Rejected By My Mate, Claimed By The King

Chapter two

Solenne’s POV

Maybe I was dreaming.

There was no other explanation that made sense. No version of reality I had ever imagined where Caden Wolfe — my Caden, my best friend, the boy who had whispered a promise to me in the tall grass when we were twelve and had never once taken it back, would drop to one knee in front of another woman.

Not in front of me.

Not in front of everyone.

The loud applause brought me back to the present.

I blinked. The ceremonial ground came back into focus around me — the crowd, the amber light, the smell of pine and packed earth — and there he was, in flesh and undeniable reality, on one knee before Mara Sinthe. The ring box in his hand was open. The huge diamond ring inside it caught the natural light from the room and reflected blue lights.

It was the royal ring. The one reserved for an Alpha’s Luna.

The one I had let myself imagine, once or twice, in the private dark of my own mind.

“No.”

The word left my mouth before I had decided to speak. This was supposed to be my moment. The moment everyone discovered that they had overlooked a pure gem. He was supposed to be my only way out of this miserable life. There was no way I was going to let this moment be taken away from me without a fight.

Every head in the gathering turned toward me.

The silence was immediate and total.

I felt every single pair of eyes settling onto me at once. The pack that had spent years looking through me was now looking at nothing else. Some part of me registered that this was the worst possible moment to lose my composure, that the dignified thing — the Solenne thing — would be to stay quiet and still and let this happen without giving them anything more to remember.

But my life was collapsing in real time, and dignity felt very far away.

Caden turned to look at me.

It took him a full minute. I counted it without meaning to, the seconds stretching between us like a distance much greater than a few feet of packed earth. When he finally met my eyes, his expression was careful. Arranged. The face of someone who had rehearsed this moment and was committed to seeing it through.

That, more than anything, told me everything.

“You can’t do this to me.” My voice came out steadier than I expected, which surprised us both. I had started, so I finished. “I gave you everything. You cannot just — you made me a promise, Caden.”

Something shifted in the crowd. The low murmuring began again, threading through the gathered pack like smoke, and I did not care. I did not care about any of them. I cared about the look on his face, which had not broken, which was still arranged into that awful, practiced calm.

He rose from his knee.

“What promise?”

The ceremonial ground shrank. The sky lowered. The crowd, the torches, the amber light — all of it compressed into the narrow space between his words and the ground opening beneath my feet.

I stared at him.

“What?” My voice came out smaller than I intended. Smaller than I wanted it to.

“Solenne.” He said my name the way you say the name of someone you feel sorry for, and that — that — was the thing that finally cracked something open in my chest. Not the ring. Not Mara Sinthe’s perfect stillness, or the crowd’s murmuring, or even his face arranged into that unbearable calm. It was the pity. “We were children. I don’t know what you thought…”

“You told me you would choose me.” The words came out without elegance. I was past elegance. “You told me even if the moon goddess gave you someone else, you would reject her. You said…”

“I said a lot of things when I was twelve.” Something flickered across his face then — guilt, maybe, or its cousin. It was gone before I could be sure. “That was not a promise. It was not a commitment. We were kids.”

The ground did not open. I remained standing.

I was not certain how.

Mara Sinthe had not moved from her place. She stood with her hands folded in front of her and her eyes slightly lowered, which was the posture of someone performing discretion while making absolutely certain they were still visible. I could not look at her for long without feeling something I did not have a clean word for.

“I need you to hear me,” Caden said, and his voice had dropped now, quieter, meant only for me, though I was deeply aware that the entire pack could still see his face and mine and the space between us. “I care about you. I always have. But Mara is carrying my child, and she is going to be my Luna, and I need you to…”

“A child.”

The word arrived separately from the rest of the sentence.

I repeated it because repeating it was the only way to confirm that I had heard it correctly. Not because I needed more time. I had enough time. I had approximately nine years of time that had just been handed back to me all at once, and I did not know what to do with the weight of it.

“A child,” I said again, very quietly.

He did not answer.

I looked at Caden Wolfe and tried to find the boy in the tall grass who had grinned at the ground to hide how much he meant what he was saying.

