Rejected at the Banquet: My Mate Chose the Servant Over Me

I wore the green dress because Brody once said it made my eyes look like moonlight on still water. That was eight months ago, standing in the kitchen of my small Thornfield cottage, and he'd smiled at me like I was the only thing worth looking at. I'd believed him. God help me, I'd believed every word.

The Harvest Moon Banquet was supposed to be ours. Three years together. I'd even asked Elara to save us seats near the front.

I walked into the hall and the first thing I noticed was the crowd. Everyone was already gathered around the ceremonial stage, which wasn't unusual for a banquet opening. The second thing I noticed was Adrianna Snyder standing on that stage beside Brody, wearing my moonstone collar.

I stopped walking.

The collar was custom-made. A graduated string of raw moonstones set in silver, each stone hand-selected from my family's Silverpeak estate. I knew every single bead. I'd worn it at my fifteenth birthday. I'd packed it away carefully in a cedar box in the estate's east wing three years ago when I came to Thornfield to live simply, to live quietly, to live like a girl who didn't carry a king's bloodline in her veins.

Adranna had it around her throat like she'd been born with it.

And on her wrist—the crescent-moon charm bracelet. The one I'd designed myself. The one I'd pressed into her hands two years ago when she was crying in the training yard, convinced she'd never be more than what she was born into. I'd told her the crescent moon meant you were always becoming. I'd meant it as a gift.

She was using it as a costume.

Brody stepped to the microphone. His voice was warm and steady, the same voice that used to say my name like it meant something.

"I want to share something with this pack tonight," he said. "Something I should have understood sooner." He reached for Adrianna's hand. "Adrianna Snyder carries true Lycan blood. She is the she-wolf the Moon Goddess placed in my path. She is meant to be my Luna."

The hall went quiet in that particular way that means everyone is holding their breath.

Then he looked directly at me.

I had wondered, in some distant theoretical part of my mind, what it would feel like. The formal rejection. I'd heard about it from others—the way the words hit like a physical blow, the way the bond-pain moved through you like something tearing.

I hadn't understood.

"I, Brody Weaver, reject you, Bella, as my chosen mate."

The pain arrived before the words finished. It started in my chest and moved outward, fast and total, like every nerve in my body had been dipped in fire. My wolf screamed—not out loud, but inside my skull, a long raw howl that no one in that hall could hear. My knees wanted to buckle. My hands went cold.

Every wolf in the room was watching me.

I breathed in through my nose. Out through my mouth. I kept my chin level.

I turned and walked out.

Not fast. Not stumbling. I walked the way I'd been trained to walk since I was old enough to understand what I was—with my back straight and my face giving nothing away. I heard the murmur start behind me as the doors swung shut.

Outside, the night was cold and the lanterns along the path blurred a little at the edges. I stopped walking when I reached the oak tree at the far end of the courtyard, the one with roots thick enough to sit on, and I let myself have one breath. Just one. A long, shuddering exhale that I pressed my fist against my sternum to hold in.

The bond-pain came in waves. I let them come.

My wolf was silent now. Not calm—silent. The kind of silence that comes after a howl when the sound is still ringing in the air.

I stood there in the dark and I thought about the moonstone collar. About the crescent bracelet. About the way Adrianna had stood beside him like she'd earned it, wearing my scent—I'd caught it the moment I walked in, my own custom oil blend, cedar blossom and white sage, on another woman's skin.

I thought about how long that must have taken. How many trips to Silverpeak. How many small thefts, carefully spaced.

The grief was still there. I won't pretend it wasn't. Three years of my life. Three years of choosing him, funding him, believing in him.

But underneath the grief, something else was already moving. Quiet and cold and very, very precise.

I pulled out my phone and opened a new document.

Moonstone collar. Crescent bracelet. Scent oil—cedar blossom blend, batch three.

I started a list.

By morning, I was going to know exactly what she'd taken. Every vial, every stone, every item she'd lifted from my family's estate over three years to build herself a crown out of my things.

And then I was going to figure out exactly how to take it all back.