Rejected Before The Pack

Chapter 12

Aria’s POV

Kael led me down a set of stairs cut into the cliffside itself, away from the polished halls of the palace and toward a training ground built into a hollow of rock, open to the sky. A woman stood in the center of it, older than Kael by a couple of decades at least, silver threading through dark hair pulled back tight, sparring alone against nothing but the air.

She stopped the moment we appeared, though she didn't look surprised to see us.

"This is Commander Ines," Kael said. "She served your mother before she served me. If anyone in this kingdom remembers how the Lunar power actually works, it's her."

Ines studied me the way a blacksmith studies raw metal, assessing rather than judging. "You look like her. More than the reports suggested."

"You knew my mother?"

"I trained her," Ines said. "Or tried to. She learned faster than anyone I've taught before or since." She circled me once, slow, thoughtful. "Show me what you did in the council chamber."

I hesitated. "I don't really know how I did it. It just — came, both times."

"That's the problem," Ines said. "Power that only answers to instinct will get you killed the day your instincts are too slow. We're going to fix that, starting now."

Kael excused himself to deal with council matters, leaving me alone with Ines in the training hollow, and I felt a flicker of nerves I hadn't expected. Ines didn't look at me the way Kael did — not with reverence, not with careful diplomacy. She looked at me like a problem she intended to solve efficiently.

"Close your eyes," she said. "Find the place inside you where it lives. Not the moment it happened. The source itself."

I closed my eyes and searched inward, past the fear of the ambush, past the desperate need I'd felt in the council chamber to prove myself. Underneath both of those things was something steadier — the hum I'd felt since the night of the rejection, patient, waiting, like it had always been there and simply hadn't been given permission to surface before.

"I think I found it."

"Don't think. Know." Ines's voice was sharp but not unkind. "Your mother used to say the power responds to certainty, not desperation. It rewarded her when she stopped begging it to appear and simply expected it to."

I steadied my breathing and reached for the hum again, this time without the fear, without the audience I needed to convince. Just me, alone, deciding.

Silver light traced along my fingers, brighter than before, steadier.

"Good," Ines said, and there was real approval in it now. "Now do it again. Faster this time."

We worked for over an hour, Ines pushing me through the same exercise again and again, correcting the angle of my hands, the pace of my breathing, the moment I let doubt creep back in and the light flickered weaker for it.

"You keep second-guessing yourself the moment it starts working," she said, after the fourth attempt sputtered out early. "Why?"

"Because I spent twenty-two years being told I wasn't allowed to be good at anything," I said, more honestly than I meant to. "It's hard to trust something that comes easily after that."

Ines paused, studying me with an expression that had softened slightly. "Your mother told me something once, during a lesson very much like this one. She said the cruelest thing an enemy can do isn't to attack you. It's to convince you that you don't deserve to defend yourself in the first place."

The words landed harder than I expected. "That's exactly what it felt like. My whole life."

"Then let this be the thing that undoes it," Ines said. "Every time that light appears, it isn't luck. It's yours. You don't need permission to use what's already inside you."

I closed my eyes one more time, and this time when I reached for the hum, I didn't reach for it like something borrowed. I reached for it like it was mine, because it was, and the light that answered came faster and stayer than it had all morning, wrapping around my hands in a steady glow that didn't waver even when I opened my eyes to look at it.

"There," Ines said, quiet satisfaction in her voice. "That's the start of it."

"It felt different that time."

"Because you stopped asking it to prove something and started using it like a tool instead of a test." She nodded, more to herself than to me. "We'll need weeks before you're ready for anything close to real combat. Months, if I'm being honest. But this is a start most students never manage on their first day."

"Will it be enough?" I asked. "If whoever sent those attackers on the road comes again?"

Ines's expression sobered. "Enough is relative. I intend to make sure you're never facing that question with the same helplessness you had in the pack you grew up in. That's the best promise I can make you today."

I nodded, accepting it, because it was more honesty than most people in my life had ever offered me at once.

"Rest for now," Ines said. "We'll continue tomorrow, and the day after, and every day until this comes as naturally to you as breathing. Your enemies won't wait for you to be ready, so neither will I."

As I made my way back toward the palace, Ash trotting along beside me on legs that had finally healed enough to bear his weight properly, I thought about Ines's words — that the power wasn't luck, wasn't a gift handed to me by circumstance, but something that had always belonged to me, buried under years of people insisting otherwise.

For the first time since the rejection, I let myself feel something closer to purpose than grief.

Somewhere behind me, in a pack I no longer called home, people were still deciding what my humiliation had meant to them.

Here, for the first time in my life, I was starting to decide what it meant to me instead.