Chasing The Rejected Luna's Heart

I woke up before the sun, which was normal for an omega. Omegas in Silverwood did not get to sleep in, not even on their birthdays.

By five I had scrubbed the pack house kitchen floor, hauled two sacks of flour up from the cellar, and burnt my thumb on a pan that belonged to a woman who had never once said thank you. I sucked on the sore skin and smiled anyway, because today I was nineteen. Today, when the moon rose over the training field, every wolf my age in the pack would feel the pull of the person the Moon Goddess had chosen for them. Some would get a stranger. Some would get a friend. I was going to get Jaxon Vance.

I had known it for two years, even if I had never said it out loud. Jaxon was the one who sat with me behind the food stores when the other pups threw rotten fruit at me. He was the one who learned my favorite songs. He had been crowned Alpha only three months ago, and the whole pack whispered that he needed a strong Luna. I tried not to listen to that part. Mates were not picked for strength. Mates were picked by fate, and fate did not care that I was small, or quiet, or an orphan who lived in the omega quarters with a cracked window and a borrowed blanket.

"You're doing it again," Wren said.

My wolf's voice always sounded like she was talking from the bottom of a well, warm and a little sleepy. She had been awake since midnight, pacing, scratching, restless in a way I had never felt from her.

"Doing what?"

"Smiling at nothing. Like a fool."

"Let me be a fool today."

She huffed, but she did not argue.

I touched the little silver moon pendant that lay against my collarbone, the way I did whenever my nerves got loud. It was the only thing my mother had left me. She and my father had died in a fire when I was seven, and the pack had taken me in the way you take in a stray cat, with a bowl of scraps and a corner to sleep in. Nobody ever told me what exactly happened that night. Whenever I asked, the elders changed the subject, and Elder Marcus looked at me for a second too long, as if I were a math problem he had not yet solved.

I did the rest of my chores with my hair tied up and my sleeves rolled, and when the pack house finally emptied out for the afternoon I took the lemon cake out of the cold cupboard. I had baked it two nights ago using flour I had saved for a month and the last of my wages. It was lopsided on one side and the icing had slid a little, but it smelled like sugar and lemon peel and I was proud of it.

Tanya found me wrapping it.

She leaned in the kitchen doorway in my blue dress, the one I had told her she could borrow for the ceremony, and her hair was done in a way I had never seen before, pinned up, with little curls that must have taken an hour.

"Happy birthday, Sage," she said. Her smile stretched a half second too long. "I hope everything goes exactly the way it's supposed to tonight."

"Thank you." I hugged her with one arm because my other hand was holding the cake. She smelled like jasmine, the perfume I had given her two Christmases ago, and underneath it was something sharp I couldn't name. I put it down to nerves. Tanya had been my best friend since we were seven years old. She had held my hand at my parents' funeral. She had braided my hair when I was too sad to lift my arms.

My phone buzzed against the counter.

Pack meeting with the elders. Can't make dinner, babe. Wait for me at the ceremony. Don't be mad.

I read it twice. Then I read it a third time, as if the words might rearrange themselves into something kinder.

"Don't be mad," I whispered. "Of all days."

"He's the Alpha now," Tanya said, a little too quickly, as if she had already practiced the line. "It can't be helped. You know how the elders are."

"I know."

"Go see him if you want. The meeting is at the old hunting lodge by the forest edge. Take him some cake. Boys love cake."

It was a perfectly normal thing to say, and I would think about it for a very long time afterward.

I put on my coat, balanced the cake in both hands, and walked out into a gray afternoon that smelled like rain coming. The pack grounds were quiet. Everyone was getting ready for the ceremony, polishing their shoes and arguing over ribbons, and I walked the path to the lodge alone with the cake held out in front of me like an offering.

The first drops hit my shoulders when I reached the tree line.

Wren stopped pacing. She went completely still in my chest, the way she did when a hunter was nearby.

"Sage," she said quietly. "Something's wrong."

"It's the weather."

"It isn't."

I kept walking, because I did not want her to be right. The lodge was another two hundred meters through the pines. Its windows were dark. There was no light, no voices, no elders arguing over territory lines. Just the rain, and the wet bark, and underneath it, drifting between the trunks, a smell I would have known in the dark at the bottom of the sea.

I recognized the strong scent of oak and cheap vanilla anywhere. It was him.

And woven through it, soft and sweet and cruel, was jasmine.

My hands went numb around the cake box. I walked toward the smell the way you walk toward a sound you are afraid of, and I pushed aside the last low branch.