"Rejected by My Alpha, I Awakened as the Lost Queen"

The moon was full, which meant the whole pack was watching. Ivy Hart stood in the center of the ceremony grounds, her hands folded tight in front of her to keep them from shaking. Torches ringed the clearing, throwing long shadows across the packed dirt where three generations of Blackwood wolves had stood for their mating ceremonies. She'd swept this same dirt a hundred times as a servant. She'd never once imagined standing on it like this — chosen, seen, waiting for Alpha Kane Blackwood to claim her in front of everyone. She should have known better. Kane stood ten feet away in his ceremonial black, broad-shouldered and unreadable, the handsome that made people forget to be afraid of him until it was too late. When their eyes had met an hour ago, something had passed between them — warm, electric, unmistakable. The mate bond. She'd felt it settle into her chest as it belonged there. Now his jaw was tight, and his eyes wouldn't hold hers. "Alpha Kane." The pack elder's voice rang out over the clearing. "Do you accept Ivy Hart as your fated mate, before the pack and the moon as witness?" The silence stretched half a second too long. "No." One word. It landed like a blow. A ripple went through the crowd — gasps, a low murmur of shock, someone's sharp intake of breath. Ivy's ears rang. She felt her own heartbeat in her throat, too loud, too fast, drowning out whatever Kane said next. "I reject Ivy Hart as my mate," he said, louder now, steadier, as he'd rehearsed it. "I choose Selene Ashford." Selene stepped out from the front row like she'd been waiting in the wings her whole life — golden hair, sharp chin lifted, already wearing the small, satisfied smile of someone who'd won. She didn't even look at Ivy. She didn't have to. The rejection burned through Ivy's chest like something physical, like claws dragging through the place where the bond had just settled. She staggered half a step before she caught herself. She would not fall. Not here. Not in front of all of them. "Some of us," Selene said quietly, just for Ivy to hear as she swept past to take her place at Kane's side, "are simply born for more than others." Ivy didn't answer. She couldn't. Her throat had closed around every word she might have said. She turned instead, and she ran. She didn't remember deciding to run — one moment she was standing in the clearing with two hundred pairs of eyes on her, and the next she was tearing through the tree line, branches whipping at her arms, the ceremonial dress she'd been so proud of an hour ago tearing at the hem. Somewhere behind her she heard Marta calling her name, but she didn't stop. She couldn't stop. If she stopped, she'd have to feel it, and she wasn't ready to feel it yet. She ran until the trees thinned and the ground turned to broken stone under her feet, until she stood at the edge of Hollow Ridge, with the wind screaming up from the ravine below, her lungs burning, and her whole body shaking with something that wasn't quite cold. Nobody came to Hollow Ridge. The pack called it cursed — said wolves who wandered too close at night didn't wander back. Ivy had never believed the stories. Right now she didn't care if they were true. She sank onto a flat stone near the cliff's edge and finally let herself cry — ugly, gasping sobs that tore out of her like they'd been waiting years for permission. Six years she'd scrubbed floors and mended clothes for a pack that treated her like furniture. Six years she'd told herself it didn't matter, that she didn't need them, that she was fine. And for one hour tonight, she'd let herself believe she might actually belong somewhere. Stupid. "You cry for a boy," said a voice, "when you should be asking why he was ever able to reject you at all." Ivy went still. The voice hadn't come from behind her. It hadn't come from anywhere. It was inside her — low, ancient, and utterly calm, threading through her thoughts like it had always lived there and was only now bothering to speak. "Who — " Her own voice cracked. "Who's there?" "You already know I'm not one of them." The voice seemed almost amused. "You've felt me before. In your dreams. In the quiet moments you were too afraid to name." Ivy's hands pressed flat against the cold stone beneath her, grounding herself against something that made no sense. "I don't understand." "No," the voice agreed. "You don't. Because they made sure of it." A pause, weighted with something that might have been pity. "Your name isn't Ivy Hart. It never was. You are Ivy Ashwood — the last daughter of a bloodline older than this pack, older than the Blackwoods, older than the moon rites they swear by." "That's not — my mother died when I was six. She was nobody. We were nobody." "Your mother," the voice said, and for the first time it wasn't calm at all, "was murdered. Because of what she carried in her blood. Because of what she passed to you." The wind seemed to die around her. Even the ravine below fell silent, like the whole night was leaning in to listen. "Murdered," Ivy whispered. "By who?" "That," the voice said softly, "is a question you are not ready to hear the answer to. But I will tell you this much, Lost Queen — the wolf who ordered your mother's death is closer to you tonight than you could imagine." Ivy's blood went cold. She rose off the stone on unsteady legs, turning in a slow circle, scanning the tree line behind her for any sign of movement, any sign she wasn't alone out here after all. That was when she saw them. Eyes. Pale, unblinking, low to the ground at the edge of the trees — watching her with a patience that made every hair on her arms rise. They didn't move. They didn't blink. They just watched.