CHAPTER 2: The Rejection

Maya's POV

I don't remember most of the drive.

I remember gripping the wheel hard enough that my knuckles ached, remember running a yellow light I probably shouldn't have, remember catching my own reflection in the rearview mirror and not recognizing the expression on my face. Somewhere between my apartment and the Black Fang estate, the shock had burned off into something sharper. Something that didn't care anymore about looking composed.

The valet line outside the event hall was still backed up with town cars when I abandoned mine badly parked across two spaces and walked straight through the front doors like I still belonged there. Maybe I did. I'd grown up half a mile from this building. I'd attended a hundred pack functions in this exact ballroom.

Nobody stopped me at the door, because nobody expected the fiancée to show up mid-celebration looking like she'd run out of her own house without shoes.

I hadn't, actually. I'd remembered the shoes. Small mercies.

The ballroom was still loud with celebration when I pushed through the crowd — champagne glasses, laughter, someone's toast still being given near the stage. String lights overhead threw everything into a soft golden glow that felt obscene given what I was walking into.

Heads turned as I passed. Whispers followed me like a current.

I found Xavier near the edge of the stage, Priya's hand still tucked into his, both of them accepting congratulations from a cluster of pack elders. He saw me before I reached him. His face didn't do anything dramatic. No shock, no guilt. Just a kind of tired resignation, like he'd been expecting this and had already decided how he'd handle it.

"You came," he said. Flat. Almost bored.

"You didn't think I would?"

Priya's smile was sweet enough to be its own kind of cruelty. "You should've stayed home, Maya."

The music had dropped somewhere behind us, or maybe I'd simply stopped hearing anything except my own pulse. People were watching now, openly, the celebration curdling into something with an audience waiting for a different kind of show.

"Three months," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I expected. "You were going to marry me in three months."

Xavier's jaw tightened. For one half-second, something almost like guilt passed over his face. Then it was gone, replaced by the same cold composure he used in pack council meetings, the voice he used when he needed a room to understand he wasn't going to be argued with.

"That promise was made when we were kids," he said. "Before either of us understood what it actually meant to lead a pack."

"You told me you loved me two weeks ago."

"I did love you." He said it like past tense was supposed to be comforting. "But Priya is a true match. My wolf recognized her the moment—"

"Don't." My voice cracked on the word, and I hated myself for it. "Don't you dare stand there and tell me about mate bonds when you've never once actually had one. Neither of us did. That's the whole reason we made the promise in the first place."

"Exactly," he said. "And now I don't need to keep it."

The crowd had gone fully silent around us, phones half-raised, the same instinct for spectacle that had brought half of them here tonight now sensing there was more to capture.

"You don't even have a wolf," Xavier continued, quieter now, but somehow crueler for it. "You never shifted, Maya. Not once, not ever. Do you understand what that would have meant, standing beside me as Luna? The other Alphas would have laughed us out of every council meeting."

Someone in the crowd actually did laugh. I didn't turn to see who.

"So this is easier for you," I said. "Trading me for someone whose wolf works properly."

"This is what's best for the pack."

"Say what you actually mean."

His eyes hardened. And there it was — the thing he'd clearly been building toward since the moment I walked in, the thing that would let him close this chapter cleanly in front of every witness who mattered.

"Fine," he said. "I, Alpha Xavier Cross, reject you, Maya Ellison, as anything more than what you've always secretly been to this pack. A friend. Nothing more."

It wasn't the formal rejection words — there was no bond to sever, nothing sacred about what he'd just said — but it didn't need to be. The room heard exactly what he meant. A few people actually applauded, like he'd delivered some kind of victory speech.

Someone near the back muttered, loud enough to carry, "Poor wolfless girl," and a ripple of quiet laughter followed it around the room.

I felt my eyes burn and refused, absolutely refused, to let it show.

Priya stepped closer to Xavier's side, resting her hand against his arm with the casual ownership of someone who'd already won and simply wanted to make sure everyone clocked it.

"It's better this way," she said to me, almost gently, like she actually believed the cruelty in it was kindness. "You'll find someone eventually. Someone your own speed."

I looked at my cousin — the girl who'd braided my hair every summer at our grandmother's house, who'd cried with me over my first heartbreak, who'd promised me at seventeen that she'd be my maid of honor one day — and understood, with a strange, cold clarity, that whatever she'd been to me my entire life, she wasn't that person standing in front of me now.

"Congratulations," I said, and somehow the word came out almost steady. "Truly. I hope you're both very happy."

Xavier's brow furrowed slightly, like the composure in my voice had thrown him off script.

"Because I've already moved on too," I continued, some reckless, wounded part of me needing him to feel even a fraction of what he'd just handed me in front of three hundred people. "With someone far better than you, actually."

The ballroom went still for half a second — and then someone laughed.

Not a small laugh. A real one, ugly and delighted, quickly picked up by the people standing closest until it spread through half the room like something contagious.

"Oh, stop the act," a woman near the front called out, waving a manicured hand at me like she was swatting away something pathetic. "We all know you're just jealous."

Priya's smile sharpened, delighted by the opening I'd just handed her.

"Prove it, then, cousin." Her voice carried easily, pitched exactly loud enough for the whole ballroom to catch every word. "Where is he? This mystery man who's so much better than my Xavier?"

More laughter. Someone actually started a slow, mocking clap.

My face burned. I had nothing. No name, no plan, nothing except three hundred pairs of eyes waiting to watch me fail to produce a single shred of proof, waiting to turn my one moment of defiance into the punchline of the entire night.

I scanned the room anyway, desperate, my pulse roaring in my ears louder than the laughter around me.

That's when I saw him.

A man standing entirely alone near the terrace doors, half in shadow, dressed sharper than anyone else in the building, watching the whole spectacle unfold with an expression that gave away absolutely nothing. He hadn't laughed. Hadn't reached for his phone like everyone else angling for a better video. Just watched, still and unreadable, like the chaos of the room couldn't touch him at all.

Something reckless and desperate finally uncoiled in my chest, some last, cornered piece of pride refusing to let this be the ending.

I didn't think.

I started walking…