to my feet. No time to breathe. I ran.

The kitchen garden was empty—cooks inside, preparing the feast for a wedding that would not happen. I kept low, my wolf guiding me through the dark, between the herb beds, toward the back wall.

A guard on the parapet above. I pressed flat against the stone. Listened to his footsteps fade toward the gatehouse. Then I climbed.

The moss on the stones was damp. Cold. It smelled of earth and night.

I dropped into the lane outside. My wolf surged. Free. Almost free.

I ran into the pines.

The forest swallowed me in seconds. My feet found the earth the way a wolf's feet find it—sure, silent, fast. The dark wool did not catch the moonlight. The hood hid my hair. I ran low, the way a wolf runs when there is fire behind her.

The moon was rising. I could feel her—the Moon Goddess—not as a prayer, but as a warmth at the back of my neck. Pushing me forward.

*Go,* she said. *Go, child. I gave you back this night. Do not waste it on a man who would not come to his own wedding.*

The border was an hour's run through the pines. I could smell it already—the shift in the soil, the edge of my pack's territory, the place where the pack bonds at the back of my head would go silent and I would be alone for the first time in eighteen years.

My wolf did not care. She wanted out.

I ran faster.

And then, through the trees ahead, I heard hooves.

I stopped.

My wolf stopped. Every sense sharpened. The scent hit me before I saw him—strange wolf, male, Alpha. Strong. Stronger than any wolf in my father's pack. Young. His scent was pine and leather and something else I could not name.

The horse came around the bend. Black. Tall. A man in dark leather sat on its back, no pack crest, no colors. He pulled the reins when he saw me.

For a long moment, neither of us moved.

Then he spoke.

"You are far from the pack house, little wolf."

His voice was low. Calm. The voice of a man who owned everything he saw.

I did not answer. I could not.

Because inside my chest, something was happening. A bond—pulling, snapping taut. It had been dead for three years, because he had never come near me once; the day I woke reborn I had touched my wrist and found no mark there. I had thought it would never wake.

My wolf gasped inside me. She knew before I did.

*Him,* she whispered. *Our mate.*

I stared at him. And I knew him—this was the one. The Alpha who had laughed above the dungeon, who had not come down in three years to look at me, who had locked me in to die. The groom I had run halfway across the forest to escape.

But my body betrayed me. The bond pulled him toward me, and my wolf did not care what he had done—she only knew he was her mate. I hated him. I should hate him. And still, she wanted him.

I felt him feel it too. I saw it in the way his shoulders went tight. In the way his hand stilled on the reins—a man struck by his own mate bond for the first time.

The Moon Goddess had other plans.

Alpha Kael Thornheart had come to see the bride he would not marry.

And the man I had every reason to hate was pulling at my heart with a thread I could not cut.