The alpha king's rejected Luna

The blood moon hung low and red over the packlands, close enough that Miranda could almost believe it was watching her, waiting with the rest of the pack for the words that would decide the entire shape of her life. She stood at the center of the ceremonial circle in the white dress her mother had spent three months sewing, the ancient marks painted along her collarbone still tacky in places, and looked up at Ronan with a heart so full of hope she hadn't yet learned to be afraid of it. He didn't look at her the way a man was supposed to look at the woman about to become his Luna. "I, Ronan, Alpha King of the Ashwood Pack," he began, and his voice carried across the clearing with the flat, ceremonial weight every wolf present had heard a hundred times at other bindings, other celebrations. Miranda felt the crowd's attention settle onto her like a physical thing, hundreds of eyes fixed on the moment the mate bond would be sealed beneath the celestial moon that only rose once in a generation. "Do reject Miranda of the Ashwood Pack as my Luna and mate." The words didn't land at first. They simply hung there, strange and wrong, syllables her mind refused to assemble into meaning, because the sentence she'd been expecting, the sentence every wolf in that clearing had gathered to hear, was supposed to end in acceptance, not rejection. She stood very still, waiting for the correction, for the moment this revealed itself as some kind of cruel joke that would resolve into laughter and relief. It didn't resolve. Ronan's face remained utterly still, his golden eyes fixed somewhere just past her shoulder, refusing even now to actually look at her. "You reject me," Miranda said, and her voice came out smaller than she wanted it to, smaller than the moment deserved, the words barely more than a whisper in a clearing that had gone completely, suffocatingly silent. "I reject the bond." His jaw was tight, his voice utterly without warmth. "You are not fit to stand as Luna of this pack." The pain hit her a full three seconds after the words did, radiating outward from her chest in a way that felt almost physical, the mate bond she hadn't even fully realized had already begun forming tearing itself apart inside her all at once. She staggered, one hand flying to her sternum as though she could physically hold the wound closed, and somewhere behind her she heard the murmur of the crowd shifting from confused silence into something else. Whispers. A laugh, sharp and cruel, from somewhere near the back of the gathered pack. "Ronan, please." She hated herself for the please, hated the way it came out of her like a plea from a child rather than a woman who had believed, until thirty seconds ago, that she was about to become one of the most powerful figures in the entire wolf world. "What did I do? Tell me what I did." He said nothing. That was the cruelest part, she would think later, turning this moment over and over in the months that followed. Not the rejection itself, but the silence after it, the refusal to even grant her the dignity of an explanation, as though she didn't deserve to understand her own destruction. A hand closed around her upper arm, hard enough to bruise, and she turned to find her own brother's face inches from hers, twisted with an expression she had never once seen him wear in twenty-three years of being his sister. "Garrick." His name came out of her on a broken breath. "Garrick, help me, please, something is wrong, he—" "Don't." His grip tightened, and he began pulling her backward, away from the circle, away from Ronan, away from the entire life she'd spent her whole existence preparing for. "You've humiliated this family enough for one night. Don't make it worse by begging." "I didn't do anything." "The Alpha King doesn't reject a mate without reason." Garrick's voice was low, furious, pitched for her ears alone even as he dragged her across the clearing in full view of the entire pack. "Whatever you did, whatever you are, I won't have our family's name attached to it any longer than it already has been tonight." She fought him, some instinctive part of her body refusing to simply be dragged away without resistance, and her bare feet caught against the earth, scraping through grass still damp with evening dew, dirt working its way beneath her fingernails as she clawed uselessly at the ground for purchase. The white dress her mother had sewn tore at the hem. She smelled crushed grass and churned soil and, underneath it, the acrid tang of her own fear, and she understood, with a clarity that made the humiliation somehow sharper, that every single wolf in that clearing was watching this happen to her. Some of them were still laughing. She heard it clearly as Garrick hauled her past the outer edge of the gathered pack, a cluster of younger wolves who had never much liked her to begin with, their laughter following her like something with teeth, cruel and delighted at the sight of the girl who was supposed to be their Luna instead being dragged through the dirt like refuse. She caught a glimpse of her mother's face in the crowd, pale and frozen, making no move to intervene, and understood in that instant that no one was coming to help her. Not her mother. Not her father, wherever he stood in the crowd she could no longer see clearly through the tears finally spilling free. Not a single member of the pack she had been raised her entire life to serve. "Garrick, you're hurting me." "You should have thought of that before you disgraced us." He didn't slow down, didn't loosen his grip, dragging her clear of the ceremonial grounds and out toward the treeline where the manicured clearing gave way to darker, wilder forest. "Pack law is clear. A rejected mate has no place among us. You have until dawn to gather what you can carry and leave these lands. After that, you're trespassing on Ashwood territory, and I won't be the one to protect you from what happens to trespassers." "You're my brother." "I was your brother." He finally released her arm at the edge of the trees, shoving her forward hard enough that she stumbled and fell to her knees in the dirt, the last of the ceremonial paint smearing across her palms as she caught herself. "Tonight you became something else. I suggest you disappear before anyone decides to remind you exactly what that means." He turned and walked back toward the clearing without looking back, without one final glance at the sister he was leaving alone at the edge of a forest in the dark, and Miranda knelt in the torn ruins of her mother's dress with dirt under her fingernails and grass stains on her knees, one hand pressed flat against her stomach, the only person in the entire clearing who knew the secret that made tonight's humiliation so much crueler than anyone watching could have understood. She was carrying Ronan's child. And he had just cast her out without ever knowing it existed.