Rejected By My Alpha Mate

Chapter 4 - The Night of Glass

She didn't cry until Luna found her.

Control felt secure, but it faded when someone who loved you arrived.

Luna found her in the servants' corridor three hours after the ceremony. She sat on the stone floor, her back against the wall. She drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around herself, like someone holding in pain.

Luna sat down beside her without a word.

The silence lasted about thirty seconds. Then, Kaela's breath hitched, like a fault line shifting. Luna wrapped her arms around Kaela. Kaela turned her face into Luna's shoulder and cried, like she hadn’t since she was small.

It wasn't pretty. It was a deep, ugly kind of crying. This convulsive grief had likely simmered back for a decade and had finally found its way out. She pressed her fist against her mouth. It didn't help.

Luna held her close. She didn’t say, “It’s okay,” or “You’ll find someone else.” She knew those words weren’t what you say when someone feels a deep loss. She held on.

Eventually, the crying wound down.

Eventually, the body ran out of it.

Kaela sat back, pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes, and breathed.

"I'm not going to fall apart," she said.

"I know," said Luna.

"I needed"

"I know."

Kaela lowered her hands. The corridor was cold and dim and smelled of stone and old wood.

"She said they arranged it." Her voice was flat. Functional. She could operate in this register when everything else was unavailable. "The thing with Selene, the alliance with Ravenwood. They decided before the ceremony."

Luna considered her decision with caution.

"He knew." She thought about his face. The c***k and then the door closed. "He felt it. He knew the bond was real, and he rejected it anyway."

She was not crying anymore. She decided somewhere in the last thirty seconds that she had had enough of crying. She had given it its due, and now she was taking it back.

"What are you going to do?" Luna asked.

Kaela looked at the far wall of the corridor.

"Leave," she said.

"What?"

"At dawn, I'm going to pack what I can carry and leave the pack." She heard her words and felt them settle. It wasn’t a choice she was making; it was one she had already made long before. "There is nothing here for me, Luna. There never was. The ceremony made it official."

Luna was quiet for a moment. "Where will you go?"

"I don't know yet," Kaela said as she got to her feet and steadied herself against the wall. "Away. That's enough of a direction for now."

She walked to her room.

She didn't sleep.

✦ ✦ ✦

At three in the morning, Kaela woke up. She hadn’t been asleep, so she didn’t dream. But her hands felt like they were on fire.

Not burning. Not pain.

Light.

Gold light seeped through her palms, as if she had swallowed the ceremony's torches. She sat up in bed and looked at her hands. In the dark, light pulsed, warm, steady, alive. It beat in a rhythm she couldn’t grasp.

She closed her hands into fists.

The light pressed between her fingers.

She opened them. She stared.

In the narrow stripe of sky above her head, the full moon looked back.

Kaela pressed her fists into the mattress, taking slow, measured breaths. She searched for a reason why her hands glowed with a golden light at three in the morning. That night, she broke her bond.

She could not find one.

The light faded, resembling embers, and left her in the dark. Her hands shook, and a different feeling stirred in her chest, not grief for the bond's loss. It was something different. Older. Something that didn't know what had happened tonight and didn't care.

Something that was waking up.

She put her hands under the blanket, held them together, and waited for dawn.