HIS REJECTED QUEEN

CHAPTER 4

I felt her before I knew what I was feeling.

I was in the middle of a boundary meeting that had been going on for two hours longer than it should have, sitting at the head of the table in the east conference room with Cole on my left and three senior gammas on my right and a map of the northern perimeter spread out between us, and then something happened in my chest that had nothing to do with any of it.

I stopped talking mid-sentence.

Cole looked at me. The gammas looked at me. Nobody said anything because I was the Alpha and when the Alpha stopped talking mid-sentence the room waited.

I put my hand flat on the table. The feeling was faint. Distant. Like a signal coming from very far away through a lot of interference. But I knew it. I knew it the way you knew a sound you had heard once and never forgotten, the way certain things bypassed the thinking part of your brain entirely and went straight to the part that was older and less reasonable.

The bond. My bond.

Which had been broken for three years, which should not have been possible to feel anymore, which I had spent three years telling myself I did not feel even on the nights when I absolutely did.

It was awake. Which meant she was here. Which meant Mia Calloway had just crossed the Silvermont border.

Cole said, quietly, "Kael."

"Meeting's done," I said.

"We haven't finished the—"

"Tomorrow." I stood. "Same time. We'll finish it tomorrow."

The gammas exchanged a look. Cole did not exchange a look with anyone because Cole was watching me, and I'm sure he already knew what was happening but was deciding how much to say about it.

He said nothing, and I left the room.

I drove to the border.

I don't know what I thought I was going to do when I got there. Stop her, maybe. Or just see her. Or just confirm that the thing in my chest was real and not the particular cruelty my own mind had been inflicting on me for three years, which was to occasionally, without warning, make me feel the ghost of her bond so convincingly that I had to remind myself it was gone.

It wasn't gone after all, because she was back. I parked at the edge of the silver-bark tree line and sat in the dark with the engine off and waited, though I didn't know what I was waiting for exactly.

The bond was stronger here. Close to the border, close to wherever she was, it was less like a signal and more like a sound, something with texture to it, something I could almost locate directionally if I concentrated.

She was moving away from the border. Into the territory. Toward the pack town.

She wasn't coming this way. Of course she wasn't coming this way. Why would she come this way. She had left Silvermont three years ago because of me, and whatever had brought her back, it was not me, and I needed to understand that clearly and completely before I did anything I couldn't take back.

I sat in the car for a long time.

Her father had died.

Cole had told me four days ago, quietly, in the way he delivered information he thought I needed but knew I wasn't going to react well to. Damien Calloway, sixty-two, cardiac event, pack medical center, didn't make it. I had listened. I had nodded. I had said the appropriate things about arrangements and pack support for surviving family.

I had gone back to my office and sat at my desk for twenty minutes doing nothing.

Damien Calloway had been a quiet man. Omega-ranked, which in Crestwood meant mostly invisible, which was a thing I was no longer able to think about without a specific kind of discomfort that had no clean name. He had worked at the pack warehouse for thirty years. He had raised his daughter alone after his mate died. He had come to every pack gathering and sat in the back and left early and never asked for anything from anyone.

I had not known him well. I had known who he was because I had made it my business, after Mia left, to know everything about her that I could still access from inside a life she had removed herself from. Which was not much. Which was, in fact, almost nothing. She had gone somewhere, built something, disappeared into it so completely that even the pack's administrative records had nothing beyond a forwarding address that turned out to be a mail handling service.

She had not wanted to be found. I had respected that but I had not liked it.

The first year after the rejection, I had run the pack the way I ran everything, with complete focus, total control, no visible cracks. I had finalized the Blackridge alliance the way my father wanted. I had shaken Nadia Voss's hand at a formal pack dinner and smiled the smile I had been trained to produce and thought about absolutely nothing the entire time.

I had been twenty-one years old and I had stood in the ceremonial hall and said four words to a girl who had done nothing except be exactly who the Moon Goddess decided she was, and I had watched her walk away, and I had done it because my father had told me I had to and because I was twenty-one and I believed him and because the pack came first, it always came first, he had been teaching me that since I was old enough to understand the word.

