Chapter 1 — The Rejection
811 Words
Nyra had been told to smile.
She stood at the edge of the ceremony grounds with a tray of wine goblets against her hip, and she smiled, because that was what servants of the Ironmoon Pack did when their Alpha announced his bride. Three hundred wolves had gathered beneath the blood moon in their finest, gold thread catching the torchlight. At the center rose the great stone dais where Alpha Kaelen would take his chosen mate.
Sable already stood beside him. Radiant. Draped in white and silver, her dark hair braided with moonflowers, her chin lifted like she had been born for this exact moment. Maybe she had. Everyone always said Sable Ironmoon would be Luna one day.
Nyra kept her eyes down. She refilled the goblets. She told herself it didn't hurt.
She was good at that. Nineteen years of practice. Nineteen years of the charity girl, the wolfless one, the orphan we were kind enough to feed. She had learned to fold her pain small enough to carry in a pocket.
"Nyra." The kitchen matron hissed behind her. "The head table needs pouring. Move, girl, before the Alpha sees you standing there like a stump."
Nyra moved.
She wove between the tables toward the dais, keeping to the shadows the way she always did. She was three steps from the Alpha's table when it happened.
The wind shifted.
And the world stopped.
It hit her like a wave breaking over her head. A scent, warm and dark and impossibly right, flooding through her until her knees nearly buckled. Cedar and smoke and something wild underneath it. Something that reached past her ribs and closed a fist around her heart. Every hair on her body rose. Heat poured down her spine like liquid gold.
The tray slipped from her hands.
It hit the stone with a crash that split the night in two. Wine spread across the ground like spilled blood. Three hundred faces turned toward her at once.
But Nyra couldn't move. Couldn't breathe. Because up on the dais, Alpha Kaelen Ironmoon had gone rigid. His head snapped up. His nostrils flared. And his eyes, silver and burning, found hers across the crowd and locked.
Mate.
The word rang through her whole body, ancient and certain, in a voice that was hers and not hers. Her wolf, the wolf everyone swore she didn't have, surged up inside her chest for the first time in her life. Howling. Straining. Reaching for him.
Kaelen's mouth parted. His chest heaved. She watched the recognition tear across his face, raw and unguarded, and for one suspended heartbeat she saw him want to cross that distance. She saw the man beneath the Alpha, and that man knew her.
It's you, she thought, dizzy with it. It was always going to be you.
Somewhere in the crowd, someone gasped.
"The servant girl."
"That's not possible."
"She's wolfless."
Sable's voice cut through all of it. Sharp. Bright. Deadly.
"Kaelen?" She laid one manicured hand on his arm, and her nails dug in. "Kaelen. The pack is watching."
And Nyra saw the exact moment the man disappeared and the Alpha came back.
His face closed like a door slamming shut. The silver in his eyes went cold and flat. He straightened to his full height, and when he spoke, his voice carried to every corner of the grounds. Loud enough that no one could pretend they hadn't heard.
"I, Alpha Kaelen Ironmoon, reject you as my mate."
The bond didn't break gently.
It tore.
Nyra screamed. She couldn't help it. The sound was ripped out of her as pain exploded through her chest, white hot, like someone had reached inside her and torn out something with roots still attached. She dropped to her knees on the wet stone. Her wolf shrieked inside her, a sound so full of agony that Nyra tasted copper in her mouth. She wrapped her arms around herself, folded over her own knees, and shook.
Nobody moved to help her.
Three hundred wolves, and not one of them moved.
Through the roaring in her ears, she heard Sable laugh. Soft. Silvery. Delighted. Then she heard Kaelen speak in a voice like nothing at all.
"Someone remove her from the grounds. She's ruining the ceremony."
Hands seized her under the arms. Rough. Impersonal. They dragged her backward across the stone, her knees scraping raw, and the last thing she saw before the crowd swallowed the dais was Kaelen turning away from her.
Turning back to Sable.
Taking her cousin's hand.
I'll remember this.
The voice came from the very bottom of her soul. A voice she had never heard before. Older than she was. Patient as stone.
When you are on your knees, Alpha, and it is my face you are begging. I'll remember this.
Then the pain took her, and everything went black.
- Writer
