After My Mate Rejected Me, My Lycan Family Found Me

The car ride to the neutral grounds was silent.

Vera sat across from me in the back seat, her clipboard on her lap, her painted mouth pressed thin. She had picked the dress herself — a dull gray thing with long sleeves and a high collar that hid the cold mark on my neck. She wanted me visible but forgettable. A ghost at my own funeral.

"You will walk in behind me," she said, without looking up. "You will not speak. When the pendant is presented, you will lower your head. Do you understand?"

I looked out the window at the passing pines.

"Do you understand?"

"Yes."

My hand pressed flat against my abdomen. The scar there felt hot tonight, humming under my palm like a wire with current in it. I hadn't slept. The three folded pages of pack accords were still tucked into the waistband of the dress, right against my skin. I could feel every crease.

Marcus hadn't looked at me yesterday either. I had stood in front of him in the corridor and held out the pages, and he had stared at the wall behind my head and said, *I have no authority here anymore, Scarlett. I'm sorry.* Then he walked past me.

So I had folded the pages back up and put them where they were now. Waiting.

The banquet hall on the neutral grounds was bigger than Ironveil's — an old stone lodge on the border, ringed with lanterns, packed with Alphas from every neighboring territory. I counted them as I walked in. Seven Alphas. Their mates. Their Betas. A hundred witnesses, maybe more.

Hudson was already at the front of the hall in a dark suit, Jolie on his arm in white. Her belly pushed the fabric out in a soft round curve. She turned her head as I entered and gave me the same small smile she had given me at the podium.

Vera walked me to a spot three paces behind them. "Stand," she murmured. "Don't move."

I stood.

Hudson raised his hand. The hall quieted.

"Tonight," he began, and his voice carried that easy Alpha weight, the one I used to love, "Ironveil formally presents its new Luna. Jolie Ortiz, who carries the pack's future in her womb."

Murmurs. Nods. A few polite claps from the Alphas closest to the front.

"The transition is witnessed," Vera said, stepping forward with her clipboard tucked under her arm. She turned to me. Her fingers came up to my throat.

I felt her nails first. Then the chain.

She lifted the Luna pendant off my neck in one clean motion, the way you'd lift a collar off a dog you were finished with. The clasp bit my skin as it came free. She walked past me without a glance and draped it around Jolie's neck. Jolie's fingers closed over it. She lifted her chin.

And something inside me — something that had been sleeping for a very long time — opened its eyes.

It was not Nova. Nova was gone.

This was older. Deeper. It rose up through my ribs like a tide breaking against stone, and the first thing I felt was the scent — my own scent — flooding out of me in a wave I couldn't hold back. Moonflower. Frost. So thick and cold and *alive* that the Alpha closest to me actually staggered, one hand flying to his throat.

The hall went still.

My bones cracked.

I heard it before I felt it — a sound like ice splitting on a lake — and then the pain hit, and then the *joy*, because whatever was inside me was not asking permission. My spine arched. My knees hit the marble. Fur, silver-white, boiled up along my arms. My jaw stretched. Somewhere very far away a woman screamed.

When I opened my eyes I was looking down at Hudson.

*Down* at him.

He stood frozen in his black suit, his face the color of paper, and his wolf — I could feel it, could *smell* it — was cowering flat inside him, belly to the ground, ears back. Jolie had dropped to her knees. The pendant swung at her throat.

Alphas were backing away from me. Chairs scraped. Someone knocked over a wine glass and it rolled across the floor.

And then, from the doorway, a single breath.

A man in a long black coat stood at the entrance of the hall. He inhaled once — deep, slow — and his eyes flashed a brilliant, terrible gold. He walked forward. The crowd parted for him without being told to. He crossed the hall in long strides, stopped ten feet from me, and looked up into my face.

His voice, when it came, silenced everything.

"This is my daughter."

He swept his gaze across the assembled Alphas.

"This is my blood. She is a Lycan Princess of the Montgomery line."

No one moved. No one breathed.

I shifted back.

It hurt less than the first time. My knees didn't buckle. I straightened up bare and unashamed in the middle of the hall, and one of his guards stepped forward and settled a long dark coat over my shoulders without a word. The wool smelled of pine and old smoke.

I didn't look at Hudson. I didn't look at Jolie. I walked past them — past Vera, whose clipboard had slid out of her hand and clattered on the marble — and I placed my hand in my father's.

His fingers closed around mine. Warm. Steady. He didn't say anything. He didn't need to.

At the threshold I stopped and turned back to the hall.

"By the Third Accord of the Old Court," I said, and my voice was not the voice I had knelt with on the marble two nights ago — it was clear and cold and it carried, "any treaty signed with a pack whose Alpha has rejected a Lycan-blooded mate is void. From this hour."

Three of the Alphas at the front lowered their eyes. One of them — old Bennett of the Grayridge Pack, whose border touched Ironveil's east — took one deliberate step away from Hudson.

Then another.

Then a third.

Hudson made a sound behind me. Small. Broken.

I did not look back.

I walked out into the cold night on my father's arm, and the doors closed behind us.