Chapter 6

6

Mabel's pov

What the hell?

I had two mates? Two brothers? I still couldn't wrap my head around it. And then, Xavier took a slow step towards me.

My breath hitched.

The courtyard was still screaming as Xavier moved.

I felt it before I understood it, a shift in the silver thread beneath my ribs, a pull that told me he was walking toward me even though every instinct in my body told me to run the other way.

I did not run, I stood there with two threads trembling in the air around me, connecting me to two brothers at once, and I tried to make my mind catch up to what my body already knew.

I had a mate. I, Mabel Sinclair, the girl without a wolf, the scholarship student who had spent nineteen years being told that whatever made a person capable of bonding simply did not exist inside me. I had believed it.

I had built my whole life around believing it, had built walls thick enough to survive a future with no mate, no thread, no moment like this one ever coming for me.

And now I had not just one, but two.

The unfairness of it almost made me laugh…almost.

Except laughing was the last thing my body wanted to do, because Xavier was still walking toward me, and his face was not the face of a boy who had just found the other half of himself.

His face was carved from stone.

I had loved that face since I was eleven years old and too young to understand what the feeling curling in my chest even was.

I had loved it through every polite distance he kept, every time his eyes slid past me in the hallway like I was furniture, every time he answered a professor's question in that flat, controlled voice that never once cracked no matter what was asked of him.

I had told myself for years that it did not matter, that loving someone who would never look at you twice was simply a fact of life you learned to live around, the way you learn to live around a draft in an old house.

I had never imagined I would love him and be his mate and still watch him look at me like this.

Xavier stopped a few feet away, but close enough that the thread between us pulled taut and warm, close enough that I could see the muscle working in his jaw, the way his hands had curled into fists at his sides, the way his eyes would not quite meet mine even now.

The whole courtyard had gone silent again, that terrible silent that comes right before something breaks.

"Xavier." Headmaster Graves said his name low, almost a warning, but Xavier did not look at him either.

He looked at me just for a second and in that second I saw something flicker behind his eyes, something that looked almost like grief, almost like an apology, gone so fast I could have imagined it.

Then his face closed again, and he said the words that ended everything.

"I reject this bond."

Three words, that was all it took to bring the whole world down around me.

Gasps swept across the courtyard, mocking laughter followed.

The pain came instantly, a white hot tearing sensation that started beneath my ribs where the thread had first bloomed and spread outward through my chest like something inside me was being pulled apart by hand.

I gasped and folded forward, one arm wrapping around my stomach, and somewhere very far away I heard Ava's voice cry out my name.

“Mabel!”Her voice sliced through the courtyard, I could tell she was threading through the crowd to come meet me.

I didn't even turn, I couldn't.

I had heard about rejection before. Every wolf child grew up hearing stories about it, the way a rejected bond could leave a person weakened for weeks, sick in body as much as in spirit.

I had never expected to feel it myself. I had never expected to be wolfless and still bonded and still capable of being broken this thoroughly by three words spoken in a voice that did not shake at all.

That was the part that hurt most. Not the pain in my chest but the steadiness in his voice while he did it.

I straightened slowly, forcing air back into my lungs, forcing my spine to hold itself upright even though every part of me wanted to collapse onto the ancient stone beneath my feet.

I would not give this courtyard the satisfaction of watching me fall.

Around me the whispers had already started, hissing through the crowd like something catching fire.

"Did you see that."

"Of course he rejected her, she's wolfless, what did she expect."

“I'm sure Xavier doesn't want her infesting him with her curse”

"Poor Xavier, imagine being cursed with that."

I heard Bianca's laugh before I saw her face, sharp and delighted, carrying easily across the stunned quiet of the courtyard. When I finally found her in the crowd she was not even bothering to hide her satisfaction, arms crossed, chin lifted, looking at me the way you look at something that has finally been put back in its proper place.

She had been right about me all along; that was what her face said.

She had told everyone since the day I arrived at Mooncrest that a wolfless scholarship girl had no business existing among true bloodlines, and now the entire academy had watched the universe agree with her in the cruelest way possible.

I felt heat rise in my face, humiliation crawling up my neck and settling behind my eyes, and I hated myself a little for the tears gathering there. I was not weak, I had survived worse than whispered cruelty in hallways.

But there was something about being rejected in front of an entire courtyard by the boy I had loved my whole life that cut differently than anything Bianca or anyone else had ever thrown at me.

Well, what had I expected? That a Blackwood heir, golden and perfect and destined for a future written in bloodlines going back centuries, would want a bond with someone who could not even shift, someone who had spent her whole life being the exception nobody wanted to claim.

I should have known better than to hope, even for the length of a single silver thread.

"Xavier." Xander's voice cut through the crowd like a blade, low and furious in a way I had never heard from him before.

I turned enough to see him standing several feet away, and where his brother's face was stone, Xander's was fire.

His jaw was tight, his eyes bright with something dangerously close to rage, fixed entirely on his twin.

"You don't get to do that," Xander said, quiet enough that I do not think the whole courtyard caught it, but I did, standing as close as I was. "Not like this. Not in front of everyone."

Xavier did not answer him. He would not even look at his brother, he would not look at anyone, his eyes fixed somewhere over the crowd's heads like he could will himself somewhere else entirely through sheer force of avoidance.

I could not stand there another second and watch the two of them, I just could not stand beneath the weight of a hundred staring eyes and Bianca's satisfied smile and the ringing silence where Xavier's voice still echoed in my ears.

I turned before I fully decided to, my legs already carrying me away from the circle, away from the crowd, away from the two threads still burning beneath my ribs, one warm and steady, one gone cold and strange with rejection.

"Mabel." Ava's voice reached for me, but I was already moving too fast to stop, pushing through the edge of the crowd and out into the dark corridor beyond the courtyard, my vision blurring, my chest still aching with a pain that had nothing to do with breathlessness and everything to do with the boy who had just told an entire academy he wanted nothing to do with me.

I ran… so fast.

I ran past the stone archways and the flickering torchlight, past startled underclassmen who flattened themselves against the walls to let me through, ran until my lungs burned and my legs shook and the sound of the courtyard behind me finally faded into something distant and unreal.

I did not know where I was going, I only knew I needed to be anywhere that was not there, anywhere Xavier's flat, unshaking voice could not follow me.

That was when I heard the footsteps.

Fast, purposeful, closing the distance behind me despite everything, and my heart lurched painfully because for one wild, foolish second I let myself think it might be him, that he had come after me.

That the boy who rejected me in front of the entire academy had changed his mind the moment I was out of sight, that there was some explanation, some excuse, something that would make the pain in my chest make sense.

I heaved a breath, it could be Ava.

“Ava please… please I just want to be alone.” I pleaded admist as I turned.

It was not Xavier, nor Ava. It was Xander.

He stood there instead, chest heaving from the run, eyes locked on mine with an intensity that made the breath catch all over again in my throat, and for a moment neither of us said a single word.