After My Mate Rejected Me, I Ruined His Pack

The bond snapped at 8:47 on the longest night of the year.

I felt it before I understood it. One moment I was standing near the back of the banquet hall, one hand resting on the curve of my seven-month belly, pretending not to see Nina glitter at Nikolas's side in Luna white. The next, my mate's voice cut across the room like a blade dragged down a bone.

"I, Nikolas Turner, Alpha of the Ironveil Pack, reject you, Leighton Warren, as my mate and Luna."

The mark that was never there went cold first. Then it went empty. Like a door closing on an empty room, somewhere behind my sternum.

My knees folded. I caught myself on the edge of a serving table and the champagne flutes rattled. Inside my skull my wolf, Sable, lifted her head and howled once—one single, raw note—and then went silent. Not sleeping. Silent. Like someone had pressed a palm over her mouth and held it there.

I could smell Nina's honey-and-vanilla from across the hall, slick with triumph. I could smell the sour oak smoke rising off Nikolas's skin. I could not smell myself anymore. The jasmine was gone from my own wrists.

My belly moved. The pup kicked, hard, like he knew.

"Leighton." Nikolas's voice found me again, and this time it was layered with Alpha tone, that heavy iron pressure that drops down the spine of every wolf in the room. His eyes had gone flat. "Do not shift. Do not move."

My legs locked. My wolf, already gagged, sank further. I stood there with one hand on the table and one hand cradled under the baby and I could not even turn my head.

Two hundred pack members watched. Not one met my eyes.

Nina tilted her chin up at him and smiled the small, trembling smile she had been practicing in mirrors since she was fourteen.

The siren started seventeen seconds later.

It tore through the upper corridor speakers—three short bursts, the pack code for a rogue breach drill. Chairs scraped. Warriors moved. And through the roar in my ears I heard Nina's voice, breathless and bright, calling out, "The corridor! Get the Luna upstairs!" She meant herself. Of course she meant herself.

Two of her girls took my elbows instead.

I knew their faces. Marla. Devon. They had served me tea last month. Now their hands were steel and they were walking me, half-dragging me, up the back stairs toward the long corridor with the tall windows that overlooked the frozen courtyard. The Alpha-tone was still clamped around my wolf like a muzzle. I could not shift. I could not brace. My feet moved only because they pushed them.

At the end of the corridor the window was already open a hand's width. Someone had unlatched it earlier.

"Sorry," Devon whispered. She wasn't.

They shoved.

Glass is loud when it breaks around a pregnant body. I remember that. I remember the cold air hitting my face and the way the night sky tilted sideways and the single, stupid thought—

*cover him, cover him, cover him*—

as I twisted midair trying to put my back to the ground. Sable did not wake. Sable could not wake. Nikolas's command still sat on her throat.

I hit the ice.

---

I learned the rest from Julian Vance three days later, in the recovery room that smelled of antiseptic and sage.

"The pup didn't survive the impact," he said. He had the decency to look at my face when he said it, which was more than anyone else in that building had given me. "The uterine wall tore in four places. We stopped the bleeding. We could not save the... capacity."

Capacity. A clean word. A healer's word.

"Say it plain, Julian."

He closed the chart. "You will not carry again, Leighton. Not ever."

I nodded once. The sound I made was not a sob. I don't know what it was.

"And your wolf." He hesitated. "She has not surfaced since the fall. I'm calling it deep dormancy in the official report. Privately—" He stopped. Started again. "Privately I don't know if she comes back."

I pulled the collar of my gown down and pressed two fingers against the bare, unmarked skin where Nikolas's teeth should have sat five years ago. Nothing. A phantom ache, cold as the window glass.

I slid my hand down to the gauze across my stomach.

"Thank you, Julian."

He left.

---

One week after that, I stood in the back row of the great hall in a muted gray dress and watched Nikolas sink his teeth into Nina's throat.

She made a small sound. He held the bite. The pack cheered.

My neck burned where no mark would ever sit. I did not touch it. I did not blink. I counted the chandelier crystals above the dais and when I got to forty-seven the ceremony was over and people began to file past me without seeing me, which was, I was learning, the new shape of my life.

I waited until the hall emptied. I waited until the pack house went dark.

Then I walked out into the snow.

The wolfsbane ward-stones sit at seven points along Ironveil's border. I know because I set them. I have fed them my blood and my scent and three drops of pure silver tincture every full moon for five years, and not one wolf in this pack knows it, because I never told them, because I thought a Luna's work was supposed to be invisible.

I crouched at the north stone. The runes glowed faintly under the frost, waiting for my palm.

I pressed my hand flat against the stone. Felt the pull, the familiar ask.

And then I lifted my hand away.

The glow dimmed by a fraction. So small no patrol would notice tonight. Or tomorrow. Or next month.

I stood up. Brushed the snow from my knees. Looked east toward the next stone and did not walk to it.

Let them rot.

I was halfway back to the pack house when I saw the second-story window—the one I had gone through—still boarded over with raw pine. Someone was standing in the lit room beyond it. A silhouette with Nina's shape, honey-vanilla faint through the cold air. She was holding something up to the lamp. A length of chain. Thin. Dark. She was testing the weight.

She turned her head, as if she felt me watching.

I stepped back into the dark before her eyes could find mine, and behind me, very far away inside my chest, something that was not quite Sable—something older, something I did not yet have a name for—opened one silver eye.