Crowned by Rejection

Chapter Three

Isolde

The envelope was still on the table.

I had not touched it. I was not going to touch it. But I kept looking at it the way you look at something that has insulted you — with a specific, quiet fury that has nowhere useful to go.

Silvain was still standing on the other side of the room. He had not moved since I said no. His expression had done something complicated and then gone very still, the way faces go still when the person wearing them has decided to stop feeling things in front of you.

"You don't understand what you're refusing," he said.

"I understand perfectly," I said.

"That money would set you up for years. A new settlement, somewhere better than—"

"I don't want your money." I turned away from the envelope. "I want what the bond means. That's what I want. And you're telling me I can't have it because of my last name."

He was quiet.

"So no," I said. "I won't accept."

Something shifted in his face then. Not softness — I don't think Silvain Marcellus did softness, exactly. But something that looked, briefly, like regret. Then it was gone and what replaced it was the composure I was beginning to understand was just the face he wore when he had made a decision and was done revisiting it.

"Then I need you to leave," he said.

I blinked. "What?"

"I need you to leave this building." His voice was even. Measured. Like he was asking me to reschedule a meeting. "I'll have someone take you—"

"You're throwing me out," I said. Just to make sure I had heard him correctly. Just to make sure this was actually happening.

He didn't answer. Which was its own answer.

I looked at him for a long moment. I memorized his face the way you memorize something you know you won't see again — not because you want to, but because some part of you knows it will come back to find you in the dark later whether you prepared for it or not.

Then I picked up my jacket from the chair and walked to the door.

I stopped with my hand on the frame.

"You felt it too," I said, without turning around. "I know you did. When our blood touched." I paused. "You're going to think about that for a very long time."

He said nothing.

I walked out.

~

The sickness started in the elevator.

A wave of heat so sudden and severe that I had to press my hand against the wall to stay upright. My vision swam at the edges. By the time the elevator reached the ground floor I was sweating through the borrowed shirt and my legs felt like they belonged to someone else.

I had heard about rejection sickness. I had never felt it before and nothing anyone described had prepared me for how physical it was. It wasn't grief, exactly, though grief was inside it somewhere. It was more like my body was confused — like something it had recognized as home had been taken back, and now every system inside me was searching for it and coming up empty and panicking about the loss.

I walked out of the building into the afternoon light.

The city moved around me like I wasn't there, which was fine. Which was familiar. I put one foot in front of the other and kept moving and tried to breathe through the heat rolling through my chest in slow, nauseating waves.

I walked for a long time.

~

By evening I was back at the edge of the settlement.

The familiar smell of it hit me first — woodsmoke and damp ground and the particular staleness of buildings that had never been properly insulated. I had spent my whole life being quietly ashamed of that smell. Right now it almost broke me, because it was the only thing that felt real.

Mrs. Orin from two streets over spotted me near the east gate. She was a heavyset woman with sharp eyes and a habit of knowing everyone's business, and she looked at me — really looked, in the way older women look when they're taking inventory — and her expression shifted.

"Child," she said. "What happened to you?"

"I'm fine," I said.

"You are not fine. You look like you've been turned inside out." She reached for my arm. "Come inside, let me—"

"I'm fine," I said again, and stepped back, and kept walking.

I heard her call after me. I didn't stop.

I didn't stop for the next two days.

~

I don't know how to explain what those days were like without sounding like I had lost my mind, which is possible that I had, a little. The rejection sickness came and went in cycles — hours of fever, then a cold so deep it felt like my bones were made of ice, then fever again. I couldn't eat. I slept in doorways when my legs gave out and woke up when the cold became unbearable and kept moving.

People tried to help. A woman left a blanket on a step I was sitting on. A man from the settlement's small medical post spotted me on the second night and followed me for half a street asking me to come inside. A girl, maybe twelve, offered me half her bread roll with the serious gravity of someone who understood what hunger looked like.

I said no to all of it.

That wasn't rational. I know that. But rationality had packed its things and left somewhere around the moment the elevator doors opened onto that street, and what I was left with was something rawer and stupider. I didn't want to be taken care of. Being taken care of meant accepting that I needed it. Accepting that I needed it meant accepting that I had been broken, and I was not ready to be broken. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

So I kept moving.

By the third day I was running a real fever — not the supernatural cycling of the rejection sickness but a genuine, human, this-is-now-a-medical-problem fever. My left side, where the cart had hit me during the attack, had stiffened badly. I was sitting against the outer wall of the settlement's grain store, in the narrow alley nobody used, watching the sky go from grey to dark and trying to remember why I had thought this was a better option than the blanket.

I couldn't come up with a good answer.

The full moon was rising.

I felt it before I saw it — that pull, deep and familiar, that had nothing to do with grief or sickness. My wolf rose in response to the moon the way she always did. Instinct older than any of my problems.

I stopped fighting it. I let the shift take me.

It hurt more than usual, my injuries pulling and protesting against the change, but then it was done and I was low to the ground and the world smelled completely different — richer, more layered, everything the settlement was came flooding in at once.

I ran.

I ran because it was the only thing that still felt like mine. The fever dimmed in wolf form. The ache dimmed. The thing in my chest that kept reaching for warmth that wasn't there anymore dimmed, just slightly, just enough to breathe.

I ran into the forest at the settlement's edge and I kept running until my legs burned and my lungs burned and everything burned, and then I stopped in a clearing and stood in the moonlight and just breathed.

That was when I heard the other wolf.

I turned.

Large. Grey. Scarred across the left shoulder in a pattern I recognized — the same wolf from the attack. One of the rogues. He had been heading straight for me in that burning street.

I dropped low, hackles up, a growl building in my chest.

He didn't advance. He sat back on his haunches and looked at me, and his posture was all wrong for a threat — too still, too deliberate. Like he was waiting for me to finish being afraid.

Then he shifted back.

A man. Lean, weathered, with a scar across his jaw and eyes that had seen too much and stopped being surprised by any of it. He looked at me steadily.

"I know what he did to you," he said. His voice was quiet. Direct. No performance to it. "The Alpha."

My wolf went very still.

"My name is Cael," he said. "And I think you're exactly who we've been looking for."

I should have run. Every rational thought I had left told me to run.

I didn't run.