Chapter 2: "I, Damon Thorne, Reject You"
2032 Words
She should have stayed in the kitchen.
That was the thought that kept circling back, after everything. If she'd stayed behind the swinging doors, scrubbing the grease stain off that champagne flute, none of it would have happened the way it did. Or it would have happened anyway, just differently, on a different night, in a different room. The bond didn't care about timing.
But she didn't stay.
The wine service ended around midnight. Harriet told her she could go, and she should have gone straight to her closet-room. That was the smart thing. The safe thing. Instead, she stood in the corridor between the kitchen and the Great Hall, her apron balled up in her hands, and listened to the party.
Inside her, Nyx was pacing.
We have to go back in, Nyx said. He's still there. I can feel him.
"That's exactly why we shouldn't go back," Sera muttered.
He's our mate, Sera.
"He looked at me like I was dirt on his boot."
His wolf knows. Fenris knows. I could feel him reaching for us.
Sera pressed her back against the corridor wall. The stone was cold through her thin dress. She could still smell it—that pine-and-storm scent, faint now but there, threading through the air like smoke from a distant fire.
Please, Nyx whispered. And it was the please that broke her, because Nyx never begged. Nyx barely spoke. For years Sera had wondered if her wolf was dead, or defective, or just too disgusted by the body she was stuck in to bother communicating. Hearing her plead was like hearing a stone talk.
Sera untied the apron. Smoothed her gray-black dress. Knew it wouldn't help. Pushed through the doors anyway.
The hall had thinned out since she'd left. The formal part of the ceremony was over. What remained was the real business—the drinking, the deal-making, the Alpha-to-Alpha conversations held in corners with lowered voices. Maybe fifty, sixty wolves still in the room. Enough to fill every space that mattered.
Damon was at the head table, flanked by his Beta, Caleb, and two visiting Alphas she didn't recognize. He'd taken off his suit jacket. The white dress shirt underneath was rolled to his elbows, showing forearms roped with muscle and the edge of a tattoo she couldn't quite make out from across the room. He was holding a whiskey glass. He hadn't drunk from it.
Now, Nyx urged. Go.
Sera's legs moved before her brain could file an objection. She stepped out from the wall and into the open floor, heading toward the dais. Her heart was doing something she hadn't authorized—sprinting, basically—and her palms had gone slick. She kept her eyes on Damon. Twenty tables between them. Fifteen. Ten.
She was halfway across the hall when Victoria stepped into her path.
Or rather, Victoria's foot did.
Sera didn't see it. One second she was walking, and the next the floor was rushing up to meet her at a speed that left no time for catching herself. She went down hard—hands first, then knees, then the side of her face against the stone. The impact jarred her teeth. A sharp, copper bolt of pain shot through her chin.
Laughter. Immediate, delighted, like she'd performed a trick on cue.
"Oh my God." Victoria's voice rang out above the noise, pitched to carry. "Someone should really teach the help how to walk."
Sera pushed up on her hands. Her left palm was scraped raw, little beads of blood rising through the skin. Her cheek throbbed. She could feel two dozen pairs of eyes on her—some amused, most indifferent, a few actively annoyed that she'd interrupted whatever conversation they'd been having.
She got to her knees. Then to her feet. Didn't look at Victoria. Didn't wipe the blood off her palm. Just looked at Damon.
He was watching her now. The whiskey glass was still in his hand, untouched. His face gave away absolutely nothing. He could have been watching the weather report.
Go to him, Nyx said, and this time her voice trembled. He'll see us. When he's close enough to smell us, he'll understand.
Sera took a step forward. Then another. She was close enough now to see the gray of his eyes, the hard set of his mouth, the way his knuckles had gone white around the glass. Close enough to see the vein in his temple pulsing. Close enough to drown in that scent—pine and rain and raw storm.
She stopped three feet from the head table. Her voice came out smaller than she wanted.
"Alpha Thorne." She paused. Swallowed. "Can I—can I speak with you? Privately?"
The silence that followed was the loudest thing she'd ever heard.
Every conversation in the vicinity died. Caleb, the Beta, froze with his beer halfway to his mouth. The visiting Alphas exchanged a glance that was half amusement, half pity. At a table nearby, Victoria watched with her arms crossed and a smile that was already spreading, because Victoria could smell blood in the water from a mile away and she was always, always hungry.
Damon set his glass down. The tiny click of crystal on wood sounded like a gunshot.
He stood. He was taller than she'd realized, even from across the hall. Up close, the difference was almost absurd—she barely came up to his chest. She had to tilt her head back to see his face, and when she did, she wished she hadn't.
His eyes were dead. Not angry, not disgusted—she could have handled those. Just empty. Like he was looking through her at the far wall.
"You," he said. One word. Quiet enough that only the nearest tables could hear, which meant in wolf terms, half the hall would know within minutes.
"I felt—" Sera started.
"I know what you felt."
The words landed like slaps. Sera's mouth closed.
