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Chapter One
“I, Alpha of the Silverclan Pack, hereby,reject you as my mate.”
Alpha Jordan announced loudly and I knelt in front of the whole pack grabbing him by the leg in silent pleading.
I had just been named his mate, and without delay, he outright rejected me.
For the first time since the Silverclan Pack was formed, an alpha rejected his mate.
I knelt down there, unable to move, feeling utterly humiliated. I could hear the vile laughs and Snickers from the female members of our pack who were jealous of my supposed good fortune and I was sure nothing made them happier than witnessing my humiliation.
“No, Alpha, you can’t reject your mate or the moon goddess will be pissed with you.” Elder Marion, the elder in charge of the mating ceremony counselled but Alpha Jordan payed no heed.
“And when she gets pissed with me, what is the worst that could happen? She would curse me? I prefer to be cursed all my life because marrying her would be worse than any curse in this world,” he said amidst gasps.
I covered my head, hoping the ground would swallow me as tears streamed down my face. I would forever be seen as the girl who got rejected by her mate.
I looked up to see the pack slowly dispersing, and my elder sister walked up to me and helped me up.
“Cheer up. You are not the first person to be rejected by an alpha,” she consoled.
“But I am,” I replied as she helped me back to our house, very near the pack’s house.
She helped me to a seat and gave me my favorite milkshake to help me feel better.
“Don’t worry. Once Dad and Mom come back from the hunt, I’m sure they will convince his parents to make him change his mind.”
“Change his mind? I don’t even want to marry him. I don’t want to marry someone that does not want me, and I certainly don’t want to marry a jerk like him,” I said, still feeling sad and humiliated.
“Well, make sure to tell our parents. I’m sure they will try to force you,” she said.
I cocked up at her in surprise. Normally, she would advise me to rebel when she felt our parents would try to force me to do anything she felt they would like.
Now she was asking me to stand up to them just as we were coming inside. The door opened and our mother stepped in, looking really disturbed.
“I heard what happened,” she said, hugging me tightly.
“It’s probably for the best. If he accepted me, I would have lived the rest of my life in misery,” I said.
“For the best? You must be out of your mind. Your father is with Jordan’s father now, and they are trying to change his mind,” my mother said in a high tone, visibly annoyed with me.
“But I don’t want to marry him, especially not after he humiliated me in front of everyone. I don’t want to be the girl who was forced herself on the alpha.”
“So why did you cry when he rejected you?” my mom asked.
“Because he rejected me in front of the whole pack and announced he would rather be cursed than marry me.”
“Whether or not you like him, you are going to marry him. We can’t let this chance to get close to the alpha pass us by,” she said.
“She doesn’t like him. You should not force her to go and—” my sister was saying, but a cold stare from our mother shut her up.
Just then, our door opened and Dad stepped in wearing his hunting gear, followed by Jordan’s father and mother, with Jordan trailing behind, followed by four of his popular goons.
Silence descended on the room as they walked in. I stared at Jordan, praying he had not come to humiliate me again.
“I am very sorry for what happened while we were away. I’m sure Jordan must not have meant what he said, and he is here to apologize,” Lucas Jordan’s father apologized.
There was no atom of remorse or apology in his tone. This was the first time I had seen him apologize to someone—or even mock-apologize.
Jordan hesitated for a moment, looking at me like I was a disgusting piece of garbage.
“I accept you as my mate,” he said in a mocking tone.
“Good. He has apologized,” my father said, sounding pleased.
“Now you two should hug and let bygones be bygones,” Alpha Lucas ,Jordan’s father said, a smile appearing on his crooked face.
“I accept you as my mate?” How could that pass as an apology? It was more of an insult, I thought, as Lucas smirked and spread open his hand, giving me an emotionless hug.
His mouth got close to my ear so I could hear his breath and feel it on my ear. Then he whispered inaudibly so only I could hear him.
“After the wedding, I am going to make your life miserable and then kill you in the most brutal way. Mark my word.”
His tone stated he was not playing around.
