CHAPTER ONE: THE REJECTION

The dress was too tight across my ribs. I'd noticed that an hour ago, standing in front of the mirror while my aunt pinned the last of my hair back, and I hadn't said anything because it felt like a stupid thing to bring up on your own wedding day. Now I was glad I hadn't. Now it was the least important thing in the room.

Kane stood at the front of the hall in the dark green that marked him as Alpha, and he would not look at me.

That was the first wrong thing. The second was how quiet the room had gone, not the good kind, not the held-breath-before-vows kind. Something with teeth in it.

"Kane." My father, low, warning.

He didn't answer. He was looking past my shoulder, and I turned before I could stop myself.

Selene. Standing near the back with her hands folded like she was praying, mouth doing something that wasn't a smile and wasn't not one. We used to braid each other's hair when we were kids. I actually thought about that, right then, of all the useless things to think about.

"I can't do this." Kane said it to the room. Not to me. Never once turned his head to say it to my face, and that's the part I couldn't stop chewing on afterward, not the words, that.

Somebody made a sound behind me. My mother, probably.

"Kane, what are you—"

"I reject the bond." Louder. Like he'd rehearsed it in a mirror, or worse, out loud to somebody who wasn't me. "Mia Ashford is not my mate."

My ears started ringing, this thin high whine like standing too close to a wire fence in a storm. I could see mouths moving around me and I couldn't make any of it into words. Someone's hand grabbed my elbow and I shook it off without deciding to.

"She was never going to be strong enough for this pack," Kane said, and I don't know if he meant it for me or for all three hundred people watching, and honestly I don't know which would be worse. "You all know it. I know it. I should have ended this months ago."

Months ago, not last week, not yesterday. Months.

There was something underneath the way he said it, some weight I couldn't place at the time and would spend a long time afterward trying to understand. Not just cruelty. Something closer to fear, like a man saying words he'd rehearsed so many times they'd stopped feeling true and started feeling necessary.

My knees went first, then the rest of me followed, and I remember the exact second the floor tilted up to meet my face because I had time to think, distantly, stupidly, that I was about to ruin the dress. Then Selene crossed the room toward him, not hesitating, not for one second, which told me everything about how long this had been arranged behind my back, and Kane took her hand in front of every person who'd come to watch us bond for life.

That's when I ran.

I don't remember deciding to. I remember the doors looking impossibly far away, my name being shouted from at least three directions, my aunt's fingers closing on air where my arm used to be. I remember the cold outside hitting me like something with weight to it. I got maybe forty feet before my legs simply stopped taking instructions, and the ground came up fast, and the last thing I heard before everything went black at the edges was my own heartbeat, way too loud, way too fast, like it was trying to get out before I did.

I woke up in the healer's room with a blanket that smelled like lavender and antiseptic, and Dr. Whitlock sitting in the chair beside the bed with an expression I couldn't read.

"You fainted," she said. Unnecessary. I could have told her that.

"I gathered."

She didn't say anything for a moment, just kept looking at me in that careful, clinical way doctors have when they're deciding how to say something. My stomach did something uneasy, though at the time I told myself it was just the aftermath of collapsing in front of my entire pack on what was supposed to be my wedding day.

"Mia." She set down whatever she'd been holding. "When did you last have your cycle?"

I stared at her.

"I need you to think carefully," she said, and her voice had gone gentle in a way that scared me more than anything Kane had said in that hall. "It's important."

I did the math out loud, badly, my mouth dry. Six weeks, maybe seven.

Dr. Whitlock's face didn't change, but something in the room did.

"I want to run a proper test," she said, "but I don't think you fainted just from shock."

I laughed. It came out wrong, cracked in the middle. "That's not funny."

"I'm not being funny."

There was a strange, guarded look on her face while she said it, like she was watching me for a reaction to something she hadn't asked yet. "There's also something in your bloodwork I want to flag, while we're at it. Nothing urgent. Just unusual. Familiar, almost, though I can't place from where. I'd like to run it again to be sure before I say more."

I didn't have the energy to chase that thread that day, so I let it go, though it stuck somewhere in the back of my mind, the way a door left slightly open in a house you're not ready to search yet stays open whether you look at it or not.

Outside the door I could hear voices, my mother's, raised, and someone else's I didn't recognize, and underneath all of it, so faint I might have imagined it, Kane's. Still out there. Still married to someone else by every practical measure that mattered, in front of everyone who used to call me their future Luna.

"Don't tell anyone," I said. The words came out before I'd fully decided to say them, but the second they were out I knew I meant them completely. "Please. Not yet. Not until I know for certain."

Dr. Whitlock studied me a moment longer, then nodded once. "Alright. Not yet."

I lay back and did not cry, which surprised me more than anything else that day. Six weeks or maybe seven. Somewhere down the hall, my former mate was almost certainly still holding another woman's hand.

The door opened without a knock.

Selene had changed out of her dress into something plainer, like she'd already stopped needing to perform for anyone, and she closed the door behind her before Dr. Whitlock could object.

"I wanted to see if you were alright." She said it flat, no real attempt to sound like she meant it.

"You should go."

"I will." She didn't move. "I just wanted to say, this isn't personal, Mia. It was never about you specifically." A pause, like she was choosing the next part carefully. "You have to understand, a pack this size can't be led by someone who faints in front of three hundred people. Kane didn't reject you because he stopped loving you. He rejected you because he finally admitted you were never going to be enough to stand beside him."

Dr. Whitlock's hand stilled on the chart she was holding.

I sat up. It cost me something to do it, the room tilting slightly, but I did it anyway, because I was not going to say what I needed to say lying down.

"Get out."

"Mia—"

"You have thirty seconds before I start screaming loud enough that everyone in this wing hears exactly what you just said to me, and then you can explain to Kane why his new Luna was gloating in a sickroom an hour after his wedding." My voice came out steadier than I felt, which was its own small victory. "Your choice."

Something flickered across her face, not quite fear, but close enough to it that I filed it away for later. She left without another word, and the door clicked shut harder than it needed to.

Dr. Whitlock exhaled slowly. "You didn't have to let her finish."

"I wanted to hear all of it." I lay back down, staring at the water stain on the ceiling, the one that had been there since I was a kid sneaking in here with a scraped knee. "I wanted to know exactly what I'm dealing with."

Because underneath the calm I'd forced into my voice, one thing had gone very still and very clear: whatever this pack thought I was now, someone to be pitied and quietly managed until she disappeared, I was not going to spend the next several months proving them right. And Selene had just told me, without meaning to, exactly how far she was willing to go to make sure of it.

Whatever was growing inside me was never going to be Kane's problem to solve.

It was going to be mine. And it was going to need somewhere a long way from here to grow.