After My Mate Rejected Me, the Lycan Prince Claimed Me

The bond burned open at 9:47 on the night before my Mate Ceremony.

I was sitting at my vanity, pinning my grandmother's moonstone pendant at my throat, when heat tore across the mark on my neck like someone had pressed a coal there. I dropped the pin. My hand flew up. Under my fingers the mark was pulsing — not with pain, exactly. With teeth.

Someone else's teeth.

I felt them break skin. Not mine. Hers.

The bond funneled it straight into my body — the pressure of a jaw closing down, the drag of tongue over the wound, the intimate, obscene electricity of a marking that was not happening to me. Jasmine flooded my senses. Thick, sweet, cloying. It layered over Jaxon's scent until I could not find him underneath it anymore. He was gone. He was inside her.

My wolf — silent for three years — let out one small whimper in the hollow of my chest.

Then she went still.

I sat very carefully. I did not cry. I looked at the woman in the mirror and did not recognize the shape of her mouth.

The Mate Ceremony was tomorrow.

---

The banquet hall smelled like roasted meat and pine candles and, underneath it all, jasmine.

I took the Luna's seat because I had earned it. My spine was straight. My hands were folded. The mark on my neck was burning cold now — that strange dead cold that comes after a fire has gone out and the stones still remember it.

Jaxon stood at the head of the table. He did not look at me.

"I, Jaxon Ellis, Alpha of the Ironvale Pack," he said, and every wolf in the room went quiet, "reject you, Aspen Wells, as my mate and Luna."

A breath moved through the hall. Not a gasp. Something smaller. Recognition.

"Your scarred, wolfless body is unworthy of standing beside an Alpha."

The mark on my neck closed like a door in an empty room.

I felt it go. The bond had lived on that patch of skin for three years. Now there was nothing. A cold circle where a person used to be.

Giana stepped forward in a green dress. She slid her hand into Jaxon's like she had rehearsed it. Her jasmine scent bloomed through the hall.

No one spoke.

I looked down the long table. Wolves I had bandaged. Wolves I had cooked for on winter feast nights. Wolves whose pups I had rocked in my own arms. Every one of them dropped their eyes to their plates.

I pressed two fingers to the base of my neck. The mark was cold under them. Not tender. Not warm. Cold like a stone in a river.

I stood up.

I walked out of the hall.

My heels sounded very loud on the wood floor. No one said my name.

---

I went back to the pack house for one thing.

My grandmother's pendant was on the entry table where I had left it while I dressed. I stepped through the door and Jaxon was already there, standing in the middle of the room with Giana tucked under his arm like a coat.

"How long?" I said.

My voice came out low. It always does when I'm furious.

Giana smiled at me. Then she reached over and picked up my pendant.

She let it swing from her fingers. She weighed it. Slowly. Deliberately. I watched her make the choice before she made it.

"Oh, honey," she said. "You should have let this go a long time ago."

She threw it.

The moonstone hit the stone floor and shattered — not into pieces, into dust. Silver-white dust. My grandmother's bloodline scattered under a stranger's shoes.

Something broke open behind my ribs.

I moved.

One step. That was all I took. One step toward the woman who had just erased my grandmother from the world.

Jaxon's hand caught my shoulder and threw me back.

I did not see the display case coming. I felt it — the silver edge of the ceremonial shelf catching the fabric of my dress, then the skin underneath, then deeper. All thirty scars across my back split open at once. Three years of sealed wounds tore apart in a single breath.

I heard my dress rip. I heard something wet hit the floor.

I went down on the stone.

There were witnesses in the doorway. I counted them without meaning to. Twelve. Fifteen. More behind them.

Not one of them moved.

Jaxon was already turning back to Giana, checking her face, her hands, her hair. As if she had been the one shoved. As if I were furniture that had fallen over.

Blood was pooling under me. I could feel it soaking through the back of my dress into the stone.

I put my palm flat against the display case.

I pushed.

My arms shook. My back was screaming. I could feel the wolfsbane burn waking up in every scar like something remembering how to speak.

I stood up.

I walked past Jaxon. I walked past Giana. I walked past every wolf in that doorway and none of them touched me and none of them looked at me and I left a footprint of blood on every stone.

My car was in the drive. My files were in the trunk — three years of rogue-movement notes in my own handwriting, catalogued by date and border sector.

I drove north.

Somewhere past the boundary line, my wolf stirred once inside me. A pulse. Warm. Underwater. Then quiet again.

I did not look in the rearview mirror.

Ahead of me, past the black trees, the Silvercrest border was waiting.

And behind me, in the pack house I had bled for, Giana was already laughing.