Rejected for My Twin: Claimed by the Lycan King

Torn to Ribbons

"I, Alpha Cassian Blackwood of the Frostpeak Pack," his voice shook the rafters, echoing with absolute finality, "formally reject you, Valeria Thorne, as my fated mate!"

When Cassian spoke the words, the golden thread tethering my soul to his didn't just break.

It detonated.

A live wire buried inside my ribcage was seized by iron claws and ripped out by its roots. A white-hot shockwave blasted through my marrow, tearing through every nerve ending until my chest caved in under the vacuum of severed magic. The air left my lungs in a strangled gasp.

Then the fire came.

The uncompleted mating mark on the left side of my neck — the faint, tender crescent where his teeth had grazed two years ago, the mark I had spent seven hundred mornings carefully hiding beneath heavy foundation — ignited. It felt like a blacksmith's brand held against raw muscle, sizzling through the skin, charring tissue down to the bone. The biological bond forged by the Moon Goddess was tearing itself out of my flesh.

My spine arched so hard off the cold marble floor that my vertebrae popped in succession.

[Valeria!]

Lyra's scream inside my head wasn't her fierce warrior cry. It was the terrified, dying whimper of a pup. The mental bridge that had connected us since I was sixteen began to crumble, snapping like dry twigs. I reached for her with every scrap of my will, desperate for her strength, but she was slipping, falling backward into a pitch-black void, suffocated by the trauma of an Alpha's rejection.

No, no, no, Lyra, hold on to me! Cassian, look at me! Look at what you're doing to us!

"Cassian... please... my wolf..."

The plea tore past my cracked lips, pathetic and raw. I hated myself for it. I was the Lead Warrior of Frostpeak, the she-wolf who had gutted three border rogues with a single hunting knife, yet here I was, digging my bloody fingernails into the slick stone, dragging my burning body toward his shoes.

This is a test. It has to be. He's just pretending for the elders.

The Great Hall erupted into laughter, the sound crashing over me like freezing water. Hundreds of wolves — scouts I had trained, elders whose borders I had secured, Gammas who had smiled at me at dawn — were laughing, a cruel, braying roar of collective mockery that vibrated through the floor and straight into my bruised ribs.

"Look at the disgrace squirming on the floor," my father's cold voice cut through the noise. Beta Silas stepped forward, but he didn't spare me a glance. He positioned himself deliberately in front of Aurelia, shielding her from the sight of me as if I were a diseased animal. "He needs a true Luna, not an embarrassment to the pack."

Twenty years old and I still caught myself looking for him in the crowd — some stupid, small animal part of me still checking whether my father might, this once, stand between me and the thing hurting me. He'd picked his side before I hit the floor. He always had. The only new information was how little it cost him to say it out loud.

"I told you she was defective, Magnus," Luna Elara murmured from the dais, taking a measured sip of champagne from her crystal flute. Her silver eyes flicked over my convulsing body with aristocratic revulsion. "Your other daughter carries herself like royalty, but this one? She couldn't even hold her mate bond. My son made the right choice for the pack's future."

Defective. She said it the way you'd describe a cracked bowl — mildly inconvenient, not even worth the energy of real contempt. This was the woman I'd gone to at sixteen, bleeding, asking for fairness. She'd split my lip with her rings and called me a savage. I should have understood then exactly what I was to these people.

My chest heaved in shallow, ragged gasps. The sickening smell of my own blistered flesh filled my throat, thick and copper-sweet, mingling with the vanilla and crushed orchids radiating off my sister. The static in my chest was deafening, a relentless high-pitched ringing that made my skull feel like it was splitting in two.

Aurelia stepped gracefully down from the stage, her tulle whispering against the marble. She came to a halt barely two feet from where I lay trembling in my own blood.

I could snap her neck right now. I could lunge and tear her throat out before her heart beats twice.

"Cassian," Aurelia whimpered, pressing her dainty, trembling hands against her chest, her lower lip quivering with theatrical perfection. "Her dress... the crimson silk. It's the exact shade of the sacred war banner our mother carried the day the rogues slaughtered her. Valeria wore it on purpose. She wore it to curse our coronation!"

You lying, calculated psychopath. I wove this silk myself. You helped me pick the dye six months ago.

She'd sat on my cot while I did it. She'd held the swatches up to the lamp and told me the darker red suited my coloring better, and I'd been so stupidly pleased that my sister wanted to help with anything of mine that I'd taken her word for it. She had built this six months ago. The b***h had picked out the noose and let me weave it!

Only a wet choke escaped my throat.

"You dare spit on your own mother's memory, you unwanted mistake?" Cassian's voice dropped into a guttural rumble and the icy grey of his eyes bled away, consumed by a sharp flash of crimson. His wolf surged straight to the surface — two burning coals of Alpha red locking onto me with murderous intent.

