REJECTED BY THE ALPHA, CHOOSEN BY THE LYCAN KING

Chapter 5: The Reflection

Aveline stared down into the ravine, and the ravine stared back.

The mark glowing beneath the water's surface was unmistakable the same crescent curve, the same faint silver pulse, hovering in the black water like a moon fallen from the sky. But it wasn't a reflection. She understood that even before her mind could fully accept it. There was no moon overhead to cast such an image, no light source that could explain the mark's presence in water that had gone eerily, unnaturally still.

"Vaelor." Her voice came out barely above a whisper. "What is that?"

He had gone very still beside her, his gaze fixed on the water with an intensity that made her stomach twist. Whatever he saw there, he understood it far better than she did and whatever he understood, it had stolen the last of the composure he'd worn like armor all night.

"It shouldn't be possible," he murmured, almost to himself. "Not yet. Not this soon."

"What shouldn't be possible? Vaelor, *talk to me.*" Aveline's patience, already worn thin by rejection and terror and a night that refused to make sense, finally snapped. "You said you'd tell me who I am. You said my mother hid something. I just watched myself set a monster on fire with my bare hand, and now there's a second mark glowing up out of a ravine like it's trying to say something to me. I deserve to know what's happening."

Something in her tone must have reached him, because when he turned to face her, the grief she'd glimpsed a moment ago had steadied into something more careful, more deliberate a man choosing his next words as if they were the first stones laid in a bridge that had to hold enormous weight.

"You are not the only Moon mark in this world," he said finally. "There is another. There has always been another."

The words settled over her strangely, resonant in a way she couldn't explain, as though some part of her had been waiting her whole life to hear them. "Another mark. You mean another person."

"I mean a person who shares your blood so completely that the two of you were never meant to exist apart." Vaelor's gaze returned to the water, where the second crescent still glowed faint and steady, untouched by the current. "Your mother didn't simply hide you, Aveline. She *divided* you. Split what should never have been split, and scattered the pieces to keep them from ever being whole again."

Aveline's breath caught somewhere between her ribs. "Divided me from what?"

"Not from what." Vaelor's pale eyes finally lifted to hers, and in them she saw something that looked almost like pity. "From whom."

The water rippled once, gently, though nothing had touched its surface and the mark beneath it flared brighter for a single heartbeat before sinking back into the dark and vanishing entirely, leaving nothing behind but still black water and the echo of a truth Aveline wasn't ready to hold.

"A sister," she breathed, the word arriving in her mouth before she'd consciously reached for it, as though something older than memory had supplied it. "I have a sister."

Vaelor didn't confirm it. He didn't need to. The confirmation was already written across his face, in the careful stillness of a man who had clearly spent years guarding a secret he was only now beginning to release, one fragment at a time.

"Where is she?" Aveline pressed, stepping closer, urgency cracking through the numbness that had carried her this far. "Does she know about me? Does she know what we are?"

"I don't know where she is." For the first time, something almost like frustration edged into his voice the frustration of a powerful man confronted with the limits of his own power. "Your mother made certain of that. She scattered you both so thoroughly that even I have spent years searching without success."

"Then how do you know she's still alive?"

Vaelor's gaze drifted back to the ravine, to the water that had gone still and dark and ordinary once more, as if the mark had never appeared at all. "Because your mark just answered hers," he said quietly. "Marks like yours don't respond to nothing, Aveline. They respond to blood. To a bond older than either of you understands." He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice had dropped low enough that she had to lean in to catch it. "Tonight, for the first time in eighteen years, your sister's mark woke. Which means somewhere in this world, she felt exactly what you felt. The rejection. The fear. The mark burning to life."

A chill swept through Aveline that had nothing to do with the night air.

"And if she felt it," Vaelor continued, his gaze hardening as it lifted back to the treeline, to the dark spaces between the trees where the creatures had vanished only minutes before, "then so did Veyrix. Which means the hunt for both of you has already begun and I no longer have the luxury of finding her quietly."

Somewhere far off in the Blackwood, faint and mournful, a wolf's howl rose into the night answered, a heartbeat later, by another Aveline didn't recognize, carried on a wind that smelled of somewhere far beyond the borders of everything she'd ever known.