When My Mate Rejected Me, the Lycan Prince Claimed Me

The mark on my neck was still warm when Sterling said my name for the last time as his mate.

He stood on the dais with Layla's fingers curled around his forearm, both of them dressed in white, torches throwing gold light across two hundred faces that had gathered to watch. I stood in the crowd where I'd stood for five years—near the back, unremarkable, useful only when summoned. The garlands on the walls were the same ones from our mating anniversary. Someone had forgotten to take them down, or hadn't bothered.

Sterling turned. He found me across the room the way he used to find exits.

"I, Sterling Ashford, Alpha of Ironveil Pack, reject you, Grace Sullivan, as my mate and Luna."

The mark went cold first. Then it went hollow, like a door shutting on an empty house. I felt the bond snap somewhere behind my sternum, a physical crack that every wolf in that hall must have felt too, because the whole room flinched at once, a ripple of shoulders and jaws going tight. My knees buckled. I went down on stone that had never once been swept clean of my blood, my miscarriage blood, five years of it soaked invisibly into the grout.

Something in my chest snarled. Not me—her. The wolf I'd never met, clawing up through wolfsbane fog for the first time in my life, a growl building low and furious in a throat that wasn't fully mine yet. I felt her rage flare white-hot behind my ribs. Then the chemical leash yanked her back down and she went silent, and I was just a woman on the floor again, alone in a room full of people who did not move.

Layla smiled. She didn't even try to hide it.

Sterling did not look back.

They carried me out—not to the healer's wing, never that, but to a storage room at the back of the pack house, past crates of folding chairs and boxes of old Beltane decorations. Someone dropped me on a bare cot and left the door cracked, and through it I could hear the celebration start up again almost immediately. Music. Laughter. Layla's voice, bright as a struck bell, telling someone she'd never doubted she'd come home.

I pressed my fingers to my neck. The mark was cooling under my skin like a coal going to ash. I thought about the pup. I thought about nothing at all for a long time.

Connor came for me after midnight.

I knew his footsteps before I saw him—had known them since we were children, since he used to carry me on his back through the woods behind our mother's house. He stood in the doorway with a syringe already uncapped, the liquid inside darker than standard doses, thick with too much wolfsbane to be anything but a weapon.

"Grace, listen to me." His voice was steady, rehearsed, a script someone else had written and he'd memorized too well. "You're bond-severed. That makes you volatile. Layla says—she says you're a danger to the pack right now, to everyone, and I need you somewhere safe until it passes. You'll wake up safe. I promise."

"Connor." It came out as barely a breath. I reached for his sleeve, my fingers closing weak around the fabric. "It's me."

He looked at my hand on his arm like it belonged to someone else.

The needle went in before I finished saying his name. Concentrated wolfsbane hit my bloodstream like a struck match thrown into gasoline, and for one white second every nerve in my body screamed at once. I heard him say, "I'm sorry," already turning his face away from mine so he wouldn't have to watch it land.

The last thing I saw before the dark folded over me was the back of his head.

I don't remember the ropes. I don't remember the truck bed, or the hours of dark highway, or the cold that must have come through the metal floor. I surfaced once, briefly, to headlights and the smell of pine and diesel, and a voice I didn't know saying, "That her?"

And Connor's voice, flat now, business-quick: "That's her. Layla said the Beta title's confirmed once she's gone."

A second voice, rougher, amused. "Pleasure doing business, Sullivan."

Hands closed around my ankles. I felt myself lifted, passed from one grip to another like cargo, and somewhere above me a man I would later learn was named Viktor Crane laughed once, low, and said, "Pretty thing. Ironveil's loss."

The truck doors slammed. My brother did not stay to watch me disappear into the dark.