The Alpha's Rejected Healer

The moment Kael Voss opened his mouth under the blood moon, I knew he was going to destroy me in front of everyone I'd ever loved. I just didn't know he'd smile while he did it. "Elara Seren," he said, loud enough for every wolf in the clearing to hear. "I reject you." The world tilted. My knees didn't buckle, not yet. My body was still pretending this was a dream, still pretending the male I'd loved since I was sixteen hadn't just spoken the five words every she-wolf was raised to fear. The altar fire snapped behind him. The Shadowfang crest glowed on his bare chest, gold against skin I'd touched only in my imagination. The mate mark on my collarbone, the one that had bloomed three nights ago, the one that had made me weep with joy into my pillow, began to burn. "Kael." My voice came out small. Wrong. Not the voice of the pack's healer. The voice of a girl. "Kael, please, don't do this here. Talk to me first. Please." He didn't look at me. He looked over my head, at them. At the pack. At my pack. Two hundred wolves in ceremonial white, lined up under the old pines, watching their Alpha unmake me like I was a stitch in the wrong place. "The Goddess does not make mistakes," Kael said. His voice was flat. Beautiful. Cold as the stone under my bare feet. "But the bond does. It chose a woman who cannot serve this pack. A woman with no wolf." A sound went through the crowd. Not a gasp. Something uglier. A laugh, bitten off. A whisper. The soft, wet sound of people deciding, all at once, that they had never really liked me. No wolf. He'd said it out loud. The one thing I'd trusted him with. The one secret I'd whispered into his shoulder at seventeen, shaking, terrified he'd send me away. He'd kissed my hair and told me it didn't matter. He'd told me I was his healer. His Elara. He'd promised. "Kael." I reached for him. My fingers brushed his wrist and he stepped back like I'd burned him. "Kael, look at me. Look at me." He finally did. And there was nothing there. No boy who used to sneak into the infirmary with a cut lip and let me patch him up. No young warrior who used to read my grandmother's herb journals out loud just to make me laugh. Nothing. Just the Alpha. Just a stranger wearing his face. "I, Kael Voss, Alpha of Shadowfang," he said, and the formal words tightened around my throat like a collar, "sever the mate bond between myself and Elara Seren. By the Moon that binds us, let it be undone." "No—" The pain hit before I finished the word. It wasn't like anything I'd ever healed. Not a break. Not a burn. It was a hand reaching into my ribs and tearing out something with roots. The mark on my collarbone split open. Heat poured down my chest. I heard myself scream, and the sound didn't feel like mine. I went down. Gravel bit into my palms. My hair fell across my face. Through it I could see the hem of his ceremonial robe, black and silver, perfectly still. "Kael," I sobbed. I hated the sobbing. I hated that everyone could hear. "Please. Please, don't. I'll do anything. I'll step down as healer. I'll leave the packhouse. I'll—I'll go to the border houses, you'll never have to see me, just don't—don't tear it, please, it's going to—" "It's already done." A new voice. Of course it was her. Mira Voss stepped into the firelight like she'd been waiting in the wings her whole life. Because she had. White dress. Red lips. Kael's cousin, the pack's darling, the girl who had watched me stitch up Shadowfang warriors a hundred times with a smile that never touched her eyes. "Get up, Elara." She crouched in front of me. Her perfume was sweet. Expensive. "You're embarrassing yourself." "Mira—" "Did you really think it was real?" she whispered, just for me. "A wolfless little herb-girl and the Alpha of Shadowfang? Sweetheart. The Moon was drunk that night." She straightened. Turned to the crowd. Pitched her voice bright. "Our Alpha has been merciful long enough," she called out. "He carried this broken bond in silence so our healer wouldn't shame herself. Tonight, the Goddess corrects the mistake." The pack murmured. Agreed. Nodded. I saw Old Bryn, whose daughter I'd pulled breathing out of a breech birth last winter, look at the ground. I saw Tamsin, who I'd sat with for three nights when her mate died, turn her face away. Not one of them stepped forward. Not one. Mira lifted her wrist. The mark there, faint, silver, new, caught the firelight. My stomach dropped into a place that had no bottom. "Alpha." She smiled up at Kael. "Shall we?" Kael took her hand. He took her hand in front of me while I was still bleeding on the stones. "The ceremony continues," he said. "With the correct mate." Someone, somewhere in the crowd, started to clap. I don't remember standing. I remember the taste of iron in my mouth and the cold wind on my wet face and the pine smoke and the way the mate mark on my collarbone kept pulsing, pulsing, pulsing like a second heart that was dying slower than the first. I remember walking. Past the fire. Past the elders. Past the gate guard who wouldn't meet my eyes. Barefoot, in a torn ceremony dress, down the ridge road toward the infirmary cottage I had earned with ten years of sleepless nights. I made it to the tree line before my legs gave out. I hit my knees in the wet moss. I pressed both hands over the bleeding mark and I tried, Goddess, I tried to hate him. I tried to be angry. All I could feel was the wanting. The stupid, bone-deep wanting of a bond being ripped out of me thread by thread. I opened my mouth to beg the Moon to kill me. And that was when she spoke. Not Mira. Not Kael. Not any voice I had ever heard in twenty-two years of silence inside my own head. A woman's voice. Low. Amused. Ancient. Rising up through my chest like something uncurling after a very, very long sleep. "Finally. The false bond is broken."