In two years, I had never once seen his wolf look at me like that. I'd seen it curious, possessive, amused. Never this. Whatever had been standing between me and the animal in him, it was gone now, and it had taken the last of my denial with it.

He didn't give me time to breathe. I saw his weight shift — two years of reading fighters, and my body knew what was coming a half-second before the rest of me did, and there was nothing left in me fast enough to move.

His boot caught me square in the ribs. Something gave with a sharp, sickening crack, and the world tipped as it flipped me onto my back. The agony stole whatever oxygen was left in my lungs, leaving me gasping like a landed fish. Before my hands could raise to shield my face, Cassian leaned down, his massive, clawed fingers grabbing the plunging neckline of my gown.

Silk shrieked as it tore.

The cold hit before the understanding did. One effortless jerk and the ruby silk was gone, torn down the center seam, flung into the crowd in bloody ribbons like something he'd already finished using.

"Moon Goddess above, look at her!" a Gamma in the front row sneered, his eyes widening in disgust.

"f*****g revolting," a she-wolf laughed, leaning over the gallery railing to stare. "She's covered in silver scars like a diseased, packless nothing!"

Silver scars. I'd taken most of them on the northern line, the winter the rogues came through in numbers and the vanguard broke and I didn't. Half the people laughing had slept through that week because I hadn't. They'd called it heroism when it kept them warm. Stripped bare on a marble floor, the same marks made me disgusting.

Shame did what the boot hadn't. The dignity I had spent years building with sweat and iron was gone in a single second, and all I could do about it was curl onto my side, knees to my chin, arms wrapped over my own chest, hiding as much of myself as I could from hundreds of people I'd bled for.

"Torin!" Cassian commanded, turning his back on me to slide an arm around Aurelia's waist. "Drag this garbage out of my hall and wash the stench off her before she ruins the air."

Boots on marble, coming toward me. I didn't have to look up to know whose.

Torin. Cassian's best friend, his newly appointed Beta enforcer, and the male who'd spent three years losing every hand-to-hand match against me in the training yard — and hating me a little more each time for being faster, sharper, better than him. I'd put him on his back in front of the whole vanguard once. He'd never once let me forget that he remembered it.

Now his lips stretched into a sadistic grin.

"With pleasure, Alpha," Torin said.

He bent down, buried his thick fingers into the roots of my blonde curls, and yanked.

My neck snapped backward with a choked cry. He dragged me across the slick marble aisle, my bare hips, spine, and elbows scraping over the hard stone, leaving a smeared trail of crimson behind us.

I heard the doors before I felt the cold — the heavy slam of iron-reinforced oak hitting stone, and then the northern blizzard came through the gap and hit my bare skin like a thousand needles. One heartbeat I was on polished marble; the next, Torin hauled me down the jagged gravel steps and flung me face-first into the frozen slush of the courtyard.

Ice water bit into the raw friction burns on my back. Mud filled my mouth with the taste of dirt, grit, and copper. The freezing rain poured down, stinging the open, weeping burn of my severed mate mark until I was shaking so hard my teeth rattled.

"Look at you now," Torin sneered, jerking my wrists hard to drag me through the freezing sludge. He planted a heavy boot into my side, sending wet gravel tearing into my raw skin. "You thought those scars made you elite? You thought Cassian loved you? You were practice, Val. A cheap piece of meat he used until he could put his mark on a real female."

Practice. The word went in deeper than the gravel did, because some part of me had already done the math on the stairs and come up with the same answer. Two years of midnight visits and whispered promises, and the whole time I'd been a rehearsal for somebody else's wedding night.

Pack members lined the slushy path like vultures, screaming obscenities into the freezing wind.

Impact came before I saw it coming. A heavy rock split against my collarbone. Before I could catch my breath, a stale loaf of bread struck my temple, and a wave of sour ale washed over my head, blinding me as the cheap alcohol stung the fresh cuts across my face.

Through the blur of rain, mud, and tears, I forced my eyes toward the covered terrace above. Aurelia stood beneath the warm, golden glow of the chandeliers, nestled safely against Luna Elara, laughing so hard she had to clutch Elara's silk sleeve to stay upright, wiping away mock tears of pure amusement.

I looked at her for a long moment, lying in the slush with my own blood freezing on my skin, and understood that there was no version of this she hadn't wanted. Not the rejection. Not the hall. Not the mud. She was up there wiping her eyes over it like it was the best entertainment she'd had in years, and I had helped her get there. I had carried her. I had taken her punishments when we were small and never once made her earn a thing.

I bled for all of you. I held the borders so you could sleep in warm beds.

My vision narrowed, and the world went black.

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Consciousness returned in jagged fragments — not all at once, but through the sharp bite of splintered wood grinding against my bare shoulder blades. I was being dragged up the narrow, spiraling staircase of the packhouse attic, my hips, tailbone, and spine banging against the edge of every riser.

