MARKED BY REJECTION

CHAPTER 2

Selene's POV

I don't sleep well in Blackthorn territory. I never did, even before the rejection. Tonight is worse, because Ronan is asleep in the room next to mine, under the same roof as his father for the first time in his life, and my mind won't stop dragging me backward through everything I spent five years trying to bury.

Five years ago, I was the lowest-ranked female in this pack. My mother died when I was young, some sickness the healers never named out loud, the kind of death that gets whispered about instead of explained. My father was a mid-rank soldier who never had time for me, who looked at me like a duty rather than a daughter, who signed off on my mate match without once asking if I wanted it. I grew up on the edges of things…edges of conversations, edges of pack events, edges of everyone's attention, always the girl standing just outside the circle of firelight, close enough to feel the warmth but never invited to sit.

Then the mate bond formed between me and Kael Thorne, the Alpha's son, heir to the strongest territory in the region, and everything about my quiet, invisible life turned into a nightmare I couldn't wake from no matter how hard I tried.

He didn't want me. I understood that the moment I saw his face at the announcement. Not even anger would have meant he cared enough to be upset. It was disgust, plain and open, like I was something unpleasant that had been placed in front of him by mistake and he couldn't decide whether to laugh or walk away. His friends laughed behind their hands. His father looked embarrassed to be associated with the match at all, like my very existence was a stain on his son's future.

Then came the ceremony. The white dress. The whole pack gathered to watch, because rejection ceremonies drew crowds the way tragedies always do. Kael didn't hesitate.

"I reject you as my mate."

The pain that followed isn't something I can explain to anyone who hasn't felt it. It isn't heartbreak. It's your own body telling you, on a level deeper than thought, that you are not wanted, not chosen, not enough and a wolf feels that rejection in her bones as sharply as in her heart, maybe sharper, because a wolf's bones remember things the mind tries to forget. I collapsed. Stone floor cold against my cheek. Someone, somewhere in the crowd, laughing, though I never found out who.

I don't remember who carried me out of that hall. I've spent five years wondering, and never once asked, because some answers aren't worth having.

I woke three days later in a border town called Ashgrove, in a small room above a bakery, with a kind old healer named Mabel pressing two fingers to my wrist like she was checking whether I'd decided to keep living.

"Rejection like that can kill a young wolf," she told me gently. "Your body wanted to die along with the bond. You're stronger than you know, girl."

I didn't feel strong. I felt hollowed out, like something essential had been scooped from my chest and never replaced, like I was walking around with a room inside me that used to have furniture in it.

Four weeks later, I found out I was pregnant.

I could have gone back to Blackthorn. Some small, embarrassing part of me even wanted to see if the news would c***k something open in him, waited, pathetically, for him to care. But I remembered his face. Disgust, plain and total, the kind that doesn't leave room for a change of heart. I wasn't going to hand my child to a man who looked at me like that.

So I stayed in Ashgrove. Mabel took me in without asking for anything back, fed me broth when I couldn't keep anything else down, sat with me through the nights I cried without knowing exactly why. I worked the bakery counter, then border patrol once they saw what my wolf could do in a fight turns out grief makes you fast, makes you vicious in a way that training never quite manages on its own. Slowly, so slowly it barely felt like progress at the time, I built something of my own a small territory of misfits and outcasts, wolves who understood exactly what it meant to be thrown away by the people who were supposed to want them.

I named it Ashgrove Pack, after the town that saved my life.

I became its Alpha at twenty years old, the youngest Alpha in the entire region, and I swore that no wolf under my protection would ever be rejected the way I was, that my pack would be the place broken things went to become whole again.

Ronan was born in the spring. The first time I held him, I saw Kael's eyes staring back up at me, and I cried for an hour straight, and I never once regretted keeping him, not for a single second, not even on the hardest nights.

A knock on my door pulls me out of the memory. It's late. Ronan is asleep down the hall. I expect Marisol, coming to check on me the way she does every night in unfamiliar territory, always careful, always watching my back even when I don't ask her to.

It's Kael.

Out of his formal clothes, up close, without an audience to perform for, he looks less like an Alpha and more like a man who hasn't slept properly in years. There are lines at the corners of his eyes that weren't there before. I catalogue them without meaning to, an old habit I can't quite kill.

"I need to talk to you," he says. "About him. About Ronan."

"It's midnight, Kael."

"I know." His voice cracks slightly on the last word. "I know, and I know sorry means nothing after five years, but I have a son I didn't know existed until three hours ago, and I am not going to sleep tonight."

I should shut the door in his face. Every smart, well-earned instinct in me says shut the door, that nothing good has ever come from letting Kael Thorne see me vulnerable.

Instead, I step aside and let him in, because some stubborn, foolish piece of me still wants to hear what he has to say after all this time, still wants to know if there's anything underneath the boy who broke me.

That's my first mistake.