Chapter Five

The Rejection

Ayla

The hall gets crowded gradually, like a tide filling the shore. People drift in groups of two, three, overlapping voices, laughter just loud enough for a group that is this important. And I watch from my place, how the younger pack women steal side glances to Lugh‘s chair at the top of the table, how the elders sit just a touch further forward. All waiting. All acting as if it isn‘t.

Selene is sitting next to me. She had poured her water a few minutes ago and was hardly drinking it. She asked me whether I was fine every so often and I had replied back yes. I‘m not gonna get into that again.

Lugh hasn‘t sat. He paces the perimeter of the room, talking to the Beta, to the two elder wolves who traveled from the western border for tonight. His ceremonial coat, not his usual leather heavier, more formal drapes on him in strange ways, he is constantly rolling one shoulder back as if the fit was slightly off. That little detail, that one subconscious motion has my chest in knots I was ill-prepared for.

It‘s still there. After all of it. After the awkward distance of the woods and how he said “Even if I don‘t want it to be” as if the truth of us was something to run away from. I know it like I know a loose tooth the permanence of it, the way it presses down just a little more each time I try to forget it.

He‘ll choose me anyway. Choosing me is a must.

I lift my goblet, then put it back down without touching my lips to it.

Hall actually goes quiet when Elder Cavan gets up at the other end of the table and calls for their attention. Not politely quiet though-the kind of hold-your-breath quiet where everyone‘s hands hover over whatever they‘re reaching out for, and everyone just stops. Cavan‘s old enough that he can command silence without raising his voice. He just waits for them to be done before he speaks.

This evening is to be the night when Alpha Lugh Nightbane proclaims his Luna.

 That‘s all Cavan said; he sits himself down again.

The room lets out a sigh of relief as Lugh is on the move.

He steps back from the wall where he‘d been standing and heads toward middle of the floor. The table is set in a wide horseshoe shape for a reason and the empty space in the middle the track is made visible to everyone, so no one can miss a thing. My hand wraps around the edge of the seat below me.

He doesn‘t make eye contact when he starts. His eyes go to the floor first not that he‘s ashamed, just that he‘s drawing himself up. Then his eyes lift. He looks across at the room. He looks to the elders. He looks to his Beta, who gives him a small nod.

And then he turns to see Ayla BlackFang.

I at.

My wolf remains very still.

The Moon Goddess doesn‘t ask our permission,” Lugh adds. His voice doesn‘t seem to be trying, no display behind it. “She doesn‘t ask if we‘re prepared for it, if we consent. She merely makes it.” He pauses again. His jaw shifts. “I‘ve felt her choice. I‘ve comprehendid it. And I‘ve been three months educating myself in the matter of whether I could accept what she settled on.”

My mouth has gone dry.

He walks over to the other side of the room. My stomach begins to turn inside up and my heartbeat skips and skips and I can‘t seem to breathe right anymore. He‘s getting nearer. He‘s making his way towards me at the far end of the table and every fiber of my being tenses because this is it, now is the time He stops behind Selene‘s chair.

The world isn‘t changing shape, reeling, leaning. I just sit there watching Lugh Nightbane put one hand on the back of my sister‘s seat and the seconds just pass; the terrible things simply happen silently, mercilessly, while others watch.

“I, Alpha Lugh Nightbane,” he speaks and his voice is even different now rougher, ‘like it costs something, “refuse you, Ayla BlackFang, as my destined mate.”

Bond tears.

It doesn‘t fade, or pull, softly loose. It tears a ripping feeling deep in my chest, somewhere behind my ribs, and I feel my wolf scream, in a register that has nothing to do with sound. My vision goes white at the edges. I clench the armrest so tightly that the wood bruises my hand. I don‘t make a sound. I keep it in, denying my instinct with every fiber of my being, and my magic my silent, secret, sealed magic rushes in to fill the space where the contact just was, supporting me as I want to break.

My eyes holding the amber, feeling its quite warm. I‘m knew it‘s sitting there. I don‘t have the require mirror.

He keeps speaking. He has turned to face Selene, who has stood when her chair was pushed back, as if it were not a conscious choice, her face a kind of stunned, open blankness.

‘Seleneblack‘Fang. His voice has transformed yet again. What ever tention was in it before has turned into something else, softer, more resolute. He present her with his hand. ’ I choose you as my Luna. My chosen mate. My equal.’

The hall does the same thing a fire does when you crack a window. Everything rushes toward the open air all at once a flood of calls, some spiraling out, others snapping sharply in fear. To my left, Liana exclaims, not quite a cry. Down by the elders, someone begins to clap, and then others, uneven and gathering momentum.

Selene gazes at his hand, then at me.

I have no idea. There‘s something averse about the look in her eyes. The muscles in my face are attempting to more exactly define themselves, their structure precisely tuned for this occasion instead of the crumbling fabrication they tend to be. The nearest approximation I can provide is Three glorious seconds during which her large, sunlit eyes bore into me, seeking, digesting and storing an image.

Her face looks frightened. For just a few second. Then she turns to Lugh. And she takes his hand.

The sound of applause swells.

I am seated in my chair and I do not shift. To my side a voice calls my name and I do not register the name properly. The meal begins again all around me: Milk and bread being handed round, the vinum being decanted and the hall ringing with speech like floodwater filling a hall long used to it and I am on the inside of it all like a foreign body, like a stone in a riverbed.

My chest is hollow where the bond once were. I push my tongue hard against the roof of my mouth and breath through my nose.

Lugh turns to Selene and whispers. She chuckles nervously, nervously, overwhelmed, and tucks a piece of her hair behind her ear. He looks.

The elders beaming. The Beta beaming. Liana, three seats away, sets her smile into something functional and unplaceable that just barely reaches her eyes and glance for a splitting second at me before look away.

She has the expectation that I will be utterly annihilated.

They all do. The ones who have looked up this way since he said my name they want tears or fury or one solid test of fracture. They want to witness how I cast off a rejected mate, so they can pity this burden and go.

I reach for my goblet. I sip it one slow time.

And I smile.

Not because Im happy. Not because the hole in my chest isn‘t ripping itself open wider and wider with each second I sit here and watch my sister become the woman I should have been. I smile because I have been underestimated in this pack my whole life and tonight, for the first time, that will serve me.

Selene glances directly at me again from across the table. I look at her and keep smiling and watch her expression start to blur into fear again.

She is familiar with me.

She has known me all along.

That is the only thing, in this whole hall full of wolves and party and my sister‘s new life anything that makes me feel at all better.