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AYDEN (Five Years Ago)

"Say it again."

Samantha's voice shakes, but she doesn't look away from me. My chest feels like it's caving in, but I don't let it show on my face. An alpha can't let anything show on his face.

The clearing is packed tighter than I've ever seen it. Every warrior, every elder, every packmember who could walk here stands shoulder to shoulder under the moon, and every single one of them is watching me intensely. Torches line the edge of the gathering ground, and the smoke drifts low and slow, catching the moonlight like a held breath.

"Samantha Nonis," I say. "I reject you as my mate."

She stares at me like she's trying to memorize what I look like right before I ruin her life. Her eyes are dry, but they're wide, searching my face for some sign that I don't mean it, that this is some cruel test I'll take back the second the words are out.

I don't take it back.

"You don't mean that," she whispers. "Ayden, look at me. You don't mean that."

I do look at her. That's the problem. I look at her and I want to take it all back. I want to cross the space between us, pull her into my chest, and tell the entire pack to go home and forget they ever heard me say a word. But Elder Frois is standing at the edge of the circle with his arms crossed, and three days ago he told me exactly what would happen to Moonclaw if I mated a warrior's daughter with no pack standing while Stormfang Pack circles our borders looking for any excuse to call us weak.

"A pack sniffs out weakness before it sniffs out war," he'd said, sitting across from me in my own office with full dominance. "Give Stormfang a Luna they can laugh at, and you give them a reason to attack. You don't have that luxury, Alpha…not this year."

I told him I'd think about it. I didn't sleep after that conversation. Not once, not for three days, and now I'm standing here doing the very thing I swore to myself I wouldn't do.

"I mean it," I say. "You're not fit to be Luna of this pack."

The words taste like poison coming out of my mouth. Each one costs me something I don't think I'll ever get back. Her hand goes to her stomach for just a second, so fast I almost miss it, before she catches herself and drops it back to her side like she's embarrassed by the instinct.

I don't understand it at the moment. I will understand it, eventually, and by then it will be far too late to matter.

"Fine," she says, and her voice has gone flat and cold in a way I've never heard from her. Not once, not in the two years I've known her, not even the day her mother died and she still managed to hold herself together for her father's sake. "Then I reject you too, Alpha Ayden Hogan. I denounce the Moonclaw Pack."

The pack bond between us rips apart. It feels like someone reached into my chest and tore something out by the root, and for one blinding second, the whole clearing goes white at the edges. I stagger, just slightly, and lock my knees so I don't fall in front of my own people. My wolf howls somewhere inside me, a long and furious sound that has nowhere to go.

"Samantha,"

"Don't," she says. "You made your choice. I'm making mine."

She turns and walks through the crowd, and nobody stops her. Nobody even looks at her, because that's what a rejection means, she's nothing to this pack now, and my orders were clear before I ever said the words out loud. I watch the crowd part around her like she's already a ghost. A few warriors glance my way instead, waiting to see if I'll change my mind, waiting to see if any of this was real.

I don't move. I stand there and let her walk out of the only home she's had since she was sixteen years old, and I don't move a single muscle to stop it.

I watch her walk away and I tell myself this is what strength looks like. This is what protecting my pack looks like. I tell myself that until the words stop meaning anything at all, until they're just sounds I'm repeating to keep myself standing upright in front of everyone who's counting on me to look unshaken.

The crowd disperses slowly after that, in twos and threes, murmuring low to each other in the dark. Nobody approaches me. Nobody ever does, after something like this. I stand alone in the clearing until the torches burn down and the only sound left is the wind moving through the trees, and even then I don't leave. I don't know what I'm waiting for. Maybe some part of me is hoping she'll come back and tell me she didn't mean it either.

She doesn't come back.

That night, Lucian finds me in my office with a bottle I haven't opened yet. He doesn't say anything at first. He just sits down across from me, the way he's done a hundred times before, and waits.

"You didn't have to do it in front of everyone," he says finally.

"Elder Frois wanted it public. I wanted no room for doubt."

"You could have told him no."

"I'm the Alpha, Lucian. I don't get to want things."

He doesn't answer that, because we both know it isn't true. I wanted plenty of things. I wanted her. I still do, sitting here with my hands shaking around a bottle of whiskey like a coward.

Lucian pours himself a glass without hesitating and I let him. He's the only one who ever gets to see me like this. Every other pack member needs the Alpha to be steady and cold. Lucian just needs me to stop pretending in front of him, at least for one night.

"Frois is going to come to you tomorrow acting as if he did you a favor," Lucian says.

"He'll be right, on paper."

"On paper isn't the same as right." He turns his glass slowly, watching the liquid catch the lamplight. "You know that better than anyone. You just won't let yourself say it out loud."

"Saying it out loud doesn't undo it."

"No," he agrees. "It doesn't."

We sit in silence for a long while after that, the kind of silence that used to be comfortable between us now just feels heavy. Somewhere out past the window, the pack has gone quiet for the night. No howls. No laughter drifting up from the training grounds. Just the wind and my own wolf pacing somewhere far beneath my skin, refusing to settle.

"You should sleep," Lucian says eventually, standing.

"I will."

He doesn't believe me, and he's right not to, but he leaves anyway. 

I sit there long after he's gone, staring at the bottle. I don't do anything except replay the sound of her voice breaking the pack bond over and over until the sun starts to come up outside my window.

I tell myself, that first morning, that the pain will fade. That in a year I won't remember the exact color her eyes turned right before she walked away. That in five years this will just be a decision I made for the good of my pack, filed away with all the other hard decisions an Alpha has to live with.

What I don't know yet, what I won't find out for five more years, is that Samantha didn't just walk away from the pack that night.

She walked away carrying something of mine that I would have burned the world down to protect, if only I'd known it existed.