Rejected by My Alpha, Claimed by the Lycan King

The dress wasn't mine. It was Celeste's, from two winters ago, taken in at the waist with pins I'd set myself because there was no money in the pack budget for a tailor and no one who thought to ask. The pins dug into my ribs every time I breathed. I had stopped breathing deeply around the third hour. "Smile, Rhea." My father's hand closed around my elbow, harder than he needed to. "This is your sister's night." It was always my sister's night. Celeste was the one with the good hair and the soft laugh, the one the elders called a credit to Blackridge. I was the other one. The spare. The daughter who'd been sickly at four and strange at nine and quiet ever since, so quiet that people had stopped noticing me at all, which was the only advantage I'd ever been given. I smiled. It cost me nothing. I'd had practice. The hall was full. Three hundred wolves of the pack, the elders at the high table, the string quartet hired from the city so the Alpha's future Luna could walk in to something expensive. Frost had built up on the tall windows. Somewhere past them, the woods were dark and patient and waiting, the way they always were. Then Kael took Celeste's hand to lead her onto the dais, and my chest cracked open. I didn't scream. I couldn't. The bond hit me low and hard, a hook behind the sternum, and the whole room pulled into a single point of heat. The Moon Goddess, choosing. The Moon Goddess, deciding that the man who had just pledged himself to my sister in front of three hundred wolves was the other half of me. No. My fingers curled into the fabric of the borrowed dress. Not him. Anyone but him. Everyone knew the Goddess had a cruel sense of humor. Nobody knew she was this cruel. Kael's head turned. He felt it. I watched it land, the way his jaw locked, the way his eyes went black from edge to edge. His grip on Celeste's hand tightened. And for exactly one heartbeat, he looked at me. At me, standing at the back of the hall by the service door, in a dress that didn't fit, with pins in my ribs. Then he let go of her hand and looked away. "Kael?" Celeste's smile wobbled. "What is it?" He walked to the edge of the dais. He looked down at me the way you look at a stain on a tablecloth you're deciding whether to replace. "Rhea." The room did not go quiet all at once. It went quiet in rings, like water after a stone, and by the time the last whisper died there were three hundred faces turned toward me and not one of them looked surprised. "I reject you," Kael said, "as my mate." Someone laughed. It might have been one of the elders. "The bond is a mistake," he went on, voice flat, carrying to the back of the hall. "Whatever the Goddess intended, it's not you. You were never going to be a Luna. You were never going to be anything." The words landed one after another, small and precise, like stitches. I should have felt it tear. That's what the stories say. A rejected bond tears, and it bleeds, and you feel it for years. I felt the hook pull loose, and then I felt nothing at all. Not numbness. Something quieter than that. Something in my chest that had been holding very still for eighteen years turned over, and opened one eye, and looked at him. My father's hand fell away from my elbow like he'd been burned. "Alpha," he said, "I'm... I don't know what she's done." "Nothing." Kael's mouth curled. "That's the problem." Celeste pressed her fingers to her lips. "Oh, Rhea." Her voice was sweet enough to pour. "You should have told someone. If you'd told me, I'd have..." "You'd have what?" I said. It came out calm. That surprised me more than the rejection had. It surprised the room, too. Heads turned from the dais to me and back again, uncertain. I let go of the dress. My hands were steady. I walked the length of the hall, past the elders who wouldn't meet my eyes, past the string quartet who had stopped playing somewhere in the middle of everything and were now staring at their shoes, and I stopped at the foot of the dais and looked up at the two of them. "Rejected," I said. "On your engagement night. In front of everyone." I tilted my head. "That's going to follow you, Kael. Not me. You." His eyes flickered. Just once. I turned and walked out. The kitchen corridor was cold and smelled of coal. I got twelve steps before my mother's voice came up out of the dark of my own memory, the way it did on nights like this. Thin, cracked, a week before she died. They'll cast you out, Rhea. Or they'll kill you. Whichever comes first, don't run to the woods. Run to the woods and you run into them. I never knew who they was. She'd never said. Behind me, in the hall, the music started again. Someone laughed too loudly. A chair scraped. The party went on, because parties do. I was halfway down the corridor when the great doors of the hall banged open and a new voice cut through the noise. A messenger's voice, thin and shaking and pitched to carry. "The Lycan King has crossed the border!" The music stopped again. It stopped faster this time. I turned back. Through the doorway I could see the dais, and Kael's face, and something in that face had turned the color of old cream. Beside him, Celeste had gone rigid. "He comes to collect the Blood Debt," the messenger said, into a hall that had stopped breathing. "Three hundred years of it. He will be at Blackridge gates in three days." Nobody spoke. And in the cold corridor, in the dark, with my ribs still stinging from pins that had never been mine, something in my blood woke up. It knew his name.