Knot My Luna

Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO — "Accepted"

They didn't put me in a cell. That was the strange part.

They put me in the linen room off the kitchen, which has a door that locks from the outside, and two young wolves stood in the corridor all night arguing about whether they were guarding me or guarding everyone else from me.

"She's a servant," one of them kept saying.

"She's a mate."

"She's a hybrid."

"Yeah, and he burned his hands off her neck, so you tell me."

I sat on a shelf of folded tablecloths with my knees up and my hand around my own throat, because I couldn't stop touching it. Bare skin. No hum. Twenty-two years of that cold buzzing under my jaw and now there was nothing there, and my body kept checking, the way your tongue keeps going back to a hole in your gum.

Around three in the morning the lock turned and June slid in with her sleeves still wet.

"Move over."

"You're going to get whipped."

"Bishop's on the door." She wedged herself in beside me. "He looked at the ceiling really hard while I walked past. That's basically an invitation."

She was shaking. She'd been shaking so hard I could feel the shelf move, and she was pretending she wasn't, so I pretended too.

"You knew," she said. "Didn't you. When you were pouring. You knew before anyone."

"For about half a second."

"What did it feel like?"

I thought about it honestly, because June is the only person I've ever been honest with.

"Like being handed something enormous," I said. "And being told it was always mine. And then finding out it had teeth."

She was quiet a minute.

"He said dawn."

"I know."

"Wren, if he rejects you—" Her voice went thin. "People die from that. I've heard the women talk. They go mad, or they just—"

"I'm not going to die."

"You don't know that."

"June." I turned her chin with two fingers so she'd look at me. "I have never once let anything have me. Not the collar. Not Mrs. Pell. Not the whole pack. I'm not going to start at dawn with a man who won't even say my name."

She wiped her nose on her wrist. "Okay."

"Okay."

"You should still be scared."

"I'm extremely scared," I said. "I'm just doing it quietly."

The training yard at dawn is white with frost and smells like cold iron.

They came for me at the grey hour and walked me out and the whole pack was already there. All of them. Standing three deep around the fence in their coats with their breath going up in clouds, because a public rejection is the best free entertainment a pack ever gets.

Iris Vane waited in the middle with the moon staff, an old woman with a face like a closed door. Cassidy Rourke stood off to the side in white, hands folded, chin level. She did not look happy. I'll say that for her forever.

And him.

Kade Whitlock came out with his hands wrapped in white cloth to the second knuckle, and someone in the crowd made a noise when they saw it. Nobody had told them. The Alpha of Ridgeback had bandaged hands and everyone in that yard now knew exactly why.

He stopped six feet from me and didn't come closer.

"Alpha," Iris said. "You called this."

"I called it."

"Then say it and be done. The sun's coming."

He looked at me. Whatever he'd been the night before, when he leaned in and told me to remember — that man wasn't home. This one had the lights off.

"I, Kade Whitlock," he said, "Alpha of Ridgeback—"

The bond went tight, the way a dog's chain goes tight.

"—reject you, Wren Calloway, as my mate."

Someone at the fence laughed. Actually laughed.

"And as my Luna."

The words went into me like cold water into a wound. My legs tried to fold. I didn't let them.

Then Iris turned to me, and her voice softened for the first time in twenty-two years of me existing under her nose.

"Child," she said. "You don't have to answer. Nobody expects it. Just go inside."

Because they don't. That's the thing. Rejected mates don't accept. Accepting is supposed to cut the thread clean from both ends, and everyone knows what it does to the one who says it, and so they stand there and say nothing and carry a half-torn bond around for the rest of their lives like a limp.

Three hundred people were waiting for me to be silent.

I have been silent my entire life. I was good at it. It was the only thing I owned.

I looked straight at him and I spent it.

"I, Wren Calloway," I said.

The yard went so quiet I heard the frost cracking.

"Daughter of nobody you'd know. Servant of this pack since I was six years old." My voice came out clear and low and strange to my own ears. "Accept your rejection, Kade Whitlock. All of it. Every word."

I have never seen a man look the way he looked then.

It was not relief. It was not triumph. His mouth opened slightly and his bandaged hand came up an inch off his side, and something went across his face fast and enormous, like weather over a field, and then he shut it down so hard I heard his teeth.

"Wren—" he said.

"It's done," I said. "You wanted it done."

The bond should have snapped.

That's what accepting does. It cuts. You feel it go, they say, like a rope parting under your ribs, and then there's silence, and the silence is the worst part but at least it's silence.

Mine got louder.

It came up my spine like a struck bell. The whole yard tilted. I heard someone say my name, and it was him, and he was already moving.

Then the pain arrived.

It went through my back like a hand opening inside me, and my nose was running and my hand came away red, and then my ears, warm and wet down both sides of my jaw, and the frost came up to meet my face.

The last thing I heard was Iris Vane, very close, in a voice I'd never heard her use.

"Get her up. Get her up, now — Goddess help us, it didn't break—"

I woke to lamplight and the smell of boiled linen.

The infirmary. Face down, cheek on a rough pillow, my shirt open along the back and cold air on my shoulder blade. Somewhere far away a door was being held shut against a lot of noise.

There was an old woman standing over me with a lamp.

Iris Vane had her hand on my shoulder and she was leaning in so close I could hear her breathing, and she wasn't looking at my face at all. She was looking at the mark that had come in overnight, high on my shoulder where a Luna's mark comes in.

Except a mate mark is one crescent.

Mine was two. Crossed.

The lamp hit the floor and went out.