Chapter 1: The Broken Bond

<Cassandra>

“Hurry, guys, it’s time!” I heard a voice shriek in excitement, followed by the happy murmurs of the other wolves, clamoring to get to the ritual ground first.

The fire from the lit torches that spanned the full length of the ceremony grounds made my heart skip with each passing second.

It was finally happening... After 21 long years of neglect and being called a bastard wolf, I stood near the back of the bustling crowd with my arms fidgeting against my worn gray cloak, watching wolf after wolf step forward to claim the one thing I had been waiting my entire life for.

A fated mate.

Every pair of eyes in the Bloodwyn pack was glued to the ancient ritual grounds where the wolf-shaman stood with his carved staff and his silver bowl of burning herbs. 

One by one, he called each wolf forward. One by one, he read the bond the Moon Goddess had written into their soul long before they were ever born. And one by one, the crowd erupted in cheers and congratulations.

Wolf families pressed themselves close together in pure happiness. The mothers wiped the tears of joy from their eyes, while the fathers clapped their sons on the back with expressions of softness.

Unfortunately, I had no one standing beside me.

‘Not that I expected any different.’

The Bloodwyn pack had never pretended to care about me; Cassandra Montclair. 

To put things bluntly, I was tolerated. A packmate by default, not by choice. An orphan wolf with no bloodline worth mentioning and no rank worth protecting, and the pack had made sure I understood exactly where I stood for as long as I could remember.

But the mate bond was different.

The mate bond was the one thing that rank couldn't buy and blood couldn't manufacture. It was the Moon Goddess's design, and it belonged to every wolf equally, regardless of who they were. It was the one thing in this entire world that had always belonged to me too.

‘Just a little longer,’ I told myself as another name was called.

The girl beside me; Maria, third daughter of one of the Elder families, gasped when she heard her own name and practically flew across the grounds toward a sandy-haired wolf who had gone completely still the moment she moved. 

There seemed to be a sudden change in the atmosphere the second they locked eyes together and the air felt charged. They looked like soulmates who had just found themselves and were adamant on never letting each other go.

I couldn’t help but look away, but my heart began to beat even faster at the thought of finding my soulmate. Someone who would look at me with unconditional love and we would spend the rest of our lives together, raising our cubs and growing our beautiful family.

The shaman's voice rang out again, and another name was called. Yet another celebration, and another story written in the stars.

I exhaled through my nose and forced my shoulders back down from where they'd been climbing.

‘Your turn is coming. Stop acting like you've already lost something.’ I mumbled to myself to calm the nervous bile that was already climbing up my throat.

"Cassandra Montclair!" The Shaman called out.

The crowd immediately went quiet and I stepped forward. The walk from the back of the crowd to the ritual grounds for some reason felt way longer than it should have. The grass felt cold under my bare feet, and the torch lights burned brightly on either side of me. 

I tried my very best to keep my chin level and my hands still at my sides, even though every nerve in my body was going crazy with each step I took.

The shaman watched me approach until I was standing at the bottom steps of the altar, then he dipped two fingers into the silver bowl and drew a slow line across my collarbone, just below the hollow of my throat.

Afterward, he began to chant.

The words were in the old language, and I honestly had no idea what they meant. I had watched him perform this ritual eleven times tonight already, but standing inside it was something else entirely. 

‘There it was,’ I thought. ‘Warmth.’

It was a slow, building warmth that started somewhere behind my sternum and radiated outward, climbing into my throat, my fingertips, the backs of my eyes.

"It's working. It's actually working."

The shaman's eyes opened, and he looked at something behind me. Or rather, someone.

The warmth in my chest surged. I felt the bond tug at me like a compass needle swinging north, and every thought in my head went completely quiet.

I turned around slowly, following the compass needle in my heart. The crowd had parted without me noticing, and standing at the far edge of the ceremony ground, tall and impossibly still, was Rafael Bloodwyn — The Alpha of the Bloodwyn pack.

"Huh?"

I gasped in shock.

The word formed before anything else could come out.

This wasn't the kind of thing that happened to girls like me. The Moon Goddess didn't look down at an orphan wolf without a bloodline to her name and decide that the most powerful Alpha in the wolf world was the answer to her prayers.

And yet, the bond burned in my chest like a lit bonfire, and when my eyes found his across the grounds, I felt him feel it too.

