Chapter One: Too Fat To Be Called Luna

Annabel's POV

The bond hit me like a fist to the chest.

One second I was standing in the back of the ceremony hall trying not to be noticed, the next there was something warm and golden wrapping itself around my ribs, squeezing — not painful, just present — and my eyes found him before my brain caught up with what was happening.

Aldric.

Alpha Aldric walked through the main doors and the room shifted the way it always did when he entered, three hundred wolves rearranging themselves unconsciously around his gravity. Broad-shouldered, dark-haired, jaw set like he'd been carved specifically to intimidate. The bond pulled taut between us and my breath caught.

For one stupid, humiliating second, I smiled.

I actually smiled. And trust me, I still hate myself for the smile.

His eyes swept the room — and stopped on me.

The change in his face happened fast. Too fast to hide. His chin pulled back, shoulders stiffening, the way you'd react if you reached into your pocket and found something rotting.

"No." He said it quietly at first, almost to himself. Then he took an actual step backward. "No. This — something's wrong. This can't be right."

The whispers started like a match catching.

I made myself walk toward him. If this was going to happen, I would not let them watch me stand frozen at the back like a frightened animal. My heels were loud on the stone floor. Three hundred pairs of eyes tracked every step.

"Alpha Aldric." I stopped six feet from him. "You feel it too... don't you"

Not a question. I could feel him feeling it — the same golden pull, the same impossible warmth. I knew he could feel it.

He looked at me like I'd just confessed to something criminal.

"What I feel," he said, loud enough now, loud enough for the whole room to hear, "is revolted. This fat cow can't be my mate. The Moon Goddess must have made a mistake.... probably one of her pranks."

Someone gasped. Someone else — I didn't see who — laughed. Just one person, quickly stifled, but it was enough. I wrapped my arms around my middle and hated myself for the reflex.

In the crowd, Amelia stood perfectly still with a small smile she wasn't bothering to hide. Beside her, Lennon pressed her fingers to her lips. Her shoulders were shaking.

They'd known.

The thought moved through me cold and certain. Somehow, some way — they'd known.

Elder Vivianne stepped forward from the council row, silver-haired and sharp-eyed, her voice carrying the authority of a woman who had presided over forty years of ceremonies and was not remotely impressed by drama.

"The bond is the Goddess's will, Alpha. It is not negotiable." She looked at him steadily. "You may accept. Or you may formally reject. Those are your choices."

Aldric turned back to me. He was staring at me the way you stare at a problem you're trying to find the words to articulate, jaw working, something like frustration crossing his face — not at the situation. At me. As if my existence was the inconvenience.

"Look, look at you Annabel," he said, flat like I meant nothing "I can't even point out the correct word to describe you"

Then Lennon's voice floated over, sweet as something rotten dipped in sugar.

"I think the word you're looking for is fat, Alpha, I'm I right sis."

The hall went absolutely silent.

Aldric's face cleared. He seized on it the way a drowning man seizes a rope.

"She's a fat cow," he said. Simply. Cleanly. Like he was reading something off a list. "I'm not taking a fat cow as my Luna. Neither will I take her into my bed."

The air left my body.

I heard it — the crowd's reaction, the sharp intake, the ripple of uncomfortable laughter from the back rows — but it came from very far away, because my arms had tightened across my stomach and I was suddenly and completely aware of every single inch of myself. The hips I'd tried to starve smaller. The thighs that touched no matter what I did. The stomach I'd learned to hide under loose fabric and careful angles.

I was aware of all of it at once, like a spotlight had been turned on and the whole room was reading the results.

"Look at her" someone laughed behind her fan. "A Luna that size"

"Probably 160kg"

"No you're wrong, 180kg I think"

"Oh Goddess... she's too huge"

"The bond does not concern itself with appearances," Vivianne said, her voice cooling by several degrees. "Rejection carries serious consequences. I would strongly advise—"

"Then I reject her." Aldric cut her off without looking at her. "Right now. In front of everyone."

Vivianne's jaw tightened. "Alpha—"

"She is a fat, pathetic Omega." His voice lifted, filling the hall effortlessly, the voice of a man built to be heard by crowds. "She is not fit to stand at my side. She never will be. My pack deserves a Luna they can be proud of." His eyes moved over me one final time, slow and dismissive. "Not — this."

From the crowd, someone said 'he's right', and someone else said 'poor Aldric' and someone else said something I didn't catch but understood from the laughter it produced.

My throat was burning. I would not cry. I would not cry.

"Accept her or reject her with the proper words," Vivianne said flatly. "This spectacle helps no one."

I looked at him.

"Give me a chance." My voice came out steadier than I deserved. "One. That's all, I'll do anything."

Aldric stepped closer. Close enough that what he said next was only for me.

"One chance to what?" His voice was almost gentle, which was worse than cruelty. "Lose the weight? Become someone I could actually want?" A quiet exhale. "Annabel. I have known you your entire life. You have always been weak and soft and small, and not in any of the ways that count. I didn't want you when we were children and I don't want you now." He held my gaze. "Tell me to finish it."

I stared at him for a long moment.

"Finish it, Aldric. Reject me properly" I said.

He straightened. When he spoke again his voice rang through the hall like a blade through silence.

"I, Alpha Aldric Burke, reject you, Annabel Voss, as my fated mate and future Luna, before this pack and the Goddess who bound us."

The bond didn't sever quietly.

It tore.

White-hot agony ripped through my chest and my knees hit the stone floor before I understood I was falling. Vivianne's voice came from somewhere above me — "she must accept, it won't complete until she accepts" — and I pressed one palm flat to the floor and breathed through it.

"I, Annabel Voss, accept your rejection."

The bond snapped.

I had never known a person could survive that specific pain. It seemed inconsiderate that you could.

I was still on the floor, still pressing my hand to the stone to stay upright, when Aldric's voice filled the room again.

"Lennon."

She walked forward like she'd been rehearsing. Graceful, golden, every hair placed with intention while I was bleeding out on the stone in front of three hundred witnesses. She gazed up at him and he took her hand and turned to face the pack.

"She is my chosen mate," he announced. "And she will be your Luna."

The hall erupted.

Lennon kissed him. Right there, right then, while I was still on the floor, while the place where the bond had lived was still burning itself hollow, while people around me were cheering — "she's perfect, look at them, what a Luna she'll make" — the sentence trailing off into the comparison they didn't bother completing.

I stood up.

My legs shook. I made them hold.

I would not give them the image of me prostrate on that floor one second longer than physics required. I straightened my spine and fixed my eyes on the door and walked — steady, even, deliberate — through the crowd that parted not out of respect but because no one wanted to accidentally make contact.

Aldric's voice caught me at the doors.

"One last thing Annabel ,since you eat like a cow," Aldric said, his eyes dragging over me one last time, "more than anyone else in this pack — kitchen duty suits you perfectly. Dawn tomorrow. Don't be late."

Amelia walked and whispered softly into my ears "know you place filthy Omega."