Chapter 2:The Pains of Being Rejected

The pain was immediate.

It was like being torn in half.

Not a metaphor. I felt it physically a ripping sensation in the center of my chest, hot and devastating, like something that had just begun to grow had been pulled out by the root. My vision went white at the edges. My knees buckled. I grabbed the nearest thing, the ceremonial stone pillar to my right and held on.

Breathe, I told myself. Breathe. Do not fall. Do not fall in front of all of them.

The murmuring around me was growing. I could hear my name moving through the crowd. Could hear the pity in it, and the gossip in it, and worse the satisfaction in some of it. Of course nobody got rejected. Of course. What did she expect?

"Lyra." Sera's voice, furious and close. "Lyra, look at me

"I'm fine," I said.

My voice came out steady.

I don't know how. Every part of me was breaking and my voice came out steady, and I stood up straight, and I let go of the pillar, and I looked Damien Voss directly in his grey-green eyes.

He was watching me. And this time there was something there. A tightening around his jaw,a muscle flickering. Something that might, in a different man, have been guilt.

I held his gaze for three seconds.

Then I turned my back on him.

I walked out of the Ceremony Circle with my head high and my hands clenched into fists at my sides and Sera's voice behind me calling my name, and I kept walking, past the torches, past the whispering crowd, past all of it, until the forest swallowed me whole.

And then I ran.

I ran until my legs gave out.

Until there was nothing around me but dark trees and cold air and the red light of that hateful moon filtering through the branches above me. Until the sounds of the ceremony were so far away they might have been happening in another world.

Then I dropped to my knees in the dirt.

And I fell apart.

I don't know how long I stayed there. Long enough for the cold to seep through my dress and into my skin. Long enough for my tears to dry on my cheeks. Long enough for the sobs to run out and leave behind something quieter.

Something harder.

I sat back on my heels and stared up at the moon through the branches.

She stared back at me. Red and enormous and silent.

"Why?" I whispered.

The forest didn't answer.

But something else did.

The scar on my collarbone, the old mark I'd had since birth, that no healer could explain suddenly burned,Not a little ,Not like a bruise or a sting. It burned like something had pressed a flame directly to my skin, and I gasped and grabbed it with both hands.

But then underneath the burning I felt something move.

Something deep inside me. Ancient and immense, the way a mountain is immense, not loud, just vast, so much bigger than anything I had words for. It pressed against the inside of my ribs like it was testing the walls. Like it had been locked up for a very long time and had just realized the door was cracked.

The rejection, I would understand much later, had cracked it.

My wolf went completely still. And even though she was my own wolf, part of me sounded afraid.

*What are you?* she whispered. Not to me. To the thing waking up inside us.

The blood moon pulsed above the trees.

And from somewhere deep in the dark of the Ashwood, something answered.

Not in words. In feeling. In a warmth that rolled through me like a wave —gentle, powerful, ancient and settled in my chest in the exact place where the mate bond had just been destroyed.

Like a space had opened up.

Like something was coming to fill it.

I pressed my hand flat against my collarbone and felt my scar pulse slow, steady like a second heartbeat.

*Not one,* something whispered in the back of my mind, in a voice that was not my wolf and not quite my own. A voice like moonlight. Like deep water. Like very old things.

*Not one, little vessel.*

*Two.*

I didn't understand.

Not yet.

But in the Ceremony Circle behind me, Damien Voss was accepting congratulations on his upcoming union with Nadia Storme. He was shaking hands and nodding and being exactly the cold, strategic Alpha he had always been.

And somewhere in the dark of the Ashwood, something that had been sleeping for two hundred years had just opened its eyes.

Because of me.

*Because of what he had done to me.*

I stood up slowly.

My dress was dirty. My knees were scraped. My eyes were swollen and my chest felt hollow and I was cold down to my bones.

But I stood up.

I looked back in the direction of the ceremony at the distant glow of the torches, at the faint sound of celebration carried on the wind.

He had rejected me in front of everyone.

He had felt our bond and looked me in the eye and chosen someone else, and now he was back there laughing and planning his future and I was nothing to him. A loose end. A footnote. An inconvenient omega girl the moon had made a mistake about.

That was what he thought.

I took a slow breath of cold forest air.

Something shifted in my chest, that vast, ancient warmth settling deeper, making itself at home.

*Okay*, I thought.

*Okay, Damien Voss.*

*You have no idea what you just woke up.*