I started walking before I even made the conscious decision to move my body. The best way to explain it was that my body literally began moving on its own.

The crowd had gone silent now. 

I kept my eyes on Rafael, and with every step I took, the warmth in my chest climbed higher and brighter. Building toward something it had been waiting my entire life to become.

I was just fifteen feet away when I noticed it, the slight change in Rafael’s expression. One moment, his face was unreadable, and the next, every line of it had gone absolutely cold.

His jaw tightened, and I forced myself to slow down. 

Ten feet.

‘He feels it. He has to feel it.’ I told myself over and over again as the distance slowly closed between us.

He was taller up close, broader, with dark eyes that gave nothing away. His Bloodwyn crest was tattooed along the inside of his wrist, deep black ink on his bronze skin — the symbol of everything he was and everything I clearly wasn’t.

I lifted my chin and spoke. "Do you feel it too?"

For a moment, nothing happened. The fire crackled, the crowd waited, and the bond in my chest burned like it had lived there my entire life.

"I do." Rafael finally spoke.

"There it is." The smile pulled at my mouth before I could stop it.

"And I reject it." He finished in a cold tone, staring deep into my eyes.

The warmth in my chest didn't fade… it shattered completely.

It happened so fast I didn't understand what it was at first — just a sudden, violent wrongness that tore through the center of me from the inside out. Starting behind my chest and radiating in every direction at once. 

My knees buckled. I barely managed to catch myself before I went down, my fingers pressing into my own ribs like that could hold the wound closed.

"An orphan wolf such as yourself has no place beside an Alpha." His voice was perfectly even, as though he was simply discussing the weather. "The Moon Goddess made an error I am not obligated to honor."

I couldn't speak or breathe, as his words landed. All I could do was stand in the ruins of the thing I had waited twenty-one years for and try to understand how something could be given and taken in the span of just forty seconds.

‘Don't fall. Don't you dare fall in front of all of them.’

Rafael didn't even bother looking at me again. He turned to the wolf-shaman, who was already reaching for the herbs that would stabilize the Alpha's side of the severed bond. He had already began doing exactly what the pack's healer was supposed to do for the pack's most important member, and the crowd closed around Rafael like he was the one who needed protecting.

“Somebody get her out of here!” I heard him say, and almost immediately, the pack guards had began moving toward me. 

They didn't touch me roughly, I want to be fair about that, but they grabbed me by my arms, hoisting me up till my feet couldn’t touch the ground, and carried me toward the territory border.

‘Of course.’

In this world of werewolves, it was common knowledge to know the law that states; A wolf without a mate was incomplete. A wolf without a mate had no place among the whole. I had known this law my entire life. I had just simply never believed it would be applied to me tonight.

I was almost through the crowd when I felt something press against my hip. It felt like a hand, tucking something into the tiny satchel that I had always wore over my gray cloak.

I glanced back quickly enought to see the wolf-shaman standing a few paces behind me, his carved staff in one hand, and his expression as calm as always. But his eyes found mine for just a moment, and in that moment, something flashed across his face that I hadn't seen on a single face tonight… Grief.

"Good luck, child." His voice was barely a breath.

Then he looked away, and the border treeline swallowed me whole, the warmth of the ceremony grounds disappearing behind me like it had never existed at all.

I walked until the sounds of the pack faded.

The forest was dark and bitterly cold, and the place in my chest where the bond had burned was now just an open wound with nothing to show for itself. I was alone in a way I had never once been in my entire life — and to think I had spent my entire life being the wolf nobody wanted.

I sat down against the base of a tree, drew my knees to my chest, and for the first time since my name was called at the ceremony ground, I let my hands shake, and the tears fall.

Whatever it was the wolf shaman had put in my satchel had begun weighing me down to the point I became curious.

I reached in and pulled it out. Inside was a single vial, filled with a liquid that caught the moonlight and gleamed a deep, perfect silver.

I stared at it for a long time, already knowing what it was.

“Wolfsbane,” I whispered to no one in particular as the tears fell even more freely down my cheeks.

The wound in my chest pulsed with every breath I took, and with every pulse, it got harder to remember why I had spent twenty-one years deciding that surviving was worth the trouble.

"So this is what it feels like to have absolutely nothing." I chuckled in despair.

Then I uncorked the vial and drank it.