The scent in the stairwell told me who held my wrist. Pine, frost, and vanilla. Cassian was hauling me up with one hand, taking the stairs two at a time without breaking a sweat, completely indifferent to the sound of my bones hitting the steps.

He was laughing. A low sound, entirely untroubled, vibrating in his chest.

"Two years, Val. Two whole f*****g years you swallowed every pathetic lie like a good little b***h," he chuckled, shaking his head. "Remember that blizzard last winter? While you were out freezing your ass off holding the east perimeter, I had Aurelia bent over the hot springs marble, screaming my name while I f****d her raw until dawn."

I remembered that blizzard. I remembered losing feeling in three fingers and coming back at dawn with frost in my eyelashes, and him meeting me at the gate with a blanket and that particular soft look I'd spent two years earning. I'd thought it was love. I'd cataloged it, hoarded it, pulled it out on bad nights like proof of something.

He'd come straight from her to do it.

And somehow that was the part that gutted me. I'd half known about the affair since the hallway. What I hadn't known was that the blanket counted too — that every kind thing he'd ever done had been a performance with a purpose, and I'd been too grateful to check.

He reached the threshold of my small room and hurled me across the floor. I skidded over the rough, unvarnished wood, crashing hard against the iron frame of my narrow cot, shivering as the freezing draft whistled through the cracked windowpane.

"You should get on your goddamn knees and thank her," Cassian's mouth curled, cold and pleased, closing the distance until the heavy leather toe of his shoe jammed hard under my chin, wrenching my face up to meet his cold glare. "I was going to let Torin snap your f*****g neck and throw your worthless body to the rogues at the border. But your sister pleaded for you. Said we still need an ugly, loyal mutt to take the claws and the dirt, so our real warriors don't have to."

The agony in my soul flared into a dying spark of defiance. I forced my bruised jaw open, tasting grit, blood, and bile.

"Go... to hell..."

His hand moved before I finished the sentence. The backhand struck with brutal Alpha force, snapping my head to the side and bouncing my skull off the floor. White light burst across my vision, and a high-pitched whine filled my ears.

"Get this blood off your skin, throw on your filthy rags, and crawl down to Aurelia's chambers at dawn," Cassian growled, his Alpha Aura pressing like lead against my bruised ribs. "You will beg on your knees for her forgiveness and swear your life to her. Refuse, and I'll strip your warrior title before breakfast and hand your broken body over to the border scouts as a pack toy."

He said it evenly. That was the thing I kept coming back to afterward — he laid out what he'd let a dozen men do to me the way you'd lay out a schedule, and nothing in his face moved at all.

He turned on his heel, walked out, and slammed the heavy attic door. The iron bolt slid home with a heavy, final clunk.

I lay in the freezing darkness, my chest heaving as uncontrollable, body-wracking sobs tore through my throat. I couldn't stop them. The grief, the humiliation, the sheer, crushing weight of the betrayal tore through me until I was choking on my own tears.

Something struck the boards beneath me — once, twice, three times, hard enough to jump under my palms. The blunt end of a broom handle, slammed into the ceiling below.

"Shut the f**k up!" my father's muffled, venomous roar shook the room. "Some of us have a Luna's coronation feast to prepare! Keep crying, you pathetic nothing, and I'll drag the silver whip up there and skin you myself!"

I wasn't surprised. That was the part that should have frightened me — that my own father threatening to take a silver whip to me registered as ordinary, the way weather does. He'd been making good on that threat since I was eight years old. It was simply the arithmetic of living in this house: bleed, get punished for bleeding, stay quiet so the precious one downstairs could sleep.

I shoved my bloody knuckles into my mouth, biting down hard enough to break skin, muffling the ragged screams tearing through my chest.

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When the house finally went quiet hours later, I dragged myself across the splintered boards toward the cracked basin in the corner. Every inch of movement was torture.

I looked at my reflection in the shattered sliver of mirror propped against the wall and took inventory, the way I'd been trained to after a bad patrol. Ribs: fractured. Skin: caked in mud, blood, spit, stale ale. Blood smeared across both cheekbones, hair matted with filth, and on the left side of my neck, where a mate mark should have been finishing itself, a charred and weeping crater of dead tissue.

I saved the worst for last, the way you do.

Lyra was gone. Not dead — I'd have felt that, I was certain I'd have felt that — just buried somewhere under miles of dark, her fierce, protective presence crushed flat by the trauma of the severed bond. Sixteen years of her, and the space where she'd lived was the quietest thing in the room.

I decided immediately. I wouldn't be bowing at dawn. I wouldn't be kissing Aurelia's white lace dress, and I would never bleed on the northern borders for Cassian Blackwood again.

Let them come to break me at sunrise. Let them come.

Because deep beneath the ruin where my fated bond used to live, something small and unfamiliar lingered. It wasn't the wild presence of my wolf, nor was it the crushing despair of a rejected mate.

It was a faint warmth — a tiny ember buried deep within my marrow, refusing to be put out.