Worthless Mate Chosen

Chapter 3

Rejected Without Regret



Oliver Hayes's POV

He crossed the room in a few quick steps.

His hand reached out and caught her chin, turning her face up toward his. He wanted to see her eyes. He wanted to see what was in them. She had been so careful to keep her head down, to keep her face angled away, and he was done allowing that.

"You already knew about the bond, did you not?"

His voice came out harder than he planned. But he did not soften it.

Freya pressed her lips together. She said nothing. Her eyes met his, and what he found there was not what he expected. There was no fear in them. No excitement. No trace of the kind of desperate wanting he had seen in every other she-wolf who had ever looked at him directly. Her eyes were flat and still, like a lake on a windless morning.

She looked almost bored.

His thumb moved across her cheek before he realized it was doing so. The warmth of her skin sent something rushing through his chest. He pulled his hand back inward slightly, trying to steady himself.

"Why did you not say anything when you walked in?"

She turned her face away from his grip with a sharp, clean movement.

"What exactly did you want me to say? Sorry for interrupting?"

He blinked.

"Do not speak to me like that, Freya. You should be grateful."

She looked at him then. Really looked at him, the way someone looks at something that is mildly irritating but not worth raising their voice over.

"I would suggest putting on some clothes before the ceremony begins. What you have going on right now is not a good look for a future Alpha."

The words landed so calmly, so evenly, that for a moment he could not decide if she was brave or simply out of her mind.

He grabbed her by the throat.

It was not a slow or considered movement. Anger moved through him like fire through dry grass, and his hand acted before his thoughts could catch up. She made a sound, sharp and tight, and her hands came up immediately to push against his grip.

"Let go of me."

She struggled. Her face flushed. But even through all of it, her eyes never looked away from his, and they never filled with the fear he was halfway expecting to find there.

He watched her with cold, flat eyes.

"No daughter of a traitor has any right to stand beside an Alpha as his mate. That is simply the truth. But I am willing to be generous about this. Stay near me. Not as my mate, but as someone I keep close for my own reasons. Agree to that, and I will release you right now."

She managed to push the words out even through the pressure on her throat.

"No. Not a chance."

He leaned in slightly.

"I am Oliver Hayes. I am about to become the Alpha of this pack. You are a slave. The daughter of a wolf this entire territory despises. Do you understand the difference between where you are standing and where I am standing right now?"

She let out a short sound. Not quite a laugh, but close to one.

"Alpha? You have been a puppet this whole time and you have not even noticed."

Something inside him snapped.

He released her throat and in one fast movement shoved her backward. She hit the floor hard. She coughed, pressing one hand to the cold stone, pulling air back into her lungs.

"You think being noble means something here? Fine. Refuse my offer. I can just as easily send you somewhere else. Somewhere you will have no choices left at all. Let me see how long that pride of yours holds up then."

He said it with full intention. He wanted her to hear the weight behind the words. He wanted to watch her face finally c***k.

She coughed a few more times. Then she pushed herself upright and looked at him from the floor with an expression that could only be described as exhausted patience.

"Are you finished? I still have work to do."

He stared at her.

The anger in him climbed higher, faster, past the point where he could keep his words measured and clean.

"Since you love being a slave so much, I will make it permanent. As the future Alpha of the Black Moon Pack, I, Oliver Hayes, hereby and without hesitation reject you, Freya Ashford, as my mate."

He said every word slowly. Clearly. He wanted each one to land like a stone.

Then he waited.

He waited for her face to fall. For her lip to tremble. For her eyes to fill. Any she-wolf in this pack would have broken at those words. A mate rejection was not a small thing. It was not something a wolf simply brushed aside. The bond was real and the severing of it hurt in a way that went all the way down to the bone.

Freya got up from the floor.

She stood straight. She smoothed the front of her coat with one hand. She looked at him.

And then, slowly, a small and quiet expression crossed her face that he could not quite name. It was not sadness. It was not devastation.

It looked like relief.

"Thank you for that, Oliver."

He went completely still.

"I, Freya Ashford, daughter of the late Beta Olivia Ashford of the Black Moon Pack, accept your rejection."

She turned toward the door. She walked to it without hurrying. She did not look back.

He stood in the center of his room with his mouth slightly open and the echo of her words sitting in the air around him like smoke that would not clear.

Thank you?

She had thanked him. She had accepted his rejection like he had handed her something she wanted. Like he had done her a favor.

He was still standing there, not fully able to process what had just happened, when Theo's voice came crashing in.

"What did you just do? Oliver, that was your mate. Your actual mate. There is not another one. There will never be another one who looks like that, who feels like that. What were you thinking? Go after her. Right now. Bring her back."

Oliver said nothing for a moment.

"She needed to be taught where she stands."

"She walked out that door with her head up and thanked you for rejecting her! Does that look like someone who learned a lesson to you? Oliver, please, go after her."

He turned toward the window. He could see the edge of the corridor below. He watched Freya's figure moving away through the narrow view the window offered, getting smaller with every step she took.

Something in his chest pulled sharply in her direction. It was the bond, already weakening now that the rejection had been spoken aloud, and yet still strong enough to make her absence feel like a missing tooth his tongue could not stop finding.

He pressed his jaw tight.

He was not going after her. That was not something he was willing to do.

"She will regret this," he said quietly.

"And what if she does not? What if she never does?" Theo pressed.

"Then I will help her along."

He let the thought take shape slowly. Prince Lucian was coming to the ceremony today. Word had traveled through the pack for months about what kind of man Prince Lucian was. Ruthless. Cold. A pack had once offered him a female slave as a gift. She did not survive the arrangement.

Oliver had heard that story more than once. He had never thought he would find a use for it.

"I am going to offer Freya to Prince Lucian as a gift."

The silence that followed inside his head was total.

"No." Theo's response came out as a single flat word, harder than anything Oliver had ever heard from him. "No. I will not allow this. She is your mate. She is still your mate, Oliver, rejection or not. The words may have been spoken but she is still the one the Moon Goddess chose for you. You would be sending her to her death. You know what Prince Lucian does."

"She should have thought about what she was walking away from before she thanked me."

"Oliver, listen to yourself. This is not teaching a lesson. This is something else entirely and you know it."

He turned away from the window.

The image of Freya's face stayed with him. The steadiness in her eyes. The way she had looked at him from the floor without breaking. The way she had said thank you like she meant every syllable of it.

His body still responded to the memory of her scent in the room. Even now, with her gone from sight and the rejection already settled between them, his chest kept pulling in the direction she had walked.

He clenched his hand at his side.

By the time she understood what she had thrown away, by the time the weight of what he was about to arrange came down on her, she would be on her knees.

He had decided.

But deep somewhere underneath all of that cold resolve, one question kept pushing itself up through the surface of his thoughts, unwanted and persistent.

What kind of wolf walks away from her mate with relief on her face, and what had this pack already done to her to make that possible?