His Rejected Queen

7

Chapter 7

I was halfway through my shower when I heard the commotion downstairs.

Not an alarm, not a fight, just raised voices and then a single voice cutting over all of them that I would have recognized anywhere on earth because it had been talking at high volume my entire life.

I was out of the shower, dressed, and down the stairs in under three minutes.

Sage was standing in the entrance hall of the Black Ridge packhouse with her curly red hair wild from running and her cheeks flushed and her eyes bright with the particular energy she got when she was frightened but refusing to show it. Two patrol wolves flanked her, not touching her but positioned with the clear intention of not letting her go further until someone with authority made a decision.

She saw me at the top of the stairs.

“Aria.” The relief in her voice hit me somewhere deep and tender. “Thank the moon you are alive. I have been running since midnight.”

I came down the stairs and walked past the patrol wolves and hugged her. She grabbed me back hard, both arms, the kind of hug that is really an argument against all the things that could have gone wrong and did not.

“You ran through the Borderlands alone,” I said into her shoulder.

“You did it first.”

“I was desperate.”

“So was I.” She pulled back and held my face in her hands and looked at me with searching eyes, checking for damage the way she always had, cataloguing what the world had done to me since she last saw me. Whatever she found made her jaw tighten. “You look tired.”

“I am fine.”

“You look fine and tired.” She released me and looked around the entrance hall with wide eyes, taking in the high ceilings and the dark stone and the general atmosphere of a pack that had never once worried about resources. “This place is enormous.”

“I know.”

“Their patrol wolves are enormous.”

“I noticed.”

“One of them is extremely good looking in a terrifying sort of way.” She glanced at the two wolves still standing behind her. “Not these two. Another one. Brown hair. Broken nose.”

“That is Damon.”

“Of course his name is Damon.” She turned back to me and her expression shifted, the brightness dropping out of it and something more serious moving in underneath. “Aria. I did not come just to find you. I came because you need to know what is happening in Silver Creek.”

The entrance hall felt quieter suddenly.

“Tell me,” I said.

“Not here.” Her eyes moved around the space meaningfully.

“Whatever you need to say to her.”

The voice came from the corridor to our left. Luca was standing there, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, and from his expression it was clear he had been there for at least part of this. His eyes moved from Sage to me with that steady assessing quality and then he pushed off the wall.

“You can use the sitting room,” he said. “Both of you.”

He walked away without waiting for a response.

Sage watched him go. Then she turned to me very slowly with an expression I knew extremely well. It was the expression she had made the first time she tasted expensive chocolate. Like something had just recalibrated her understanding of what was possible in the world.

“Aria,” she said quietly.

“Do not.”

“I am just saying.”

“Sage.”

“He is looking out for you and he has only known you for five minutes.”

“Sitting room,” I said. “Now.”

She followed me down the corridor still wearing that expression.

We sat across from each other in a room with a fireplace that was already lit against the morning cold and Sage pulled her knees up onto the chair and took a breath and told me everything.

Cole had woken up the morning after the ceremony in a fury. Not guilt. Not regret. Fury, directed at the fact that I had left without being formally dismissed, without signing the pack release papers that would have officially transferred my status. In his mind, and in the technical interpretation of pack law, I was still a Silver Creek wolf. A runaway. Which meant he had the right to come after me.

Diana had encouraged it. Of course she had.

“She told him it looked weak,” Sage said. “An Alpha whose rejected mate just walked out into the Borderlands and disappeared. She said the neighboring packs would talk. That he needed to bring you back and process the release formally and publicly to close it out properly.”

I felt cold. “She wants a public scene.”

“She wants you humiliated one more time where everyone can see it.” Sage’s voice was flat with anger. “And Cole is letting her run him because he always lets beautiful terrible people run him, that is literally his only consistent personality trait.”

“When are they coming?”

“Two days. Maybe three. He sent a formal message to Black Ridge this morning requesting the return of a Silver Creek pack member. Luca will have received it by now.”

I sat with that for a moment.

The fire crackled. Outside the window the morning had gone grey and overcast, the kind of heavy sky that feels like it is pressing down on everything beneath it.

“He thinks Luca will just hand me over,” I said.

“He thinks Black Ridge will not start a conflict over one Omega female.” Sage watched my face carefully. “Will he? Luca. Will he hand you over?”

I thought about black eyes in a dark corridor. A thumb pressed carefully against a bruise. The way he had looked at me from the office window and not moved away.

“I do not know,” I said honestly.

Sage was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “There is something else.”

I looked at her.

“I overheard Diana talking to her sister before I left. She was not talking about the pack release papers.” Sage’s voice dropped. “She was talking about you specifically. About what you are.”

“What I am,” I repeated slowly.

“She said something about your wolf. She said Cole made a mistake and that if he had known what you were carrying he never would have rejected you.” Sage leaned forward. “Aria, she sounded scared. Diana Voss was scared of you and she does not even know where you are yet.”

The room was very still.

I did not know what to do with that. I filed it somewhere I could not look at directly yet and kept my face calm and reached over and squeezed Sage’s hand.

“You are staying here,” I said. “I am not arguing about it. You ran through the Borderlands alone for me and you are staying.”

“I was hoping you would say that.” She squeezed back. “Also I would very much like a shower and something to eat and possibly to find out where Damon trains.”

I almost smiled. Almost.

Because underneath the warmth of having Sage here, underneath all of it, one thing was sitting cold and certain in the center of my chest.

Cole was coming.

And I needed to know, before he arrived, exactly where Luca Thorne stood.

I stood up and walked out of the sitting room and down the corridor to Luca’s office and I knocked once and opened the door without waiting.

He was at his desk. He looked up.

“You got Cole’s message,” I said.

“This morning.”

“What did you say back.”

Luca held my gaze across the room for a long steady moment.

Then he said, “I told him no.”

Just that. No explanation, no qualification, no outline of his reasoning.

Just no.

And the way he said it, quiet and absolute and completely without doubt, made something in my chest unlock that I had not even known was bolted shut.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay,” he said back.

I turned to leave.

“Aria.”

I stopped.

“Cole will not accept no,” Luca said. “He will come anyway. And when he does, I need you to be ready.”

I turned back to look at him.

“Ready for what exactly,” I said.

He looked at me across the office with black eyes that were doing that complicated thing again and said four words that rearranged the next week of my life entirely.

“Ready to fight back.”