I could not find him.

Maybe he had never really been there. Maybe I had built him out of a twelve-year-old’s careless words and my own desperate need to believe that someone in this pack had chosen me completely, without reservation and I had spent nine years furnishing that belief until it was detailed enough to live inside.

I took one breath. Then I turned to walk away.

But why should my heart be the only broken one tonight?

I turned back.

“Did you know,” I said, and my voice carried now, clear and steady across the silent crowd, “that he has been with me every single day for the past five years? Not once did he forget to tell me he loved me. Not once.”

“Solenne…” Caden took a step forward.

“No.” Mara Sinthe spoke for the first time. “Let her finish.”

I hated how her voice sounded. Soft and smooth and clean, the kind of voice that every she-wolf in the pack had been taught to aspire to. I hated that it was beautiful.

I refused to let it stop me.

“It’s obvious you are his second choice,” I said, holding her gaze. “He only chose you because you were carrying his child.”

She smiled. It was a small, perfectly measured smile, and something about its precision made the hair rise on the back of my neck.

“Then you should have gotten pregnant.” Her voice did not waver. “In one month, I did what you couldn’t manage in five years. No pack would ever want an infertile, wolfless she-wolf as their Luna.” She tilted her head. “You should have known your place.”

The words landed harder than I ever thought.

I could feel them everywhere — in my throat, behind my eyes, in the hollow place in my chest where my wolf was supposed to live and didn’t. I wanted, more than I had wanted anything in a very long time, to disappear.

A single pair of hands began to clap.

Then another. Then another. Then the whole ceremonial hall joined, and the sound rose around me like water rising, and I was standing at the center of it with tears running down my face that I had not given permission to fall.

“Spoken like a true Luna.” Alpha Grey’s voice cut through the applause with easy authority. He was walking toward us, hands clasped behind his back, his expression carrying the particular satisfaction of a man whose evening had gone exactly as planned. Mara bowed her head in response — graceful, gentle, the perfect picture of deference.

He turned to me.

“Solenne Thorne.” He said my name the way people say the names of things they find faintly amusing. “An Alpha is permitted as many distractions as he wishes before he ascends the throne. It is tradition. It is his right.” He paused, as if allowing me to appreciate the distinction. “To have held his attention for five full years, considering your…circumstances is, in fact, an achievement. You should carry some pride in that.”

He started clapping again. The hall followed.

The laughter began underneath the applause.

I pressed my hands over my ears.

The laughter kept rising and I could not make it stop.

I dropped my hands from my ears. I would not cover them again. I straightened my spine and I kept my chin level and I looked at nothing in particular, at the middle distance past the crowd, past the torches, past all of it, and I walked away.

I walked to the water table at the far edge of the hall. I poured myself a cup with unsteady hands. I drank it. I set the cup down and I poured another.

I did not allow myself to feel anything. I had become very good at this over the years — the specific, practiced skill of placing a feeling behind a door in my chest and holding the door shut with everything I had until I was somewhere safe enough to let it open.

The door was holding. Barely.

Somewhere behind me, the ceremony continued. Alpha Grey had resumed the traditional words. The youngsters receiving their wolves for the first time were lined up at the center of the hall, shaking with anticipation. It was a beautiful thing. It has always been a beautiful thing and I had never once been part of it.

I became aware, gradually, that the laughter had quieted. I kept my place at the water table until my heartbeat had settled into something I could manage. Then I smoothed the front of my dress and I turned around.

Mara Sinthe was accepting the crown.

It was a slim thing, ceremonial silver, the kind that would be replaced with the true Luna’s crown at the formal mating ceremony. But it caught the light beautifully, and it looked beautiful on her, and the pack watched her receive it with the particular warmth of people who had already decided she deserved it.

Caden stood beside her. His face had returned to its composed arrangement. He did not look at me.

I looked at him for a long moment.

I was looking for grief. Some sign that the version of him who had gripped the grass in the summer and meant every word was still alive somewhere inside the man standing at the altar. Some small, private acknowledgment that this had cost him something too.

There was nothing. Or if there was, he had buried it past where I could reach.

I put the cup down and walked out.