Cast Aside by My Alpha, Crowned by the Enemy Pack

This The whole pack was watching when Damien said the words that ended her. "I, Damien Cross, reject Freya Calloway as my fated mate." Freya heard her own heartbeat before she heard the silence that followed. It was the kind of silence that had weight, the kind that pressed down on a person's chest until breathing felt like a decision instead of a reflex. She had known this was coming. She had known for three weeks, ever since Selene Marsh arrived with her father and her pack's alliance papers, and Damien stopped meeting her eyes at dinner. She had told herself she was prepared. She was not prepared. The bond snapped inside her like something physical breaking, a cord pulled taut for twenty-three years and then cut in half a second. Her wolf let out a sound Freya had never heard her make before, something between a whimper and a scream, and Freya pressed her nails into her palms to keep from making the same sound out loud. Around the hall, three hundred pack members stared at her. Some with pity. Most with the particular hunger people get when they are watching someone else's life fall apart and are grateful it isn't theirs. Damien would not look at her. He stood beside his father, jaw tight, eyes fixed somewhere over her shoulder, as if she were furniture that had been moved out of the way. "For the good of the pack," Alpha Reeves said, his voice carrying easily over the crowd, "the Cross line will bond with the Marsh line. This union secures our southern border and ends fifteen years of tension with our neighbors." Fifteen years of tension. That was what she was worth. A border dispute, settled by discarding her like an old treaty. Freya's mother stood near the front, her face carefully arranged into something between grief and approval. Her father would not look at her either. Beta Callum had spent his whole life teaching Freya that the pack came first, that sacrifice was the price of belonging to something bigger than yourself. She had not understood, until this exact moment, that she was the sacrifice. "Freya." Damien had finally turned to her, and for one brief second she thought, stupidly, that he might take it back. That there might be some version of this where he crossed the hall and told his father no. Instead he said, quietly enough that only she could hear, "You'll understand, someday. This is bigger than us." "Don't," Freya said. Her voice came out steadier than she expected. "Don't you dare tell me to understand." Something in her cracked open at her own words, some door that had stayed shut her entire life out of politeness, out of duty, out of the desperate need to be the good daughter, the good future Luna, the girl who never made things harder for anyone. She felt her wolf go still and cold inside her, curling into some far corner of herself, wounded and silent. The Alpha cleared his throat, ready to move the ceremony forward, ready to announce the Marsh bonding as though Freya were not still standing there in the wreckage of her own life. That was when she noticed him. At the back of the hall, near the doors that led out to the training grounds, stood a man she did not recognize. Tall, dark-haired, dressed in black that bore no crest she knew. He was not pack. He should not have been allowed inside the ceremony at all. He was watching her, not Damien, not the Alpha, not the spectacle at the front of the room. Her. And when their eyes met across the crowded hall, he did something no one else in that room had done all night. He smiled, slow and certain, like a man who had just found exactly what he came for. Freya did not know his name yet. She would learn it soon enough, and when she did, it would mean the end of everything her family thought they had just secured.