"You Rejected Me, Now Beg"

The Toast

The reception happens because it has to happen. Because two packs are watching, and the Cross family does not let a single crack show in public if they can help it.

I sit at the head table in a dress that suddenly feels like a costume, smiling at guests who came here to witness a triumph and are leaving with a story about a rejection instead. I can feel the whispers moving through the room the way heat moves through a body. Slow at first. Then everywhere at once.

Damian sits beside me. He hasn't looked at me since the ceremony.

Someone rises with a glass of champagne, some cousin of his, and starts a toast about strength and legacy and the joining of two great houses. I watch Damian's face while the man talks. He nods in the right places. He smiles when he's supposed to smile. If you didn't know better, you'd think nothing happened an hour ago.

I know better.

I lift my glass when everyone else does. I don't drink from it.

Across the table, Raya watches me over the rim of her own glass, and there's something almost lazy in the way she does it, like she has all the time in the world to enjoy this. She doesn't bother hiding her satisfaction. Why would she. Everyone in this room just watched Damian choose her over me without saying a single word.

I excuse myself before dessert. Nobody stops me.

The hallway outside the ballroom is quieter, cooler, lined with the kind of art that costs more than my father's entire house. I press my back against the wall for a moment and breathe, just breathe, because if I go back in there and cry in front of two packs I will never forgive myself.

That's when I hear the voices.

A door is cracked open down the hall, one of the private rooms the Cross family uses for business they don't want overheard. I recognize Lucian's voice first, low and controlled in the way of a man who has spent his whole life making sure nobody hears him raise it.

"You couldn't even manage the claiming words." Lucian's voice carries an edge I've never heard him use with Damian in public. "Do you understand what you just did in front of both packs?"

"I understand exactly what I did." Damian's voice, tight, furious, and underneath the fury something that sounds almost like fear. "What I don't understand is why you didn't tell me she was my mate."

Silence.

I go very still against that wall, because whatever is about to be said next, I need to hear every word of it.

"It wouldn't have changed the arrangement," Lucian says finally. "The debt still needed settling. The alliance still needed sealing. Whether or not the two of you happened to be fated is irrelevant to the business at hand."

"Irrelevant." Damian's laugh is short and humorless. "You knew what a rejected bond does to a wolf. You knew, and you let me stand up there and find out in front of everyone."

"Would you have gone through with it if you'd known beforehand?"

Another silence. Longer this time.

"No," Damian says quietly.

"There's your answer."

I press my hand flat against the wall to keep myself steady, because two things have just become true at once and both of them matter.

The first is that Damian didn't know. Whatever this marriage has become, whatever he said to me in front of everyone, he didn't walk into that ceremony already knowing I was his fated mate and choosing cruelty anyway. He was ambushed by the same truth I was, and he handled it in the worst possible way, but he didn't plan it.

The second thing is worse.

Because if Lucian knew, and Lucian is the one who arranged this marriage down to the smallest detail, then the story I was told about a family debt owed to the Cross pack was never the whole truth. Lucian didn't orchestrate a marriage to settle an old debt between two houses.

He orchestrated a marriage between two mates, on purpose, and made sure neither of us found out until it was too late to undo it.

Which means someone benefits from Damian and I being bound together whether either of us wants it or not.

I don't move from that wall until I hear their footsteps heading toward a different exit, until the hallway goes quiet again, until my heartbeat slows enough that I trust myself to walk back into that ballroom without my face giving anything away.

I have spent my whole life being handed to people. My family handed me to this marriage. My marriage just handed me a rejection in front of everyone I will have to live among for the rest of my life.

I am done being handed anywhere.

Whatever Lucian Cross was really doing when he built this arrangement, I intend to find out exactly what it is, and exactly what it's going to cost him when I do.

I smooth my dress, lift my chin, and walk back toward the sound of music and forced laughter like a woman who has already decided the wound she was given tonight is going to be the thing that makes her dangerous.