After My Mate Rejected Me, I Became a Royal Lycan

Hands seized my arms.

I knew these hands. Marcus, the warrior whose shoulder I'd bandaged after a border skirmish two winters ago. Deacon, whose mate I'd sat with through a difficult labor. Their fingers dug into my biceps like I was a stranger — like I had always been one.

"Let go of me."

They didn't.

They forced me down. My knees hit the stone with a crack that shot up my thighs, and Avayah was ripped from my chest — small hands clutching my shirt, fingers uncurling one by one as someone pulled her away. She didn't cry out. She just looked at me, her eyes huge, and I twisted against the hands holding me and reached for her—

"Mama—"

"Avayah, I'm here, I'm right here—"

A knee landed between my shoulder blades. My face went to the stone. Grit against my cheek, the taste of copper flooding my mouth from where Brooke had split my lip.

"Hold her," Brooke said, calm as someone ordering coffee.

I thrashed. I have never thrashed like that in my life. Every muscle I owned strained toward my daughter, and the warriors only pressed harder, a second knee now on my lower back, a hand fisted in my hair to keep my head against the ground.

"Caspian," I whispered into the bond. "Caspian, please—"

Silence.

I heard footsteps — small ones. Kaisen's shoes, patent leather, scraping over stone. Someone was walking Avayah toward the silver-lined door.

"No." My voice cracked. "No, no — Brooke, she's five, she's five years old—"

Brooke crouched down in front of me. She tilted her head so we were eye-to-eye across the courtyard stone. Her lipstick was perfect.

"I know," she said.

The heavy hinges groaned.

Avayah's small voice: "Mama?"

And then — the sound.

The silver-lined door slammed shut.

There was no scream. That was what I would remember. There was a sharp intake of breath — a tiny gasp, almost polite — and then nothing. My daughter went silent, and I knew what that silence was, because I had spent six years quietly studying pack medicine, and I knew the exact threshold at which pain exceeds a child's capacity to vocalize.

Her fingers were crushed. The silver was in her nerves now. It would not be minor.

I screamed his name into the bond. *Caspian. CASPIAN.*

The bond returned nothing. Not silence — silence would have been mercy. It returned the flat, dead resonance of a line already being cut.

My face was still against the stone. I could see, from this angle, one small patent leather shoe standing near the door. Kaisen's. He had not moved.

I lifted my eyes.

Brooke was still crouched in front of me, and she was watching my face. Not Avayah. Not the door. My face. She was checking her work — checking to see if I was breaking the way she had planned for me to break.

I was not breaking.

Something in me had gone very still, and very cold, and very awake. I felt the pressure in my ribs again — that vibration, that clawing thing — and this time I did not push it down. I simply held it, the way you hold a coal in a fist, and I looked at Brooke, and I memorized her.

The curve of her mouth. The gloss of her hair. The exact tilt of her head.

Her smile faltered.

I think that was when she understood, for the first time, that whatever she had rehearsed for this moment was not what she was getting.

Engines.

Three of them, low and heavy, rolling up the pack house drive. The courtyard shifted — heads turning, breath held, warriors straightening even as they kept me pinned. The SUVs came to a stop in a black arc. Doors opened.

Caspian stepped out.

His Beta and Gamma flanked him. The pack parted around him like water around a stone. He walked past Avayah's small crumpled form beside the silver door without slowing. He walked past my pinned body without looking. He straightened his cuffs — first the left, then the right, the small ritual every one of us in this pack had learned to read — and he walked to the center of the courtyard.

I looked up at him.

I looked up at the man whose hair I had smoothed back from his forehead every morning for six years, whose scars I had traced with my fingers, whose daughter was bleeding on the stones ten feet from where he stood.

His eyes met mine.

There was nothing there.

Not conflict. Not guilt. Not even the cruelty I could have understood, could have hated cleanly. Just the flat, closing-ledger look of a man finishing paperwork.

He opened his mouth.

The Alpha tone flooded the courtyard, and every wolf present flinched — every wolf except me, because I was already on the ground.

"I, Caspian Robertson, Alpha of Silverfang Pack, reject you, Naomi Warren, as my mate and Luna."

The mark on my neck went white-hot.

It was not pain. Pain is a word for what you feel when your body is being hurt. This was something else — a brand being torn from living flesh, an entire six-year architecture of self ripped out through a single point of skin. I heard someone screaming and realized, distantly, that it was me.

Then the heat vanished.

Cold. Hollow. Dead.

The bond — the tether, the hum, the thing that had told me every morning of my adult life that I belonged to someone — simply stopped.

Across the territory, wolves fell to their knees. I felt the shockwave of a severed mate bond broadcast through every mind-link in Silverfang, and I felt each of them recognize it for what it was.

My body convulsed on the stones. My hand tore free of the warrior's grip and reached for my neck, for the mark, for the place where he had been—

Cold skin.

Just cold skin.