Rejected Before The Pack

Chapter 2

Damon’s POV

The bonfire had been burning since sundown, and still the pack kept coming — every unmated wolf in Shadow Moon Pack gathered in the clearing, waiting for the moon to climb high enough to start the ceremony. I stood at the front of it all, the way an Alpha was supposed to, and told myself the tight feeling in my chest was nothing more than duty.

It wasn't duty. I just didn't have a name for it yet.

"You look like a man waiting for bad news," Ethan said beside me, arms crossed, watching the crowd the way he always did — like he was counting threats instead of faces.

"I look like a man who wants this over with," I said.

That wasn't true either. Somewhere underneath the boredom I wore like armor, there was a part of me that still believed in the old stories. Fated mates. A bond the Moon Goddess herself decided, before either of you had a say in it. I'd stopped admitting that out loud years ago. Alphas weren't supposed to want things they couldn't control.

Selena stood close to my right, where she always stood, watching me instead of the fire. "Nervous?" she asked, like she already knew the answer and just wanted to hear me deny it.

"No," I said.

She smiled the way she did when she didn't believe me and wasn't going to argue about it. Selena had been at my side since we were pups — steady, sharp, ambitious in a way I used to admire. If the Goddess didn't choose for me tonight, my mother had made it clear who she hoped I'd choose instead. I hadn't decided how I felt about that. I'd been too busy not deciding.

The elder began the chant, and the fire rose higher, and one by one the wolves stepped forward to have their bond revealed. I watched two pups I barely remembered from the training yard find each other in the crowd and go stiff with shock, then joy. Somebody's mother started crying. It was the same every year. I'd seen it a dozen times and it never moved me the way it seemed to move everyone else.

Then my name was called.

I stepped toward the fire the way I'd stepped toward everything in my life — certain, unhurried, already half-bored with the outcome before it arrived.

And then I saw her.

She was standing near the back, half in shadow, dirt still under her nails and something dark staining the sleeve of a shirt too thin for the cold. I knew her. Everyone knew her, in the way you know furniture — Aria, the omega who scrubbed floors and hauled wood and never once looked anyone in the eye long enough to be remembered.

She was looking at me now.

The bond hit me like a physical thing, a rope pulled taut from my chest straight to hers, and for one unguarded second I understood exactly what those pups had felt at the fire before me. Recognition. Certainty. Something in me that had never once been quiet suddenly went completely still, like it had finally found what it was looking for.

Her.

The Moon Goddess had looked at every wolf in this pack — warriors, healers, daughters of proud bloodlines — and chosen the omega nobody bothered to remember the name of.

I should have felt something close to wonder. Instead, the first thing that moved through me was heat, fast and ugly, climbing up the back of my neck. I was aware, suddenly and completely, of every eye in the clearing. Of my mother, watching from the front row. Of the elders, who had buried three generations of Alphas and expected the fourth to be worthy of the title. Of Selena, close enough that I could feel her go rigid beside me.

Aria hadn't moved. She stood there with her hands pressed to her chest like she was holding herself together, and something in her face was so raw, so hopeful, that it made the heat in me worse instead of better. She wanted this. She wanted me.

I didn't move.

The silence stretched a beat too long, then two, and I felt the crowd notice it the way a pack always notices weakness — a shift in the air, a held breath, whispers starting low and then climbing.

"That's the omega," someone murmured behind me. "That's her."

"The Alpha's mate is a servant?"

I heard Selena exhale beside me, slow and quiet, and when I glanced at her I saw it land — the understanding moving behind her eyes like a door closing. She looked from me to Aria and back again, and whatever calculation she was running, I watched it finish.

I looked back at Aria. She hadn't looked away from me once, not even as the whispers grew louder, not even as I stood there like a coward instead of an Alpha. There was still hope in her face. She still thought this might go the way the old stories promised.

I hated that some part of me wanted it to.

But an Alpha didn't bow to a bond that made him look weak in front of his own pack. An Alpha decided who deserved to stand beside him, and I had already decided, whether I wanted to admit it or not, the moment the whispers started.

I set my jaw, buried whatever had just cracked open in my chest, and started walking toward her.

My face was cold. My steps were certain.

Nothing about what I was going to do next was going to feel like mercy.