MARKED BY REJECTION

CHAPTER 3

Selene's POV

Kael stands in the middle of my guest room like he doesn't know what to do with his hands. I fold my arms and lean against the door frame, putting distance between us without moving my feet. I'm not going to make this easy for him. I've imagined this conversation a hundred different ways over five years, and in every version, I was the one who got to walk away first.

"Say what you came to say."

"I was seventeen," he starts, and my jaw tightens instantly, because that is the worst possible opening line he could have chosen. "I'm not saying that as an excuse. I need you to understand I was a different person. My father spent years telling me a weak mate would weaken the whole bloodline, drilled it into me before I even understood what a mate bond felt like. When they called your name at the ceremony, I panicked. I said what I thought would make him proud of me."

"And it didn't occur to you," I say, voice very steady, very controlled, the kind of controlled that took years to learn, "that rejecting a bond in front of four hundred people might kill the girl on the other end of it?"

His face goes pale, genuinely pale, like the memory still costs him something even now. "I didn't know it could do that. Not until after. I asked the healers what happened to you once the shock wore off, and they told me you nearly died on that floor. I have not had one good night's sleep since that day, Selene. Not one."

"Good," I say. "You shouldn't."

He flinches like I hit him. Maybe, in a way, I did, and maybe some part of me is glad.

"I looked for you," he says quietly, eyes down, studying the floor like it might give him better answers than I will. "For months, after. I asked around every border town within three days' run. I never found anything, because you'd already changed your name and buried yourself somewhere I never thought to check. Eventually my father told me to stop said it made the pack look weak, an Alpha's heir chasing after a girl he'd already rejected in front of everyone."

"So you stopped."

"I stopped looking. I never stopped thinking about it. Not once. Not for a single day in five years."

I want to feel nothing when he says that. I want the words to slide off me like water off a duck's back the way I've trained myself to let everything about him slide off. Instead something old and stubborn aches low in my chest, and I hate it, and I hate him a little for causing it, and I hate myself more for still being capable of feeling it at all.

"You don't get to feel sorry for yourself standing in my room," I say, sharper than I intend, the words coming out before I can soften them. "You don't get to make this about your guilt like I'm supposed to comfort you for it. I spent that first year alone in a town I'd never heard of, pregnant, broke, learning to fight because the pack I was born into decided I wasn't worth keeping around. You don't get to make tonight about your feelings, Kael."

"You're right." He looks at the floor, jaw working like he's chewing on something bitter. "You're completely right. I just want to know him. Ronan. If you'll let me, even a little, even just enough to be something in his life."

That's the question I've been dreading since the second he saw my son's eyes across that hall, the one I don't have a clean answer for no matter how many times I turn it over.

"He's four," I say slowly, choosing every word like I'm walking across ice. "He doesn't know who his father is. I need time to think about how to do this without hurting him in the process. He's the only thing in this world I've never let anyone hurt, and I'm not about to start now."

Ronan asks about his father sometimes, in the small, offhand way children ask about things they don't fully understand yet. Once he asked if his father was a hero, because heroes were the only kind of missing fathers he'd heard about in the stories Marisol told him at night. I never answered that one directly. I always found some reason to change the subject, some new distraction to offer him, because I never had a version of the truth that wouldn't break something in him the way the truth broke something in me.

"I understand." Kael takes a step closer, close enough that I catch the scent of him pine, and something warmer underneath, something that used to make my wolf ache with wanting before it learned better, before it learned exactly what that wanting cost. "I know I don't deserve anything from you. Not forgiveness. Not a second chance. But I'm asking anyway, because that boy is my blood, and I have already missed four years of his life that I can never get back no matter what I do."

A sharp knock cuts him off before I can answer, urgent enough to make us both go still, every instinct in me snapping to alert.

Marisol's voice comes through the door, tight with alarm I've only heard from her twice before in five years. "Selene. You need to come now. The north fence, someone's set fire to the supply stores. And they're saying it was one of our own who did it."

My stomach drops straight through the floor.

Kael's eyes meet mine, and for one strange, suspended second, we are not ex-mates or strangers or enemies standing on opposite sides of an old wound. We are just two Alphas about to walk into a crisis together, and something about that steadies me even as the fear takes hold.

"Let's go," he says.