Damon looked at her for a long moment. His jaw worked. She could see the muscles in his neck moving, cording and relaxing, cording and relaxing, and she realized with a jolt that he was fighting something. Physically restraining himself. Whether from reaching for her or from lashing out, she couldn't tell.
Then he turned and walked down the steps of the dais.
He wasn't heading for a private room. He wasn't leading her away from the crowd. He walked to the center of the Great Hall, where the ceremonial stone pillar still bore his bloody handprint, and he stopped. In full view of everyone.
No. Nyx's voice cracked. Not here. Not like this.
Sera followed him because she had no other option. The pull in her chest dragged her forward like a leash. She stopped five feet from him, standing in the open, the remaining guests forming a loose ring around them. Some had stood up from their tables. Others had come in from the corridor, drawn by the shift in energy that even a human could have felt.
Damon's voice filled the hall. He didn't need to raise it—the stone carried sound just fine, and the room was already silent.
"I, Damon Thorne, Alpha of Silver Moon Pack—"
The words hit her before her brain could process them. Some deep, animal part of her recognized the cadence. Knew what was coming. Nyx let out a sound like nothing Sera had ever heard—a howl and a scream and a breaking thing all at once.
"—reject you, Seraphina Blackwood—"
Sera's knees buckled. She didn't fall, but it was close. Something inside her chest was tearing, actually tearing. Not metaphorically. She could feel tissue separating, feel the bond between them—that bright, new, barely-alive thread—being ripped out by the roots.
"—as my mate and Luna."
The last word landed, and the world went white.
Not bright. White. Like everything had been bleached of color and sound and meaning. Sera's vision dissolved into static. She could feel her heartbeat slowing, each beat further apart than the last, each one weaker. Her legs gave out and she went down—knees first, then hands, back on the stone floor where she'd been two minutes ago, except this time the pain was everywhere and nowhere and bigger than her body could hold.
Blood filled her mouth. She tasted iron. Warm and thick, seeping from somewhere inside, from wherever the bond had been anchored before he'd ripped it free. She tried to swallow it and gagged, and then it was running from the corner of her mouth, tracing a line down her chin and dripping onto the stone.
The hall was buzzing. People were talking, whispering, someone said "Omega" like it was a dirty word, someone else said "didn't know animals could be mates."
Victoria's voice cut through it all, bright and carrying and pleased as a cat with a mouthful of feathers:
"An Omega thinking she could be Luna? That's the funniest thing I've heard all year."
More laughter. Not as much as before. A few people had the decency to look uncomfortable. Most didn't.
Sera was on all fours now. Blood dripped from her mouth and hit the floor. Each drop landed in the silence between heartbeats. Inside her, Nyx was—she didn't know what Nyx was doing. The connection had gone ragged, full of static, like a radio signal cutting in and out. She could feel her wolf clawing at something, fighting to stay conscious, fighting to hold together.
Sera. Nyx's voice was faint. Sera, I can't—I'm losing—
"Someone get her out of here," Damon said. His voice was flat. He wasn't looking at her. He'd already turned away, walking back toward the dais, where his whiskey glass was waiting and his Beta was carefully looking at the ceiling.
"She's bleeding on the floor," Caleb said, low. "Damon—"
"I said get her out."
Hands grabbed Sera under the arms. Two Gamma wolves, following orders, hauling her upright like a sack of grain. Her feet dragged on the stone. The blood was still coming, slower now, pooling in the hollow of her throat and soaking into the collar of her gray-black dress.
They carried her through the swinging doors into the kitchen. Past Harriet, who stopped mid-sentence and stared. Down the corridor. They dropped her outside the door to her closet-room and left without a word.
Sera lay on the floor for a long time.
The stone was cold. That was the clearest thought she could manage—the stone was cold, and she was lying on it, and there was blood drying on her chin. The fluorescent light above her flickered. It had been flickering for two years. She'd stopped noticing.
She noticed now. Each flicker was a tiny absence of light, and her brain latched onto it because everything else was too big. Flicker. Dark. Flicker. Dark.
Sera. Nyx's voice was barely a whisper. I'm here. I'm still here.
Sera reached up and pressed her hand against her chest. Under her palm, her heart was beating. Irregular, sluggish, wrong—but beating.
She rolled onto her side and got her arm under her. Pushed. Fell. Pushed again. Got to her knees. Reached for the doorknob. Missed. Reached again. Got it.
She pulled herself into her room. Onto her mattress. Curled into a ball with her bloodstained hand pressed to her mouth and the other wrapped around her ribs, holding herself together because nobody else was going to.
Through the wall, through the stone and wood and the insulation of an entire building, the celebration was still going on. She could feel the bass of the music through the floor. The Pack was dancing. The Pack was drinking. The Pack was toasting their new Alpha, who had just shattered a sacred bond in front of all of them like snapping a stick.
Sera closed her eyes.
She didn't cry. She'd promised herself that, years ago.
But the sound that came out of her—low, airless, pulled from somewhere below her lungs—wasn't silence, either.
- Writer
