I Refuse

The Voss great hall smelt the way it always did on important days, beeswax candles and crushed lavender strewn across the floor to mask the older smell of blood that no amount of scrubbing ever fully lifted from stone this old. I stood at the base of the dais in a gown with the color of the Nightfang banner, because someone had decided that was a clever touch, and I watched my father's face and thought about how differently I saw him now.

Alpha Corin Voss looked, for all purposes, like a man who had already won.

"The nightfang envoy," the herald announced, and three men entered in dark grey and silver, the middle one older, greying at the temples, carrying the sealed contract like it was something sacred. He wasn't Kai. I noted that with something between relief and disappointment I refused to examine too closely.

"Alpha Voss," the envoy inclined his head. "Alpha Thorn sends his son's formal proposal for the hand of your daughter, Selene, in a union that will bind our two packs under the Moon Pact for generations to come."

My father beamed. I remembered how proud I'd been of it once, how I'd thought his pride in me was really pride in me and not the pride In what I could be traded for.

Elder Maren, seated in the front row of witnesses, leaned toward the woman beside her and murmured something that made them both smile, and I remembered the smile from my first life too, remembered how satisfied the pack elders had been to see the Voss line elevated by marriage. I had mistaken their satisfaction for happiness for me once. I knew better now.

"On behalf of House Voss," my father began. "We accept this proposal—"

"I refuse."

The words came out of me before I decided to say them, clear and flat and loud enough to carry to the back of the hall. For a full second, nobody moved.

Then the hall erupted.

Somewhere near the back, Lira went very still. She tried hard to hold a straight face that didn't show how she exactly felt. I only caught it because I happened to be looking her way.

"Selene." My father's voice cracked through the noise like a whip. "What did you say?"

"I refuse the proposal," I said again, because apparently once wasn't going to be enough. "I won't marry Kai Thorn."

The envoy frowned. "My Lady, this is a formal offer from the supreme alpha's heir. Refusal is not customarily done."

"I understand exactly what customarily is," I said. "I'm still refusing it."

"Do you understand what you're risking?," the envoy pressed further, his voice climbing despite his obvious effort to keep it level. "Alpha Thorn does not offer his son's hand twice."

"I'm not asking him to."

Elder Maren was on her feet now, her earlier smile long gone, and the murmuring behind her had turned to something sharper, voices layering over each other until the hall sounded like a hive someone had kicked. Somewhere near the dark, I heard my own name repeated twice, then a third time, passed hand to hand like a coin nobody wanted to be caught holding.

"This is unheard of," someone said, close enough that I caught it clearly. "A Voss girl refusing Nightfang."

"Selene." My father's hands found my shoulder, his grip too tight to be comforting, his voice pitched low enough that only I could hear the edge underneath the diplomacy. "Whatever this is, end it. Now!."

"I already have," I said.

Elders were murmuring in clusters near the walls, the kind of murmuring that always precedes something worse. My father descended the dais steps so fast I thought he might trip on his own robes, and he grabbed my arms, not gently, and pulled me half a step toward him.

"Have you lost your mind?," he asked, low enough that only I could hear it, "In front of Nightfang's envoy?"

"I'm not marrying him," I said again, because I had died once already believing I had no choice in the matter, and I was not going to make that mistake twice, not even for my father's pride.

"You don't understand what you're doing." His grip tightened. For the first time since I'd woken up, his facial expression had changed. It wasn't anger. It was fear, raw and unguarded, the kind of fear that lives underneath a man's skin and only shows itself during a crisis.

That wasn't what I remembered. In my first life, my father would have been furious, embarrassed, ready to disown me on the spot for the insult I'd handed to the strongest pack in Lunara. He had not once looked afraid.

"Envoy," my father said, straightening, forcing his voice back to something diplomatic even as his hand stayed locked on my arm. "Forgive my daughter. She's overwhelmed. We'll send formal words to Alpha Thorn within the week.

The envoy did not look forgiving. He looked like a man calculating how much this would cost his Alpha's patience, and then he bowed, stiffly, and left with his two silent companions trailing behind him, the sealed contract still unopened in his hand.

The hall cleared slowly after that, elders leaving in twos and threes to whisper somewhere I couldn't hear them, servants preparing very hard not to have witnessed anything. My father didn't let go of my arms until the last of them were gone.

"Do you have any idea," he said, "what you have just endangered?."

"My freedom, apparently, If I'd say yes."

"This Isn't a Game, Selene." His voice shook, actually shook, in a way I had never once heard him. "This isn't about your freedom or your feelings about some boys you've met twice. There are debts in this family older than you. Older than me."

"What debts?"

He seemed to realize, all at once, that he'd said too much. His jaw worked, and for a moment I watched him decide whether to trust me with something, and then watched him decide against it, the way he always had, the way that had cost me everything the first time around.

"There is a debt to your mother's line," he finally said, quiet now. "One I hoped I never have to explain to you. This marriage was meant to settle it. Whatever you think you know, whatever reckless idea got into your head this morning, you have just left that debt open. And debts like this don't stay quiet forever.

"Wait." I caught his sleeves before he could get more than a few steps away. "If there's a debt, tell me what it is. Let me fix it instead of guessing."

"You can't fix what you don't understand," he said, his voice was calm now, but with a finality that closed the door on the conversation more surely than anger would have. "I've spent eleven years trying to understand it myself, Selene, and I have failed every year of it. I won't hand you a burden I can't even explain."

"Then explain what you can."

For a moment, I thought he might. His mouth opened, then something in his eyes wavered, the fear underneath the authority showing through like water through a crack in stone. Then his jaw set, and I watched him choose silence the way I had now understood he always had, the way that had cost us both more than either of us knew.

"Not today," he said. "Not until I know it's safe to."

He walked away before I could ask him what he meant, his footsteps echoing off the old stone, and I stood alone in the empty hall with my heart going too fast, because I understood, with a cold certainty that settled into my bone like frost, exactly what he'd just told me without meaning to.

I hadn't been alone more than a few seconds, when Lira stepped out with her arms crossed, her expression showing something that wasn't fully concerned.

"That took nerves," she said. "Refusing Nightfang's heir in front of half the council."

"Did you come to gloat, or to check that I'm still breathing?"

"Can't it be both?" The corner of her mouth twitched, almost a smile, before she smoothed it away. "You do realize what you've done. Kai Thorn doesn't get refused. Ever."

"I'm aware."

"Are you?" She stared at me for a moment. She had the look on her face that showed she was upset, even though she tried so hard to hide it. "Well. I suppose someone has to be the first."

"Lira. Are you upset that I said no? Or upset that I said no instead of you?"

"That's a strange question to ask your own sister," she said.

"You didn't answer it."

"No," she agreed, turning to go. "I didn't."

She left before I could press further, her footsteps unhurried.

My mother hadn't simply vanished eleven years ago the way everyone said. She hadn't wandered off into some tragedy the pack had quietly stopped discussing. There was a mystery behind it that I was only starting to realize.

She had been the price of something. And whatever that was, my father had spent eleven years too afraid to name it, and I had just sent one morning undoing whatever fragile peace he'd bought in her place.

I stood there for a long while after they had both left, listening to the hall settle back into silence around me, and I thought about the version of myself who had once accepted this proposal without a single question, grateful and unknowing, and how much of my own ruin had started exactly there, in not asking. I wasn't going to make that mistake twice. Whatever my mother's disappearance had cost this family, I intended to find out, with or without my father's blessing.