After My Alpha Rejected Me, the Lycan King Claimed Me

The bond snapped at 9:47 on a Saturday night, right between the third and fourth words of David's rejection vow.

"I, David, Alpha of the Silverfang Pack—"

The mark on my neck went cold first. Not warm-cold, like winter air. Real cold. The kind of cold that spreads from the inside out, like something inside my skin had just opened a window in the dead of January.

"—reject you, Maia Grant—"

I felt the black veins before I saw them. They spread out from the bite mark in slow lines, crawling up toward my jaw and down toward my collarbone. Frost across glass. Someone in the front row gasped. Someone else looked away.

"—as my mate and Luna."

My knees hit the stone floor. Both of them. Hard.

The pain wasn't like anything I had words for. It was a door closing inside an empty room. It was the sound of my own name being taken out of me. Seven years of a bond I'd fed with everything I had, ripped out through a hole the size of a bite.

I didn't scream. I don't know why. Maybe because I'd been quiet for so long my body had forgotten how.

"In the same breath," David went on, voice smooth, practiced, "I claim Scarlet Mendoza as my chosen mate and new Luna of the Silverfang Pack."

Scarlet stepped out from behind him in a red dress I had not paid for. Her small pale hand slid into his. Her smile was the smile of a woman who had rehearsed it in a mirror.

The pack didn't move. Two hundred wolves I had led, fed, mentored, and mourned with—two hundred wolves I had bled for—stood in the hall I decorated that morning with white roses and blue ribbon. Not one of them stepped forward. Not one.

I heard something inside me slam. Once. Hard. Like a fist hitting a locked door from the wrong side. My wolf. Silent for twenty years. Suddenly not.

I pressed my palm flat to the stone and pushed myself up.

David was already stepping down from the platform. He walked toward me the way a man walks toward a receipt on the counter. In his hand was a crumpled wad of bills. Twenties, mostly. Maybe two hundred dollars.

He held it out without looking at my face.

"Take the boys to that diner on Route 12," he said. His voice was pitched for the room, not for me. "I don't want the pups contaminating the ceremony."

Contaminating.

My sons. Kieran and Rowan. Four years old. Asleep in the back room where I'd tucked them under a blanket because they'd wanted to hear the music.

My hand closed around the money before my brain caught up. Some old, trained reflex—Luna smoothing things over, Luna keeping the ceremony clean.

But my wolf slammed the door again. Harder.

I felt her this time. A body against a body. Silver against black. A shudder rolled up my spine and I saw David's eyes flick toward me, just once, like he'd caught a scent he couldn't name.

I didn't say a word. I turned, walked the length of the hall past every wolf who wouldn't meet my eyes, and collected my sons from the back room. Kieran mumbled into my shoulder. Rowan didn't wake. I carried them out through the doors I had hung the ribbons on that morning.

The drive to the pack house was six minutes. It felt like six years.

When I pushed open the door of the Luna suite—my suite, the one I had painted the trim of myself the summer Kieran was born—Scarlet's perfume hit me first. Vanilla and something chemical underneath. Her clothes were already in my closet. Her jewelry on my dresser.

My things were outside.

I found them in the mud beside the driveway. My mother's silver comb, snapped in half. My cipher journal, pages torn out and soaking. The twins' baby blankets, the ones I'd stitched their names into, thrown in a heap under the rain.

I reached for the mind-link before I could stop myself.

*David—*

He cut the connection so fast the silence in my head rang.

Behind me, Margaret's voice—smooth, even, the voice of a woman announcing a grocery list—drifted from the porch. "Strip her access. Every door, every keypad. Tonight."

Three Omegas I had trained myself moved past me without looking up.

I stood in the rain and watched the pack house I had built lock itself against me, one small electronic click at a time.

I took the twins to the storage shed at the edge of the eastern boundary. It was the only structure I could still open. I laid them down on a folded tarp and pulled my coat over them. Kieran's small hand curled into my sleeve in his sleep.

I pressed my thumb hard against the inside of my left wrist. Hard enough to hurt.

A single mind-link message pushed through the dark. Joanna. Beta. My mother's quiet appointment. The words came clean and short:

*I have everything. Tell me when.*

I didn't reply. Not yet.

Inside my chest, my wolf scratched at the door again. Longer this time. Slower. Like something that had finally decided it was done waiting.

Outside the shed, tires crunched on gravel. Margaret's voice, low and unhurried, drifted through the dark.

"—and by morning, the custody papers. Both boys. She won't have a leg to stand on."