The days after Turner's declaration settled into something I hadn't expected—not a sudden shift in the pack's rhythm, but a quiet tying-off of every loose thread the war had left dangling.Victoria presented her case against the compromised elder privately, laying out everything she'd traced back to his connections with Jordan's network, and Turner removed him from the council without any public announcement at all, keeping the pack's stability intact rather than turning it into spectacle. The elder accepted it without drama, retreating to a plot of land on the outer edge of pack territory with the clear understanding that his silence going forward was the price of being allowed to stay at all. He kept it.The diplomatic accord with the southern pack was formalized not long after, Dama's representative and Victoria signing the agreement together in the same council chamber where everything else had been decided these past months. The second allied pack, leaderless and scattered in the
Erin delivered her verdict a week after the battle. "You're cleared for light activity," she said, and I had my boots on before she'd finished the sentence."Light," she said again, sharper. "Activity.""Noted," I said, already halfway to the door.Walking back out into the pack proper felt strange after a week confined to one room, and the effect of it on the wolves around me was immediate—shoulders straightening, murmurs of relief passing warrior to warrior as I moved through the grounds. A young sentry near the gate said, "Alpha," and the word carried more welcome in it than I had ever heard it hold before.I made my way through the pack systematically, the way I always did, checking every repair site, speaking with every warrior who crossed my path. I found Victoria first, and we went through the war report together—diplomatic status with the southern pack now fully secured, the remaining Silverclan alliance in tatters, the pack itself stable enough that she seemed almost relaxed
Three days after the battle, the pack settled into the slower work of recovery—repairing what fire and claws had torn apart, tending the wounded who still needed daily care, honoring the fallen with quiet ceremonies I found myself grateful to be included in rather than watching from a careful distance.I joined the repair crews without a second thought, carrying materials alongside warriors I'd trained beside for months now, and it struck me at some point during that first morning that I no longer felt like a guest here, or even a ward taken in out of pity. I moved through the work the way everyone else did, because I belonged to it the same way they did.Reo shadowed me through most of it, having apparently appointed himself my unofficial aide sometime during the battle's aftermath, and I found I didn't mind the company at all. In the evenings, once the heaviest work had wound down, I taught him a basic combat drill in the training yard, and his gratitude for it was so uncomplicated
Chapter Forty-FiveI was sitting up in the healing room, recovering faster than Erin had projected, when the border report reached me. Jordan had been sighted at the edge of a neutral pack's territory, in wolf form, and had not shifted back in two full days.The neutral pack's scouts described his behavior in careful, clinical terms—confused, circling, unresponsive to voice commands from his own remaining men, a wolf that no longer seemed to recognize the border between itself and the man who was supposed to command it.I had Victoria pulled from her own recovery work to look at the historical record before I said a word of it to anyone else."It's documented," she said, after a long moment studying the older texts. "When a Lunara's wolf dominates another wolf, and the lesser wolf refuses the submission rather than yielding to it, the wolf and the person can fracture. The wolf simply takes over. Permanently, in every case the old records describe.""Can he be helped?" I asked."He ref
Gregory and I reached the eastern treeline with just enough darkness left to cover our approach, and from the cover of the trees I got my first look at the rendezvous point. Jordan stood at the secondary entrance with Erin beside him, her hands bound, unharmed but visibly terrified, four guards positioned around them both. Jordan's wolf was present under his skin but not shifted—he was playing this as a diplomatic exchange, at least for now, and I understood that meant he still wanted something from the encounter beyond simple violence."I go alone from here," I told Gregory quietly. "You stay at range. If it turns, you'll see it before I do."He didn't like it. He didn't argue either, not with Erin standing bound in the clearing ahead of us. He nodded once and melted back into the treeline, and I stepped out into the open with my hands visible, walking toward Jordan the way I'd agreed to in the note, letting him believe I was complying."Alone," Jordan said, satisfaction thick in his
I woke to pounding on the healing room door, Turner's hand still loosely wrapped in mine, the grey light of very early morning barely touching the window. The pounding came again, more frantic this time, and I was on my feet before I'd fully separated sleep from waking.Reo stood in the corridor when I opened the door, his face pale and his composure barely holding together at all."They took Erin," he said, the words tumbling out too fast. "There's a note. In her room."I didn't wait to hear more. I was moving before he'd finished the sentence, down the corridor and into Erin's room, where the bed sat empty, the blankets thrown back like she'd been pulled from sleep with no warning at all. A folded scrap of parchment sat on the pillow, deliberately placed where anyone searching for her would find it immediately.Erin for Chelsea. Eastern secondary entrance. Before dawn.I read it twice, and felt my expression close over into something very still, something I recognized from months ag
“That went better than I thought it would,” Erin said as we sat down in her room, but I wasn’t paying attention. My mind was on Gregory, who was probably asleep in the next room. After Turner had put me in his care, he had moved me out of the shabby room I’d been staying in and into their own home.
“Fifteen against fourteen. I guess you’re staying then,” Lady Victoria said, and a wide grin spread across my face. I turned to the Beta—the man whose vote had just saved me. He smiled at me, and his handsome features, which the tension-filled moment had stopped me from noticing, dawned on me. Befo
The room was empty save for Erin, who had offered to get me some clothes and also show me to the pack house. I looked at myself in the mirror after Erin applied some concealer on my face to cover up the bruises.“You are really pretty, you know? You are going to turn heads here,” Erin said.“Thanks
CHAPTER FOURI forced my legs closed, infuriating the leader, and he gave me a sharp blow to my face, forcing blood out of my mouth.“Turn her over,” he said to his men, who were holding me as the others watched and let out excited howls. As one of his men placed his hands on my waist, meaning to t







