Luna Discarded, Alpha Forgotten

By the time the horns called the pack to the circle, Elena Voss had already buried herself twice. Once at nine years old, kneeling in wet earth beside her mother's grave. And once two weeks ago, in the herb garden, when Marta sat her down on the low stone wall and said, very gently, "You should hear this from someone who loves you, before you hear it from someone who doesn't care how it lands." "Hear what?" "Aldric is pushing Kane. He says the match was a mistake. That a healer's daughter has no business standing beside an Alpha, whatever the bond says." Marta's hands twisted together in her lap. "I'm telling you so you have time to prepare. Whatever preparing for this could possibly mean." Elena had gone home and lain awake beside a man who slept as if nothing was wrong. She thought about the day the bond first snapped into place. She had been seventeen, carrying a salve across the training yard, when she looked up and found Kane Blackthorn staring at her like she had said his name out loud. He crossed the yard without seeming to decide to. "You're the healer's daughter," he said, as though he needed to hear himself confirm it. "Elena. Not just the healer's daughter." He had laughed, startled and unguarded, nothing like the stiff Alpha's son she had watched from a careful distance her whole life. She understood now that the boy who laughed like that only existed when his father was not looking. And his father was always looking. She had loved that boy for three years. She was about to learn what he was worth. Three days before the ceremony, she found her sister crying in the east garden. It was the kind of crying that looked less like grief than guilt wearing grief's clothes. "You know," Elena said. It was not a question. "I didn't ask for this." Sabine's face hardened, as if she had rehearsed it and was relieved to finally say it. "Aldric decided. Kane's afraid of his father, you know that better than anyone." "Being afraid isn't the same as having no choice." Elena's voice came out steadier than she felt. "You could tell me you'd stop it if you could. Even if it were a lie. I'd rather have the lie than watch you decide not to bother." Sabine's mouth opened. Nothing came out. Elena walked away without waiting to see if something eventually would. On the morning of the ceremony, she went to her mother's grave before dawn. She did not plan to. Her feet simply carried her there, the way they had every year since she was nine, when the fever took Lena Voss in a single week and Marta washed the body because Elena would not let anyone else touch her. "I don't know what you'd tell me to do," she said to the headstone. "You always knew what to do with pain that wasn't yours." She pressed her palm against the stone. It was cold. The earth in front of it was cold too, and strangely loose. It had never settled, not in eleven winters, no matter how many times the gravediggers tamped it flat. "I think I'm about to find out what it's like to carry my own," she whispered. The circle was already full when she arrived. The whole pack had gathered in the old stone ring where Blackthorn settled every formal matter, three hundred wolves standing shoulder to shoulder in the first cold light. The air smelled like the first turn toward winter. Kane stood at the center. He did not look at her. A mate looked at you. Even in silence, even in anger, a mate looked. He stared at a point over her shoulder with his jaw locked, and beside him his father wore the small, satisfied twist of a man who had already won. "Elena Voss." Kane's voice came out steady, and the steadiness hurt worse than a c***k would have. "I reject you as my mate." A low murmur moved through the crowd. It was not protest. It was the sound a group makes when it privately knows something is wrong and has already decided not to stop it. She had healed half of these people. She had set their children's bones and sat up with their dying. Not one of them stepped forward. "You don't have a reason," she said. "I don't need one." For half a second, something showed beneath his composure, not regret, only the flat discomfort of a man doing something small and choosing to do it anyway. "It's done, Elena." She found Sabine in the crowd. Her sister looked as if she might be sick. She had not moved. She had not said a word in three days of watching this arrive. Then the bond tore. It did not sever cleanly. It ripped thread by thread, and some part of her kept reaching for him even as the rest of her understood there was nothing left to reach for. It began in her chest, a physical wrongness like a rib bending the wrong way. Then it ran through every limb until standing took more than she had left. Somewhere in the crowd, a child started crying, too young to understand and old enough to feel that something had gone badly wrong in the world. She stayed on her feet anyway. She would think about that later, in the long years that followed. It was one of the only choices in the whole nightmare she was proud of. Three days later, Blackthorn held a wedding. She heard about it from the road, because pack news travelled whether she wanted it to or not, carried on the same invisible current that had once let her feel Kane's mood from three rooms away. Kane married Sabine on a Thursday. Her own sister, standing exactly where Elena had stood. She made it to the edge of Blackthorn's land before her knees gave out. No one followed. She lay in the dirt at the tree line, waiting to die the way rejected mates were supposed to, and felt something arrive underneath the wreckage. Quiet. Patient. Entirely new. They think this is the end of me. She got up. The days after blurred. She walked until her feet bled, and then past that. She drank from rivers without checking if they were safe. The first snow came on the third night, thin and dry, and the cold settled into her bones in a way that should have frightened her and didn't. She sat against a fallen tree and thought, very clearly, that she could simply stay there. It was her mother's voice that moved her. Not a ghost, just a memory, patient and sure, insisting that bodies were stronger and stranger than people gave them credit for. Elena had never once considered that the rule might apply to her. She got up again. Her legs shook. She did not sit down after dark for the rest of the journey. What she did not understand, not then, was that something inside her had refused to lie down and finish dying. She only knew that putting one foot in front of the other was the last decision still her own. On the fifth night, at the edge of a tree line she did not recognize, her legs stopped answering. She fell face first into the snow. The cold was almost gentle. She thought, in the last clear moment before the dark took her, that this was probably how it ended. Not the dramatic collapse the old stories promised. Just a quiet body at the edge of land that belonged to no one. Then she heard boots. Three wolves, circling low. And a man's voice, rough and calm, close above her ear. "Do not die on my land," he said. "I have not decided to allow it."