REJECTED BY HER MATE, DESIRED BY THE LYCAN KING

Chapter 6

Freya POV

I threw the ruined dress angrily out of the room and watched it crumple against the wall.

"They're already saying I planned it that way," I said to Richard, who was leaning in the doorway of my chambers like he'd rather be anywhere else. "That I only wanted you because it would humiliate her. As if I need her to be humiliated for any of this to be real."

I didn't care what people whispered about how it happened. I cared that none of it had worked the way it was supposed to. I was the one who'd won him. I was the one wearing his mark. And somehow, three days later, every conversation in this pack still circled back to Wren.

Wren the rejected. Wren the tragic Alpha's daughter. It didn't matter that I was the one standing beside Richard now. Somehow she still walked out of every room looking like the one who mattered.

I didn't care what bloodline she's from. Without a wolf of her own, she was nothing. Less than an Omega, in my eyes.

"You should've seen her at the council session," I said. "Sitting there like she still had a right to a seat at that table."

"Forget the council," Richard said, arms crossed, he was far from being critic and that made my skin crawl. "None of it matters. It's done."

"It's not done if she's still the one everyone talks about," I said. "I won't stand for that."

"What are you planning now?" His eyes sharpened slightly, wary despite himself.

"There's a memorial gathering at her father's hall tonight," I said, letting the words crawl out my mouths before I finished. "I think it's time we made an appearance. Remind everyone exactly how this ended."

Kael POV

Wren smiled at me from across the hall.

Somehow, it's didn't seems like she's smiling at me purely, it's more like she was giving it to a stranger, and maybe that's still all I was to her.

"Your Majesty." One of the border scouts was talking, giving his report on something out past the eastern ridge. I nodded in the right places, but I wasn't really hearing him.

It had been years since anything pulled my attention away like that in a room full of people who needed things from me.

Ten years, actually, since I'd stopped letting it happen at all.

I was seventeen the first time I understood what it meant to want someone and have it used against me. Not my mother. Myself.

There'd been a girl, a healer's apprentice from a border pack, nothing official between us, nothing anyone could have named. I hadn't even claimed her. I'd only visited her camp twice, spoken to her a handful of times, let myself want something the way a boy that age is allowed to want things before he understands what a crown actually costs him.

Someone found out anyway. Word travels faster around a prince than around anyone else. Within a month her family had been run off their land by wolves loyal to a rival house, punished simply for the mistake of being close to me, close enough that hurting them might have hurt me too.

I never spoke to her again after that. Never even said goodbye properly. I told myself it was kindness, cutting the thread before it could be used to gut me the way I'd watched it gut my father. It didn't feel like kindness. It felt like the first lesson in a lifetime of lessons about exactly how much wanting something cost, and who ended up paying for it.

I never told anyone that was the real reason I kept my distance from every wolf who ever looked at me with interest in her eyes. Let them think it was duty. Let them think it was discipline, the mark of a good king. It was easier than admitting I was afraid of becoming my father, gutted and useless, standing over something I loved that I hadn't been able to protect.

"Your Majesty." The scout's voice pulled me back into the hall, patient, like a man used to repeating himself. "The eastern ridge. Before the frost sets in."

"Double the watch there," I said. "I don't want a repeat of last season."

He nodded, satisfied, already stepping back to let the next matter take his place, already assuming I'd carry it without complaint.

I always did.

"You should stay a while longer," Garrick said, appearing at my elbow with two cups in hand, holding one out to me. "Have a drink. Talk to people who aren't asking you for something for once."

"I have reports waiting," I said, waving the cup off.

"You always have reports waiting." He said it lightly, but there was something underneath it, that almost sounds like concern. "You work harder than any king I've ever stood beside, and I've stood beside a few. Doesn't hurt to breathe every now and then."

"Maybe next time," I said, and I didn't mean it, and I think we both knew it.

He didn't push. He just examine me for a few moment longer, then clapped my shoulder once and let me go.

I made my way toward the side door before anyone else could catch me, needing air more than I needed to explain why.

The balcony over the training yard was empty, the noise of the hall dulling behind me, the cold sharper out here than anything inside had managed to be. I gripped the rail and made myself breathe.

Ten years of keeping my distance from anything that could be used against me, and one girl in a ruined ceremonial dress had already made me forget half of it in a single night.

"You disappeared," she said from the doorway.

I didn't need to turn to know it was her.

"Needed air," I said.

She stepped up beside me anyway, arms wrapped around herself against the cold, close enough that I caught her scent again, the same warmth from the forest, something steady underneath it that I still hadn't found the right word for.

"My uncle says you never smile," she said. "Says you don't do gatherings."

"He talks too much."

"He's not wrong though." She whispers, as her eyes scanned the trees tremendously.

I looked at her, and the pull was there again, the same one from the boundary line, the one I still hadn't found a way to name out loud, not even to myself.

"No," I admitted. "He isn't."

She held my eyes for a moment longer than she needed to.

I could've told her everything, right there. What I knew about the prophecy. What she was, to it, and to me. What it had already cost a girl I barely knew, once, simply for standing close enough to me to matter.

I didn't.

"Go back inside," I told her instead. "It's your mother's night. You shouldn't be freezing out here with me."

She smiled and nodded .

"Right," she said, and turned to go.

I watch her as she take a steps into the house.