When My Alpha Rejected Me, the Lycan Prince Chose Me

The war room door was cracked open the width of a knife blade, and Weston's laugh came through it at 11:47 the night before our Mate Ceremony.

I had the ceremonial mating furs folded across both arms—white fox at the collar, silver-tipped along the hem, the stitching I'd worked at for six weeks until my fingers cramped. My wolf was a faint hum under the day's wolfsbane, no louder than a moth against glass. I'd stopped in the corridor to shift the weight of the furs, nothing more. That was when I heard my own name.

"Aurelia?" Weston said, and the tone was so easy, so unhurried, that for a second I thought he was calling me in. "She's a cheap knock-off of Milana whose only use is that the Moon Goddess stamped the right scent on her."

Someone snorted. His Beta, probably. The warriors made the low, agreeable noise wolves make when their Alpha has said something they were waiting to hear.

"Mark her tomorrow," Weston went on. "Get the bloodline locked. Milana takes the Luna's seat by month's end. Aurelia can keep whatever title we throw her—breeder, consort, I don't care. Milana runs the house."

"And she won't fight it?" the Beta asked.

"With what?" Weston's voice curled around the word. "Her wolf's been on wolfsbane for two years. She'd thank me for a warm bed and a quiet corner."

More laughter. Comfortable, familiar laughter, the kind men share when they've been sharing it for a long time.

I stood in the corridor and counted. Two years. Twenty-three months of taking the pills he handed me each morning, of watching Milana touch his sleeve at the dinner table and telling myself she was his friend, of stitching white fox onto silver for a ceremony he had already gutted.

My hands loosened. The furs slid down my arms and hit the floor in a soft, expensive heap. I didn't pick them up.

My wolf surged—one hot, thin spike that shot up my spine and cracked against the wolfsbane ceiling like a fish against ice. Then flat again. *Wrong,* she said, without words. *Wrong, wrong, wrong.* I pressed my back to the wall so I wouldn't fall.

The mark on the side of my neck went cold. Not warm-cold, the way skin cools after a fever—*cold*, the way a door closes on an empty room. I pressed a fist against my sternum and made myself breathe through my teeth.

I didn't weep. I moved.

I walked past the war room without looking through the gap. I walked past the great hall where the dais had already been dressed for morning. I walked to my quarters and I tore the ceremonial garlands off my door—dried mountain laurel, hand-braided by the Omega girls who'd smiled at me because they thought I would be kind to them once I was Luna—and I dropped them in the corridor too. Someone else could sweep.

I sat on the edge of my bed with the lamp off and I did the only thing I could still do.

I remembered.

Every patrol rotation Weston had signed off on. Every border log I'd glimpsed on his desk while pretending not to look. The three rogue reports last spring that didn't match the tracks I'd smelled on the eastern ridge. The falsified head-count from the winter cull. The name of the trader who came to the back gate on new moons and left with envelopes Weston's Beta thought I hadn't seen.

I filed it. All of it. In my head, in the dark, while my mark burned cold against my collarbone and my wolf lay flat inside me like something waiting to be told it could stand up again.

By the time grey light reached the window, I had a weapon. He didn't know I had it. He didn't know I had anything.

I was at the servants' door with a coat over my arm and the border two miles east when the Beta stepped out of the shadow of the boot room and put his hand around my elbow.

"Alpha wants you on the dais," he said. His grip wasn't gentle. "Ceremony's moved up."

The hall was already full when he walked me in.

Weston stood at the center in his ceremonial black, and he did not look surprised to see me arrive with a bruise blooming under the Beta's fingers. Milana sat in the front row in cream silk, ankles crossed, hands folded. She had rehearsed her posture. I could see it in the angle of her shoulders.

Weston did not wait for the pack's murmur to settle. He didn't need to.

"I, Weston, Alpha of Ironcliff," he said, clear and calm, "reject you, Aurelia, as my mate and Luna."

The mark on my neck split open like a fault line—a fissure of burning cold tearing across my skin, and every wolf in the hall saw it happen. My wolf howled once, thin and terrible, and went silent.

My knees buckled.

I hit the dais.

Milana rose from her chair, stepped over my ribs at the angle she'd practiced, and sat down in the Luna's seat.

Weston did not look back.