Rejected By My Mate, Claimed By The King

Solenne’s POV The whispers used to stop when I walked past. That was years ago now. These days they don't bother. I had passed the threshold of someone worth the courtesy of pretending. I heard them openly, the way you hear weather: not aimed at anyone, just present, just part of the air. “What is she doing here?” “Still holding onto the thought of finding a mate?” “A cursed wolf at the Mate Ceremony? Is she trying to curse others?” I kept walking. My face up and my eyes looking forward. I had learned a long time ago that the worst thing you could do was let them see you flinch, because the flinching was what they were really after. The words were just the instrument. I was almost past the outer fire pits when someone stuck their foot out. Britta Selne, one of the ceremony attendants, did not even look up from her conversation with the girl beside her. Her foot moved an inch to the left. My shoe caught it. I caught myself before I fell. Barely. The laughter was brief and quiet. The mildness of it was somehow worse than if they had pointed and howled. I was not even worth real cruelty. I was a minor entertainment. A footnote. I straightened and smoothed the front of my dress. It was the most expensive thing I had ever owned. Two months of wages from whatever work Jenna would give me stacked carefully on top of the little I had set aside from before. It was deep green and fitted at the waist. I had tried it on the night I bought it and stood in front of the small mirror above my desk for a long time, practicing the version of myself I intended to be today. I still believed in that version. I kept walking. I was cursed. That was the word the pack used, and I had stopped flinching at it somewhere around my sixteenth year. What else do you call a werewolf who was twenty-one years old and had never once shifted? The healers had examined me three times in the early years, at my guardian’s insistence. Each time they had found nothing wrong and everything wrong — no physical cause, no injury, no curse they could name or lift, just an absence that didn’t follow any rules they knew. After the third examination, they had stopped being called. The pack had settled on its verdict, which was simpler and required less paperwork. That was when the name cursed werewolf came about. They had removed my name from the ceremony list when I turned eighteen with still no sign of a shift. I had kept coming anyway. Not out of hope though. I had made my peace with the fact that I’ll never get a wolf a long time ago. I kept coming because stopping would have meant admitting they were right about me. That the erasure was deserved. That I should quietly take up less and less space until I disappeared entirely. I was not going to disappear. Today least of all. Today was different from every other day I had walked through this pack trying to survive quietly. Today would end with everyone trying to be on my good side for the rest of their lives. Caden was going to propose to me in front of everyone. In the grand, and impossible-to-misread way that would finally close the distance between who I was and who this pack had decided I was. He had asked me to be there, in a particular way that implied that he was going to do something very important. He knew that I’d never failed to attend the ceremony but yet, he invited me. He was going to keep his promise. I remember it vividly. We were twelve when he made it. We were sitting in the tall grass behind Gamma Ren’s house under the scorching sun and sharing a chocolate bar. “I am going to choose you as my mate, Sol. Even if the moon goddess gives me another, I will reject her and choose you.” He said it while staring at the grass, a wide grin pulling at the corner of his mouth to hide the shyness underneath. “I cannot see myself ending up with anyone other than you.” I had laughed. But I had kept every word. I had carried those words in my heart for nine years. And every year they had still been there, solid and unchanged, because Caden had never taken them back. Had never flinched from them even when he brought it up. He had spent nine years being the best person to me. Even if we had to keep our relationship a secret because of our different statuses, he had never made me question his feelings. So let them whisper. By the end of today, they would be bowing because I was going to be their Luna. I found my place in the outer circle of the gathering and looked for him. He was at the front among the ranked young men, where he always stood — broad-shouldered and golden in the afternoon light, the ceremonial half-crown catching the sun. Then I looked more carefully. He was holding his ceremonial robe in his fist. The fabric bunched and twisted in a grip that was too tight for someone simply standing at attention. No one around him seemed to notice. His face was arranged and composed and entirely correct. But his hands. I knew his hands. I had spent nine years learning the private language of Caden Wolfe. The tells he didn’t know he had, the small betrayals of the body that the face never permitted. I had catalogued them without meaning to, because that’s what love means. He was not nervous the way a man is nervous before a good thing. The thought moved through me and I closed the door on it immediately. He was allowed to be afraid. This was a large moment. There was no version of today that wasn’t large, even for Caden Wolfe, who had always moved through the world as if its edges had been specifically rounded for him. He was nervous. That was all. I smoothed the front of my dress. The ceremonial trumpets sounded. Alpha Grey, Caden’s father, stood at the head of the gathering and began the traditional words. The pack settled around him. I knew the order by heart. Formal declarations from the ranked members first, youngest to oldest, then the ceremony opened to the general gathering. It would take most of the afternoon. I had stood in this same outer circle, in this same patient arrangement, more times than I could count. Today I was not waiting to be called. I had long since stopped waiting for that. I was waiting for one thing only. “And now,” Alpha Grey said, his voice lifting into the register of formal announcement, “we come to a special declaration. My son, Caden Wolfe, will present his chosen Luna.” The gathering shifted. Around me, heads turned. Somewhere to my left, a cluster of she-wolves straightened at the mention of his name. I pressed my lips together to hold the smile in. Caden raised his head. He began walking. The crowd parted like they always do for him. He moved through the space they made with that unhurried ease, and I watched him come, and I finally let the smile break across my face in full. He was walking toward me. Of course he was walking toward me. He reached me. He looked into my eyes for two seconds or less than. There was something in his expression I did not recognize. Something that should not have been there — a quality I had no word for, had never needed a word for, because I had never seen it on his face before. I had just enough time to register the cold of his gaze before he looked away. He stopped three paces past where I stood, in front of Mara Sinthe, who was dressed in the most beautiful dress I’ve ever seen. “Mara Sinthe,” Caden said, his voice carrying easily across the pack, “will you be my Luna?” The silence lasted one second. Then the crowd erupted, and I was standing perfectly still at the center of it, and the dress I had saved two months for, the dress I had stood in front of the mirror practicing the person I intended to be, felt like the most expensive mistake I had ever made.