My Mate Rejected Me for My Younger Sister

Two weeks. Two weeks of smiling at the right moments, eating at the right table, sleeping in a room that smelled like cedar and cold stone and nothing like mine. Two weeks of being composed, grateful, obedient — all the things my father had ordered me to be on my knees.

I had gotten very good at it.

The Grant Thanksgiving Banquet was the biggest event on the Ironcrest calendar. Every Alpha within three territories came. Their Lunas came. Their Betas came. The great hall was dressed in amber and gold, long tables draped in white linen, candles burning in iron chandeliers overhead. It smelled like roasted venison and expensive wine and the particular kind of power that gathers when too many dominant wolves sit in one room.

I wore navy. Simple, clean, appropriate. I had chosen it carefully.

Elijah sat at the head of the table. I sat at his left, as Luna. That was the tradition. That was the arrangement.

Margo sat at his right.

She arrived twenty minutes after everyone else, which I suspected was intentional. The crimson gown was floor-length, backless, cut to make every head in the room turn. It worked. It always worked with Margo. She laughed at something Elijah's Beta said as she took her seat, and Elijah — my mate, my Alpha — pulled her chair out for her himself.

Silas caught my eye from down the table. Just for a second. Then he looked away.

I picked up my wine glass and took a slow, even sip.

*Don't react*, Sable murmured. *They're watching you.*

She was right. The visiting Alphas were watching. Their Lunas were watching. Everyone in that hall was cataloguing every flicker of my expression, waiting to see what the substitute Luna would do when her mate seated her sister at his right hand and called it hospitality.

I gave them nothing.

Elijah toasted the pack's harvest season. Standard. Then he toasted the visiting Alphas. Expected. Then he raised his glass toward Margo and said, with that quiet, certain voice of his, "And to Margo Howell, who ran the Ridgeback trail with me last spring and beat my time by four seconds. I haven't forgiven her yet."

Laughter rolled through the hall. Warm, easy laughter. The kind that only happens when an Alpha is relaxed.

Margo smiled like she'd been waiting for it. "Five seconds, actually," she said, and touched her glass to his.

I watched Elijah's mouth curve. I had seen that expression maybe twice in eight months. I had never been the one to put it there.

I cut a small piece of venison and chewed it carefully and tasted nothing.

The evening stretched. Courses came and went. The Alpha from the Ashford territory — a broad man named Callum with silver at his temples — leaned across the table to ask me something about the Ironcrest's eastern border expansion. I set down my fork and opened my mouth.

"My Luna speaks when I permit her to."

Elijah's voice. Flat. Carrying. Not loud, but it didn't need to be loud. The Alpha tone was a thin, cold wire threaded under the words, and it hit the room like a dropped glass.

Silence.

Callum blinked. His gaze dropped to the table. He reached for his wine.

I lowered myself back into my seat. My spine was straight. My hands were folded in my lap. My face was a wall.

Inside, Sable was screaming.

Not at Elijah. Not even at Margo, who had gone very still beside him with the careful blankness of someone trying not to smile. Sable was screaming at me. *Get up. Get up. Get up.*

I didn't. I sat through the remaining courses with my hands in my lap and my face arranged into something that could pass for composure. When the dessert cart appeared at the kitchen door, I folded my napkin, set it beside my plate, and said quietly to no one in particular, "Excuse me."

No one stopped me.

Elijah didn't look up.

***

I made it to the Luna chambers before my body betrayed me.

Third time that week. I knelt on the cold bathroom tile and waited for it to pass, my forehead against the cabinet, my hands shaking. When it was over I sat back against the wall and just breathed for a while.

The locked drawer of the vanity had a small key I kept on a ribbon inside my shoe. I'd taken the herbal test from the pack healer's supply closet eleven days ago and told myself I was being paranoid.

I wasn't being paranoid.

I sat on the edge of the tub and stared at the result for a long time. The candle on the windowsill guttered. Somewhere below, I could hear the faint sound of the banquet still going — glass, laughter, the low pulse of Elijah's voice carrying through the floor.

Sable didn't say anything. She surfaced slowly, like something rising from very deep water, and she pressed herself against the inside of my ribs, and she was quiet.

I pressed both hands flat against my stomach.

It was a small thing. Barely a beginning. But it was mine. The only thing in this pack house, in this life, in any of this — that was entirely, completely mine.

And I would not let this place take it.

*We leave*, I told her. My voice didn't shake. Not even inside my own head. *Soon. Before anything else can be taken from us.*

Sable pressed closer.

I sat on the cold tile floor of a Luna's bathroom that had never felt like mine, and I began to count what I had. What I could carry. What I could sell.

I had three months. Maybe four.

It would have to be enough.