The pack came first.

I had believed that completely until about three weeks after Mia left, when I woke up at four in the morning and lay in the dark and understood, with a clarity that had apparently been waiting for a quiet moment to introduce itself, that I had made a mistake I was not going to be able to fix.

Not because the pack wasn't important.

Because what I had done to her was wrong. Wrong in the way that certain things were just wrong, cleanly and completely, and no amount of reasoning about the greater good made them anything else.

I had known she was my mate. I had felt the bond.

I had looked at her across that room and felt it land in my chest like something true, and then I had looked at my father, and then I had looked back at her, and I had said the words.

Three years. I had been running the pack and running from that for three years.

My phone rang.

It was Cole. I answered it.

"You're at the border," he said. It wasn't a question.

"How do you know that."

"Because I know you." A pause. "She's not coming to you, Kael."

"I know that."

"She's going to her father's house. She's going to settle his things and leave. That's what people do when they come back for this reason."

"I know."

"So whatever you're thinking about doing right now—"

"I'm not doing anything," I said. "I'm sitting in my car."

"You drove to the border at eleven at night."

"Cole."

"I'm just describing what's happening."

I looked at the silver-bark trees. The dark. The border I had not crossed in three years because there was nothing on the other side that was mine.

"She felt it too," I said. "The bond. When she crossed over. I felt her feel it."

Silence on Cole's end.

"That doesn't mean she wants to," he said carefully.

"I know that too."

"Kael." His voice shifted. The tone he used when he was going to say the thing I didn't want to hear, which was the thing I had come to rely on him for precisely because almost nobody else would. "You rejected her in front of the entire pack. She left that same night. She has been gone for three years." A pause. "The bond being alive doesn't erase any of that."

"I know," I said.

"Do you."

I didn't answer that.

Outside the car, the silver-bark trees stood pale and still in the dark, marking the edge of my territory, the edge of everything I had been given and everything I had chosen, the edge of the life I had built in the three years since I watched the only unpredicted thing that had ever happened to me walk out of a ceremonial hall without looking back.

"She's going to see me eventually," I said. "Pack this size, she can't avoid it."

"Probably not," Cole agreed.

"When she does."

"Yes?"

I thought about the bond in my chest. Not the ghost of it. The real thing, awake and present and inconveniently, undeniably alive.

"When she does," I said, "I need her to see something different from what she saw three years ago."

Cole was quiet for a moment.

"That's going to take more than a conversation," he said.

"I know."

"It might take more than she's willing to give you."

"I know that too."

Another silence. This one longer than the last.pl

"Okay," Cole said finally. Just that. Okay.

I started the car.

I drove back toward the pack house without crossing the border, without going toward her father's house, without doing any of the things I had driven out here to talk myself out of doing.

I drove back and I told myself I was going to be patient.

I told myself I was going to give her space and time and whatever she needed to do what she came here to do.

I told myself all of that very firmly and I almost believed it.

Right up until I walked into the pack house and Marcus was waiting in the hallway with an expression on his face I had not seen since the night before the ceremony.

The expression of a man who had just found out about a complication he thought he had permanently removed.

He said, "I heard she's back."

And something in me went very still.

"Yes," I said.

"Kael." He said my name the way he said it when he wanted me to hear the Alpha in it, the authority, the three decades of running this pack before he handed it to me. "We need to talk about why that's a problem."

I looked at my father.

Three years ago I had looked at him across a ceremonial hall and let him make my decision for me.

"No," I said.

He blinked. "Kael—"

"Whatever you're about to say." I held his gaze. "The answer is no."

I walked past him. Behind me, he said something else. I didn't stop walking.

The bond in my chest was steady and warm and present.

She was here, and whatever my father thought that meant for his plans, he was about to find out that the person who had made a decision in that ceremonial hall three years ago was not the same person standing in this hallway now.

He had taught me that the pack came first.

What he hadn't taught me, what I had learned entirely on my own in three years of running the thing he built, was that a pack was only as good as what it protected.

And I had failed to protect the one thing that mattered. I was not going to do that again.