Chapter 1

Selene POV:

"You are nothing, Selene. You hear me? Nothing."

Damien's voice cut through the celebration noise spilling from the packhouse behind us. His blue eyes were cold, colder than I had ever seen them, and I stood frozen on the back porch with my fingers curling around the railing.

"I heard you the first time," I said.

"Then why are you still standing here looking at me like I owe you something?" He stepped closer, and the mate bond hummed between us, warm and insistent, the way it always was. I hated that it still did that. I hated that my body still responded to him even now.

"Because you do owe me something, Damien," I said. "Three years. You owe me three years."

He laughed, and it was not a kind laugh. "Three years of what? Watching you fail every training session? Three years of the whole pack wondering why their Alpha chose a mate who cannot even shift properly?"

"I can shift."

"Barely." He looked me over the way someone looks at a piece of furniture they are planning to throw out. "I made a mistake bonding with you. The moon made a mistake. I am choosing to correct it."

I stared at him. The music was still playing inside. Someone had opened a bottle of champagne. His sister was laughing at something, that bright beautiful laugh she had. The pack was celebrating his twenty-fifth birthday, and out here on this porch, he was ending us.

"You are rejecting me," I said.

"I am being honest with you. Something I should have done a long time ago."

"Say the words, Damien."

He met my eyes. "I, Damien Crowe, Alpha of the Blackridge Pack, reject you, Selene Voss, as my mate."

The pain was immediate and total. It came from somewhere behind my sternum and spread outward like a crack in ice, sharp and splitting. I grabbed the railing harder and I did not cry. I had promised myself I would not cry.

"Done?" I asked.

Something flickered in his expression. Guilt, maybe. Or maybe it was just the porch light playing tricks.

"Selene, you should leave Blackridge. For your own sake."

"Do not tell me what I should do," I said. "Not anymore."

I walked back inside, through the party, through the perfume and the laughter and the congratulations being thrown around like confetti. I walked past his sister Maya who reached for my arm and I shook her off. I walked up to my room, which had been our room, and I pulled a bag from under the bed and I packed it in ten minutes.

My phone buzzed. It was Maya.

"Selene, what happened? What did he say to you?"

"Ask your brother," I said into the phone.

"Selene, please do not do anything right now. Just sleep on it."

"I am not sleeping here tonight." I zipped the bag and swung it over my shoulder. "Tell him I accept."

"You accept what?"

"He will know."

I ended the call and walked out of the packhouse. The night air hit me and I breathed it in, deep and slow, and I felt the rejection bond still raw and bleeding somewhere inside my chest. But I also felt something else underneath it. Something quiet and steady.

Relief.

I had been drowning in that relationship for three years, shrinking myself to fit inside the space he decided I was allowed to occupy. Apologizing for existing at the wrong volume. Pretending I did not notice the way he looked at Cassandra Reid at every pack event. Pretending everything was fine.

Nothing had been fine.

I got in my car and I drove. I did not know exactly where I was going. I just knew I was going north, because three years ago, before Damien, before Blackridge, before all of it, my grandmother had left me a small cabin in the mountain territory between three pack borders.

Unclaimed land. Neutral ground.

The kind of place where a woman with a broken bond and a half-shift and a bruised pride could disappear for a while.

I drove for four hours. The rejection pain dulled to something manageable, a persistent ache that I knew would take weeks to fade fully. The radio played something country and sad and I turned it off and drove in silence.

I pulled up to the cabin just before two in the morning. The trees around it were enormous and old and the moonlight came down through the gaps in the branches in long silver shafts.

I sat in the car for a moment.

The cabin was dark. The air outside was cold and clean. Somewhere in the trees, an owl called once and then went silent.

I grabbed my bag and walked to the door and I was reaching for the key under the third porch step, the place my grandmother always kept it, when I heard something.

A low sound. Not quite human.

I straightened slowly and looked toward the tree line.

Two sets of eyes caught the moonlight.

And they were watching me.