Luna He Rejected: Alpha's Forbidden Heir

Selena POV Selene felt it the moment Damian Voss stepped into the circle. It started as warmth in her chest. Then it spread down her arms, like sunlight breaking through clouds. Her wolf rose inside her, alert and shaking. She had heard stories about the mate bond her whole life, but nothing prepared her for how it would actually feel. It was like her body remembered something her mind had forgotten. The whole pack stood around the stone circle, waiting. Torches lined the edge of the clearing. Long shadows moved across the grass. The air smelled like smoke and pine. Tonight was Selene's eighteenth birthday, the night every wolf in Blackthorn either found their mate or didn't. She had spent years wondering if she even had one, since she wasn't born into this pack. Her father had been a rogue Alpha, thrown out before she was old enough to remember his face. The Blackthorn pack took her in out of pity, not love. She had always felt like a guest in someone else's house, careful not to take up too much space. She had pictured this moment a hundred times. She always imagined some stranger walking toward her out of the dark. She never once thought it would be Damian. But Damian looked at her, and his eyes went wide, and she knew. He felt it too. "Selene." He said her name like it surprised him. Like he never thought it would be her. She smiled before she could stop herself. She had known Damian since she was a child. He used to pull her braid and steal food off her plate when they were young. Somewhere along the way, she stopped seeing him as the future Alpha and started seeing him as someone she wanted. She never told anyone that. She never thought it mattered, because boys like Damian didn't end up with girls like her. Except now the bond said otherwise. The pack began to whisper. Some smiled. Some looked nervous. An old woman near the front pressed a hand to her chest, like the moment had moved her to tears. Selene noticed Victor standing close to Damian's side, his face giving nothing away. For one second his eyes met hers, and something in them made the warmth in her chest falter. She didn't know why. "Step forward," the elder said to Damian. "Claim your mate." Damian didn't move. Selene watched his jaw go tight. His hands curled at his sides. She waited for him to say something, anything, but his face had already gone flat and far away, like he had made up his mind a long time ago. The whispers around them grew louder. People had already noticed something was wrong before she let herself admit it. Her heart pounded so hard she could feel it in her throat. Still, she held on to hope. Surely the boy who used to steal food off her plate wouldn't leave her standing here alone, not in front of everyone who had ever known either of them. "Damian," she whispered, just for him. "It's okay. I know this is a lot." He looked at her for one long second. His face gave away nothing at all. "I reject you." The words hit her harder than any punch could have. For a second she thought she heard him wrong. She actually opened her mouth to ask him to say it again, like some part of her refused to believe it the first time. "Selene Hartley," he said, louder now, so the whole circle could hear. "I reject you as my mate. I reject you as my future Luna." He said it clean and cold, without a single c***k in his voice. No shaking. No sorry in his eyes. Just a man saying a fact he had already settled in his own mind, like he had said the words to himself so many times that saying them out loud cost him nothing at all. The bond inside her didn't just break. It tore. She felt it rip through her chest like claws dragging through skin, and she had to fight to stay standing. Her knees buckled, just a little, and she dug her nails into her own palms to keep from falling. Around them, the pack went silent, that thick kind of silence that comes right before everyone starts whispering. "Why?" The word came out smaller than she meant it to. Damian didn't answer right away. For one strange moment his eyes cut sideways, toward someone in the crowd, then snapped back to her, like he hadn't meant to look at all. "It's for the good of the pack," he said finally, his voice flat, almost rehearsed. "I'm sorry, Selene." Sorry. He said it like a man closing a door, not a man being forced. She felt the tears coming and hated herself for it. She would not cry in front of these people. She would not give them that. Somewhere behind her, a girl she used to call a friend whispered something to the person next to her, and the shame of it burned hotter than the rejection itself. She turned and walked, then ran, the second she was out of the light. She ran until the trees blurred and the cold air burned in her lungs, until she couldn't hear the pack's whispers anymore, only her own ragged breathing and her bare feet hitting the dirt. Branches tore at her arms and she barely felt them. The pain in her chest was louder than anything her body could feel. She didn't stop until she reached the old watchtower at the edge of the territory, the one nobody used anymore. She slid down against the cold stone wall and finally let herself cry, the kind of crying that comes from somewhere deep and old, not just from tonight. That was when she heard voices on the other side of the wall. Low. Careful. Two men, maybe three, too far to tell who they were. "It's done," one of them said, pleased in a way that made her stomach turn. "He rejected her. The bond is broken." "And if she finds out the threat was never real?" a second voice asked. Selene's whole body went still. "She won't," the first voice said. "And even if she does, who would believe a rogue's daughter over a man close enough to the Alpha to ruin her with one sentence?" What threat? What had been done to make Damian do this? She pressed herself against the cold stone, her heart slamming against her ribs, straining to catch a name, anything that would tell her who these men were. A third voice spoke then, quieter than the rest, almost a whisper. The few words she caught made her blood run cold. "Make sure the girl never finds out it was one of our own who started this." Then footsteps. Fast. Coming straight for the wall she was hiding behind.