MY ALPHA'S REGRET

"I reject you." Three words. That was all it took to end Lyra Ashwood's entire life. She was still in the white dress her mother had sewn for the claiming ceremony when Kane said them, loud enough for all two hundred pack members to hear, his amber eyes refusing to meet hers. The bond beneath her sternum — the one that had lived there since the night Kane Voss first said *mate* in front of the whole pack council — went cold and silent, like a candle pinched out between two fingers. Somewhere behind her, Lyra's mother had gone silent too. The happy, humming tears of an hour ago cut off mid-breath. "Kane?" Her own voice came out smaller than she wanted it to, standing exposed in front of the entire Ironclaw Pack in a dress sewn for a claiming that hadn't happened yet. He looked at her, and for one heartbeat there was real pain in his face — raw, nothing like the cold mask an Alpha was supposed to wear. Whatever was coming, it was costing him something too. Across the bonfire, Kane's jaw was locked so tight a muscle jumped beneath the skin. His eyes weren't on her anymore. They'd shifted past her shoulder, to his father — to Magnus Voss stepping out of the crowd, leaning hard on a cane he'd have died before admitting he needed. "Say it properly." Magnus's voice, flat and merciless, cutting through the ringing silence. "The full rite, Kane. Don't leave the girl half-marked. That's crueler than finishing it." Something broke behind Kane's eyes. But his voice, when it came again, was steady — steady in a way that told her he'd rehearsed the cruelty specifically so it would land clean. "Lyra Ashwood. I reject you as my mate. I release the bond, and I release you from any claim on my pack, my protection, or my name." A pause. Brief. Agonizing. "You are omega-ranked and unbonded. You hold no place at my side." The bond didn't just sever. It *tore*. A physical wrenching sensation low in her chest dropped her to one knee in the dirt before she'd even registered deciding to kneel. A sound came out of her that she didn't recognize as her own voice. Somewhere behind her, her mother screamed. The pack didn't move to help. They *couldn't*, not without the Alpha's leave. Kane stood frozen at the fire's edge, hands clenched into fists, watching her convulse in the dirt with an expression that looked, for one unguarded second, like a man watching himself commit murder. Then the pain in her chest did something no rejection was supposed to do. It didn't fade to the dull, permanent ache the elders always described. It sharpened — spiked upward through her sternum and along her collarbone in lines that burned like actual fire. Lyra looked down at her own trembling hands. Her fingernails had gone black at the tips. Thin threads of shadow curled off her skin like smoke that had learned to move with purpose. The nearest wolves scrambled back so fast three of them fell over each other in the dirt. "What—" Old Ferris's voice cracked, his ceremonial staff dropping from suddenly nerveless fingers. "That's not — that bloodline died out generations ago—" Lyra didn't hear the rest. The world had narrowed down to the fire in her chest, the black smoke curling off her own skin, and Kane's face across the clearing. No longer grieving. No longer guilty. *Afraid.* Genuinely and completely afraid — staring at her like she'd just turned into something out of the old stories his grandmother used to frighten pups with around this exact fire pit. "Shadow-blood," someone whispered. The word rippled outward through the crowd like a stone dropped in still water. "She's Shadow-blood. The Ashwoods were never just healers — oh gods, they were *hiding* her—" Magnus Voss's cane hit the ground as he stumbled backward. For the first time in Lyra's entire life, she watched a dying Alpha look genuinely, mortally frightened of a twenty-one-year-old omega girl kneeling broken in the dirt. "Get her out of this pack." His voice shook — actually shook, the first c***k of weakness Lyra had ever heard from him. "Tonight. Before whatever's waking up inside her finishes waking." Kane didn't argue with his father. He didn't move at all. He just stood frozen at the fire's edge, staring at the black smoke curling off her skin, with an expression she would spend the next ten years trying, and failing, to forget. Because underneath the fear — underneath the horror rippling through the entire pack around them — she saw something else in his face that made no sense at all. Something that looked almost like recognition. Like he'd been waiting, his whole life, for exactly this. Her mother reached her first, dropping to her knees in the churned dirt, hands scrabbling uselessly at Lyra's shoulders. "Lyra. Lyra, look at me, breathe, just breathe—" "Get her up." Magnus's voice again, rougher now, edged with something that might have been panic dressed up as command. "I want her past the border stones before that thing finishes coming out of her skin." "She doesn't need a *cart*, she needs a healer—" her mother's voice cracked down the middle, fury and fear tangled so tightly Lyra could barely tell them apart. "She's twenty-one years old, Magnus, she is not a thing to be *disposed* of—" "She is exactly what the old stories warned us