Rejected By My Mate, Claimed By The King

Chapter three

Solenne’s POV

The walk back to my quarters took eleven minutes.

I knew because I counted. When the feeling is too large, the counting helps. It gives the mind something smaller to hold.

My room was small and smelled of pine resin and the faint damp of the outer wall, and I sat down on the edge of the bed in my expensive dress and I let the door open.

Everything I had been holding came through it at once. Every detail arrived in order, with the particular clarity of a deep wound. I sat with all of it for a long time.

Then the ugly tears came. I pressed both hands over my mouth the way I used to as a child, when I had learned early that some grief is safer kept quiet, and I let it move through me in waves until it was finished.

When it was finished, I was very tired.

I changed out of the dress. I folded it carefully and placed it on the chair rather than the floor, because it was the most expensive thing I owned and that fact was not going to change just because tonight had gone wrong. I was still going to treat it like it was worth something. I was still going to treat it like I was worth something, even now, even here, even in this room with the pine smell and the damp wall and nothing waiting for me in the morning except the same small life I had always had, minus the one thing I had built it around.

I lay down and I stared at the ceiling.

I thought about what my place was. I had been given the answer to that question many times, by many people, in many different tones. I was the wolfless one. The cursed one. The burden the pack kept out of some dim, diminishing sense of obligation that was wearing thinner every year.

I had never believed it. I had refused to, on principle, the way you refuse to sit down when you are very tired and the sitting down would mean you might not get back up.

Tonight had made the refusal harder.

I turned onto my side and looked at the wall.

On the small shelf above my desk, where I kept the few things I had decided were worth keeping, there was a folded square of paper. I had not opened it in over a year. I did not open it now. But I knew what it said. I had memorized it so thoroughly in the early years that the words had become part of the furniture of my mind.

I wondered, lying there in the dark, what I would have done differently if I had known with full knowledge, given to my twelve-year-old self in the tall grass, that the boy grinning at the ground was going to spend nine years letting me believe something that was never going to happen, and then stand in front of his pack and choose someone else.

Would I have believed it?

Probably not. That was the particular cruelty of it.

I closed my eyes.

Sleep didn’t come for a long time.

When it finally came, it brought with it the dream I had not had in years.

The Hollow. The dark between the trees. The smell of pine and cold earth and something metallic underneath it.

I was seven years old and I was very small in the roots of the fallen tree, and I had my hands pressed over my mouth because my mother had told me. Her last instruction to me, given in a voice that was steady because she had made it steady, for me — do not make a sound, Solenne. Not one sound.

I had been a very obedient child.

I watched from the roots. I watched the shapes move in the dark. I watched the man with the gold eyes walk out of the shadow, and I watched what his hands did, and I held my breath until there was nothing left to watch, until the forest was quiet again, until the only sound was the distant ceremony bells from the pack still celebrating something I would never know the name of because by the next morning my whole life would be different.

I had not forgotten the face. It had lived in the back of my mind for fourteen years, vivid and specific.

I woke up with a start.

The room was still dark. The shelf above my desk was a dim outline. The folded paper sat where it always sat.

I lay still and waited for my heartbeat to slow.

Something was coming. I had learned, in the long years since the Hollow, to trust the feeling.

Whatever it was, I was going to face it alone. That much, at least, was no longer in doubt.

Good, something in me said. The same stubborn, unreasonable part that had kept my chin up all these years, that had refused to sit down, that had walked out of that hall without running.

Good. I have always been better alone.

I stared at the ceiling until morning came.