HIS REJECTED QUEEN

CHAPTER 3

Three years.

That was how long it took to stop flinching at the sound of my own name.

Not because anyone in Crestwood was saying it. I was eight hundred kilometers away from Crestwood, in a city that had never heard of it, living in an apartment that fit everything I owned and still had room left over, working a job that had nothing to do with pack hierarchy or ranked seating or the particular social mathematics of who mattered and who didn't.

Nobody here knew what an omega was.

The first time I realized that, I stood in the middle of my new workplace and felt something shift in my chest so quietly and so completely that I had to go to the bathroom and sit on the floor for a few minutes just to process it.

Nobody knew.

Which meant nobody had decided who I was for me, which also meant, for the first time in my life, I got to.

My name was Mia Calloway and I was twenty-one years old and I worked at a law firm that specialized in cross-jurisdictional cases, which was a complicated way of saying they handled the legal disputes that arose when the human world and the pack world overlapped and neither side wanted to admit it.

I had started there as a filing clerk. I was now a junior legal researcher with a reputation for finding things other people missed, which was a skill I had developed in self-defense long before I ever walked through their door.

My boss was a woman named Dara who was half-witch and entirely terrifying and had taken one look at me three years ago and said, with the directness of someone who had no patience for anything else, you're smarter than this job. I had said, I know. And she had said, good, then stop pretending otherwise.

Nobody had ever said that to me before.

It turned out to be the most useful thing anyone had ever said to me, which was either a comment on Dara or a comment on the people I had grown up around. Probably both.

I was at my desk on a Tuesday morning, working through the documentation on a boundary dispute between a mid-sized pack in the east and a human property developer who had no idea what he had built on, when my phone rang.

Unknown number. Silvermont area code.

I stared at it for a moment, mainly because the only number with a Silvermont area code I knew was not an unknown number. My father called every Sunday at seven in the evening, reliable as weather, and his number was saved in my phone under Dad with a small house symbol next to it because I had put it there at twenty-one in a moment of sentimentality I was not going to apologize for.

Unknown Silvermont number meant someone else.

I answered it anyway because my father was sixty-two and lived alone and the particular anxiety that lived in the back of my mind about that fact had just woken up very suddenly.

"Mia Calloway," I said.

A pause.

Then a voice I recognized immediately and had not heard in three years. "Mia. It's Sera."

I put my pen down.

Sera and I had not spoken since I left. Not because we had ended badly, we hadn't, Sera had held my hand in those first terrible minutes after the rejection and walked me to the edge of the crowd and that was the last time I had seen her. We had not spoken since because speaking to Sera meant speaking to Silvermont and speaking to Silvermont meant keeping a door open that I needed closed in order to become someone who could function.

She had understood that, I thought. I had hoped she understood that.

"Sera," I said.

"I know," she said. "I know, I wouldn't call if it wasn't—" She stopped. I could hear her breathing. "Mia, it's your dad."

The floor did something underneath me.

"What happened."

"He collapsed three days ago. They took him to the pack medical center." A pause that told me everything before the words did. "He didn't wake up, Mia. He passed yesterday morning. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry, I tried to reach you, I didn't have your number so I had to get it from the admin records and I know you didn't want—"

I was not hearing the rest of it.

I was hearing my father's voice instead. The morning I left. Take care of yourself. And the way he had said my name like he was handing me something to carry.

I was hearing three years of Sunday phone calls, his voice the same every time, steady and warm and asking about my week and telling me about his garden like the garden was a person we both knew.

I was hearing the last call, six days ago. He had seemed tired. I had noticed and not said anything because he always said he was fine and I always let him. I should not have let him.

"Mia." Sera's voice, careful. "Are you still there?"

"Yes," I said. "I'm here."

"There are things to settle. The house, his belongings. You don't have to come back if you don't want to, I can try to handle some of it remotely, but—"

"I'm coming back," I said.

Silence on her end.

"You're sure?"

I looked at my desk. The boundary dispute documents. The city outside my window that had given me three years of anonymity and space and the specific freedom of being nobody in particular.

I thought about my father's kitchen table. His cup of tea. The way he had pushed the chair out with his foot without saying a word.

"I'm sure," I said.

I booked the bus ticket that afternoon.

I packed the same bag I had left with, plus three years worth of additions — more clothes, the letter I had read so many times the paper had gone soft at the folds, a second photograph of my father that Sera had sent me six months after I left, the two of them at some pack gathering, him laughing at something off-camera.

I held that photograph for a while.

Then I packed it carefully between two shirts and zipped the bag and stood in the middle of my apartment and took stock of what I was about to do.

I was going back to Silvermont. I was going back to the pack that had watched me get rejected in the most public way possible and had spent the following three years, I had no doubt, discussing it with the particular relish that small communities reserved for other people's humiliation.

I was going back to the territory of the man whose bond I still felt, faintly, distantly, the way you felt the ghost of an old injury in cold weather. Not painful anymore. Just there. A reminder.

I was going back to bury my father and settle his affairs and then I was leaving again, and this time I was not eighteen and heartbroken and running.

This time I knew exactly what I was walking into.

And I knew, more importantly, exactly who I was walking in as.

I picked up my bag, turned off the lights, and left.

The bus reached the Silvermont boundary at just past eleven at night.

I was in the window seat, half asleep, my forehead against the cold glass, watching the dark countryside move past. Most of the other passengers were asleep. The bus was quiet.

And then, the bond woke up.

Not the collapsed, fraying thing from three years ago. Not the clean snap of the broken connection at the border. Something different. Something that moved through my chest like a current finding a path it had forgotten it knew, tentative and then less tentative, reaching toward something that was suddenly, undeniably close.

I sat up straight, my hand going to my chest without thinking.

The bus crossed the boundary line, and the bond flared. It was nothing like before. Before it had been new, overwhelming, a door kicked off its hinges. This was quieter and somehow worse. This was the feeling of something you thought was dead turning out to have been sleeping. This was three years of carefully built distance collapsing in the space of a single breath.

He was here.Somewhere in this territory, close enough that the bond remembered, Kael Crestwood existed.

And my body, traitor that it was, recognized him like coming home.

I pressed my hand harder against my chest as if I could push it back down. I could not push it back down.

I stared at the dark window and thought about my father, and the house, and the letter, and the fourteen things I needed to accomplish before I could leave again, and I made myself focus on those things, one by one, in order.

I did not think about the bond. I did not think about him. I was here for my father. I was here to close a chapter. Nothing else.