about," someone else said, "and I won't have my children sleeping fifty yards from it tonight." The pack was already pulling back, forming a wide, careful ring around her — the way you'd circle a wounded animal you weren't yet sure was dangerous. Lyra lay half-collapsed against her mother's chest, black smoke still threading from her fingertips, the torn place where the bond had lived screaming with every heartbeat. She was still watching Kane. She couldn't seem to stop. He hadn't moved from the fire's edge. While his father barked orders and the pack scrambled to put distance between themselves and her, Kane stood frozen with his fist pressed hard to his own chest, his amber eyes fixed on her with an intensity that made no sense against the horror on every other face in the clearing. Because it wasn't horror. Not from him. It was something far more complicated. Grief for a choice he hadn't wanted to make. Hunger for a truth he hadn't been allowed to say out loud. "Kane." His father's voice, sharp as a blade. "*Kane.* Say something. Command your pack." For one long, suspended second, Lyra thought he might defy it. Hoped — some small, stupid, broken part of her still hoped, even now, even with black smoke curling off her own hands — that he might cross the clearing and put himself between her and the pack that had just watched him tear her apart. He didn't. "Take her to the border," Kane said, his voice carved out of the same flat, terrible steadiness he'd used to reject her in the first place. "Escort her mother home safely after. No one touches her. No one follows her past the stones." It wasn't mercy. It was barely even permission. But it was the last thing Lyra heard him say before two of the pack's younger warriors hauled her up by the arms — carefully, more carefully than the fear in their faces suggested they wanted to be — and half-carried, half-dragged her toward the tree line, her mother stumbling along beside them, still sobbing her name. --- The black smoke had stopped curling from her fingers by the time they reached the border stones. The fire in her chest banked down to a dull, exhausted ache. But the mark was still there — a cold brand seared into the skin below her collarbone where the bond had lived, permanent and unmistakable, visible proof to any wolf who ever scented her again that she had been claimed and thrown away in the same breath. Her mother collapsed against the largest border stone the moment the warriors released them, pulling Lyra down with her. Both of them shook too hard to do anything but cling to each other in the cold. Behind them, back through the black trees, the bonfire still burned. Lyra could just make out the pack beginning to disperse, voices low and urgent, already reshaping the story of tonight into something they could live with. *Shadow-blood.* The words kept circling back through her mind, foreign and impossible. Her mother had never once, in twenty-one years, spoken that name in her hearing. Whatever the Ashwood bloodline actually was, whatever her mother had spent two decades hiding beneath the ordinary label of *healer*, it had chosen tonight — the worst possible night — to finally show itself. "Mama." Lyra's voice came out raw, barely more than breath. "What am I?" Her mother didn't answer. She was staring past Lyra's shoulder, back toward the tree line, her whole body suddenly rigid. Lyra turned to follow her gaze — and went very still. A figure stood at the edge of the firelight, just inside the tree line, close enough that the pack's departing warriors should have scented him instantly and hadn't. Tall. Dark-haired. Dressed in the deep gray of a pack that wasn't Ironclaw. He watched the two of them with an expression that held none of the fear that had gripped every other face in that clearing tonight. He was smiling. Not cruelly. Almost gently — the way you'd smile at something you'd been waiting a very long time to finally find. "Shadow-blood," he said quietly, loud enough to carry across the still night air. His eyes fixed on Lyra with an intensity that made the exhausted ache in her chest flare hot again, though this time not entirely with pain. "I wondered how long the Ashwoods thought they could keep you hidden." "Who are you?" Lyra's mother had already pulled herself upright, placing her own body between Lyra and the stranger with a warrior's instinct that ten years running a healer's tent had apparently never entirely erased. The stranger didn't answer directly. His gaze stayed locked on Lyra, and something in his expression sharpened — hungry and calculating in a way that should have frightened her and instead sent a strange current of something like hope sparking through her exhausted body. "Alpha Voss just handed the entire valley the one weapon that could actually beat him," the stranger said, stepping fully out of the tree line, close enough now that Lyra could see his eyes were a pale, unusual silver-gray, nothing like any wolf she'd ever encountered. "He just doesn't know it yet." He extended one hand toward her, patient and unhurried, as though he had all the time in the world and every intention of using it. "My name is Damien Cross." "And I think, Lyra Ashwood, that you and I have a great deal to talk about." ---