Rejected Before The Pack

Chapter 8

Aria’s POV

By the time I made it back to the clearing, most of the pack had drifted off, unwilling to stand around waiting for a scandal that had already peaked. Only the important ones remained — Damon, Ethan, Selena, and Kael's riders, still mounted, still patient.

Damon crossed the distance between us before I'd even fully stepped into view. "What did Rowan tell you?"

"Enough," I said. "Enough to know I'm not staying here."

Something shifted in his face, quick and unguarded, gone before I could name it. "Aria—"

"Don't." I kept my voice even, though it cost me. "You don't get to say my name like that. Not after last night."

"I know what I did."

"Then you know there's nothing left to say." I shifted Ash carefully in my arms, buying myself a second to steady my breathing. "You made your choice in front of the whole pack. I'm making mine now, in front of the same people. That seems fair."

Ethan stepped up beside Damon, his expression carefully neutral in the way of someone who'd clearly been thinking hard and hadn't liked his own conclusions. "For what it's worth, I don't think he understood what he was rejecting."

"He didn't need to understand," I said. "He just needed to choose me. He didn't."

Nobody argued with that. Even Damon didn't argue with that.

Selena, standing a little apart from the others, hadn't said a word since Kael's arrival. I caught her watching me with an expression I couldn't quite place — not triumph, not anymore. Something closer to unease, like she'd started adding things up and didn't like the sum she was getting.

"You're really going with him," Damon said. Not a question.

"I'm going to find out who I am," I said. "If that happens to be with him, then yes."

Kael approached without hurrying, giving me the space to finish whatever this was before he inserted himself into it again. "The convoy is ready whenever you are, my queen. There's no need to rush, if you'd like more time."

"I wouldn't," I said. "There's nothing left here for me to wait for."

Damon's expression cracked at that, just slightly, the way ice cracks under weight it wasn't built to hold. "So that's it. Twenty-two years in this pack, and you just walk away without looking back."

"You didn't look back either," I said. "Last night, when I was on my knees in the mud and this whole pack was laughing at me. You didn't look back once."

He didn't have an answer for that. I hadn't expected one.

I turned to Kael instead. "I have one condition before I go anywhere with you."

"Name it."

"Whatever you tell me from here on, you tell me the truth. All of it, even the parts you think will hurt me. I've had enough of people deciding what I can handle."

Kael studied me for a moment, something like respect settling into his expression. "You have my word."

"Good." I looked back at Damon one last time, at the pack behind him that had spent twenty-two years teaching me exactly how little I mattered to them. "Goodbye, Alpha Blackwood."

I didn't wait for his response. I turned and walked toward Kael's convoy, Ash still curled against my chest, and let one of the riders help me up onto a horse I'd never sat on before, in a saddle finer than anything I'd ever touched in my life.

Selena caught my eye one last time as the convoy began to move, and for just a second, something in her expression looked almost like fear. I filed that away without understanding it yet. There would be time to understand it later.

As the horses carried us through the gate I'd tried to walk out of alone that same morning, I allowed myself one look back at Shadow Moon Pack — the training yard where I'd scrubbed floors before sunrise, the woodshed where I'd found Ash shivering in the mud, the clearing where I'd been humiliated in front of everyone I'd ever known.

None of it looked the way it used to. Or maybe I was the one who'd changed, and the pack had simply stayed exactly as small and cruel as it had always been.

"You're quiet," Kael said, riding beside me, his voice careful, like he was giving me room to be anything I needed to be.

"I don't know what I'm supposed to feel right now."

"You don't have to know yet," he said. "Grief and relief can exist in the same breath. I've seen it before."

"Have you? Watched someone lose everything they thought they knew in the space of a day?"

"I've lived it," Kael said, quiet enough that I almost missed it. "We'll have time to talk about that, when you're ready."

I nodded, not trusting my voice, and let the rhythm of the horse carry me forward, away from the only home I'd ever known and toward a kingdom I couldn't yet picture, a title I hadn't asked for, and a truth about my parents I wasn't sure I was ready to hear in full.

Behind us, Shadow Moon Pack grew smaller with every step, until the trees swallowed it whole, and there was nothing left behind me but the life I used to have.