My Little Trophy

/Selene's POV/

"I, Atlas Maxwell, future Alpha of Blue Zircon pack, reject you, Selene Argus Phoebe, as my mate and the Luna of Blue Zircon pack."

I woke up gasping. Same nightmare. Always the same words, the same voice, the same sentence that hunts me whether I'm asleep or awake.

Growing up, I used to eavesdrop on pack members whispering about mates, how the moment you find yours, everything becomes bliss. Your soulmate is the missing piece the Moon Goddess divided from your heart when she breathed life into her offspring. I was just a child then, wide-eyed and hopeful, clinging to that promise like it was the only warmth in a cold house full of terror.

Well, it was. It was the only hope I had left after my parents died.

Everyone treated me like trash. I became the pack's slave, and worse, my mate's servant and his personal plaything.

When he rejected me, I accepted it quietly. I even went to the Alpha on my knees, begging for permission to leave and start over somewhere else. The Alpha refused. Atlas was informed of my request.

What happened after that was the day I truly died.

I had already grown used to the cycle, beatings every night, waking at four in the morning to begin chores, not eating until every pack member had been fed and satisfied. But after that day, something behind my eyes went quiet. The girl who had once believed in mates and moonlight stopped existing. What was left of the small girl learned to survive instead.

"Wake up, you useless bitch! It's time for your chores. I don't know why your pathetic self is still in bed. Get up now, or I'll report you to the Alpha!"

The bucket of ice-cold water hit me before I was fully conscious.

I lay there for a moment, soaked and shivering, staring at the ceiling, then the wall clock.

Twenty minutes of sleep. A personal record.

"Well, Athena," I silently communicated to the wolf that never answered me anymore, "at least it wasn't a dry awakening. I'd have preferred breakfast in bed, but apparently the universe had other plans."

Silence. As always. Ever since the rejection, my wolf had retreated somewhere deep and unreachable inside me, not gone, just absent in the way that hurt more than gone would have. Like a door left open to an empty room.

I rolled my eyes and sat up.

Veronica stood in the doorway in a yellow dress so aggressively bright it was practically a public disturbance while she glared at me. I pressed my lips together hard. The last thing I needed was to start my morning being beaten for laughing at the walking yellow daisy, but she was really making it difficult.

After making sure that I was fully awake, she strode out of the hallway like a wannabe model. I rolled out of bed and sighed deeply when my hands touched the mattress.

The soaked mattress was a loss. I'd be sleeping on the cold, hard floor for days until it dried out. I added it to the long, unspoken list of things I'd stopped grieving over.

My early morning routine passed in a blur. After eating whatever scraps passed for my meal, I made my way to school, limping slightly, as usual, trying to keep my weight off my left side where last night's bruises had settled deepest.

Walking to school was the one part of my day I almost didn't hate. Nobody bothered me on the road. It was just me, the morning air, and the quiet company of my own miserable thoughts.

This is your life, Selene. Make peace with it.

I stepped on a thorn and yelped, the pain shooting straight through the worn-out excuse for a shoe on my foot. The three pack mistletoes, our resident pack bitches, had taken to calling it "a madman's property." I couldn't even argue. They weren't entirely wrong.

I looked up and saw the school gate ahead. I exhaled slowly, steeling myself.

The clusters of idiots were unusually distracted that morning. I slipped through without being cornered, a small miracle I decided not to question. I made it to the far end of the classroom, put my head down, and silently begged the teacher to arrive before anyone noticed me.

Brittany was already smiling and walking toward me when the bell saved my life.

I did a very quiet, very private happy dance.

A minute later, Miss Anderson sashayed in like she owned the building. Fiery red hair, pale legs, a royal blue dress paired with canary yellow shoes. I stared at the shoes for perhaps three seconds longer than was appropriate.

History teacher. Right. Not a marine biology demonstration.

"Care to share what you're thinking about?" Her gaze landed on me like a stone. "The blonde girl in the black hoodie with her head down."

I looked behind me. Prayed. But knew my luck was non-existent.

"Me, ma'am?"

"Is there anyone else fitting that description?"

"What was the question, ma'am?" I asked, keeping my voice carefully sweet. Getting reported to the Alpha over a history class was not how I intended to end my day.

"I asked what you were thinking about."

"Nothing. I'm sorry."

She moved on. The class blurred after that, words washing over me like water I'd already stopped trying to hold.

Hours later, I was back at the pack house, I was nearly through my evening chores, successfully avoiding eye contact with Veronica and her aggressively yellow dress, when the message found me.

"Selene. Atlas is summoning you."

My stomach dropped.

What does he want now?

It wasn't even a question anymore. Questions implied uncertainty. I already knew, had known the moment I heard his name, what waited for me at the end of that walk. I just didn't know how to stop my feet from carrying me there anyway.

I grabbed my cleaning supplies. The pretense mattered to him. To everyone watching, I was going to clean his library. That was the story. That was always the story.

I realised halfway there that I hadn't asked where he was.

I turned back, found the girl who'd delivered the message, and asked as calmly as I could manage.

"His library," she said. "With your cleaning supplies."

Of course.

I walked more slowly after that. Snail pace. Deliberately, uselessly slow, as if I could delay him from losing interest. As if that had ever worked.

The library door appeared at the end of the corridor, and something in my chest went very still.

Don't say anything sharp. Don't give him a reason.

I knocked.

"What took you so long?"

He opened the door wide and stepped aside, and the moment he did, the moment his scent reached me, I felt it.

That treacherous warmth. Starting somewhere behind my sternum, spreading outward without my permission, without my consent, without any regard for everything he had done and everything I had lost.

I hated it. I hated it more than I hated him.

Athena stirred somewhere deep inside me, the first time all day she'd made herself known, and she reached toward him the way she always did. Like a flower turning instinctively toward sunlight that had already burned it to the ground. He is still ours, she whispered, and I wanted to scream at her.

He was never ours. He made that very clear the day he looked me in the eyes and chose to let me go.

But the bond doesn't listen to reason. It never has. That was the cruellest thing about it, that it existed independently of everything else. Independent of his rejection, independent of my pain, independent of what happened every time I walked through this door.

"Drop the supplies." He still wasn't looking at me. "Assume your position."

The warmth curdled. Twisted into something sick and shameful, low in my stomach and I hated myself for ever feeling it in the first place. This was the most insidious part of all of it, that my body still remembered what my mind was desperately trying to bury. That even here, even now, some broken fragment of me still recognised him as mine while the rest of me was already retreating. Already going somewhere else. Somewhere quiet and unreachable where none of this could touch me.

I had learned to leave before he even touched me. It was the only mercy I could give myself.

I thought, not for the first time, about the Alpha. About walking into his office and laying everything bare. I had tried, once, in those early days when I still believed someone might care, and Atlas had known within hours because he was the Alpha's son.

"You're raping me," I had told him that day, my voice shaking but my eyes steady. "This is not sex. You're raping me."

The slap had been so hard I saw stars. Actual stars, scattered across my vision like a cruel little constellation just for me.

He had made himself very clear after that. No one was to know. No one would believe me anyway. And if I tried again, it would be so much worse.

So I said nothing. I went somewhere else instead. Somewhere, he couldn't follow.

When it was over, I didn't move immediately.

I never did.

There was always this moment, just one small, terrible, shameful moment, where the bond made my traitorous body want to stay close to him. Where Athena whimpered softly at the distance, even as every conscious part of me was already screaming to get up, get out, get away. The bond didn't know what he had done to it. Or maybe it did and simply didn't care. Either way it pulled quietly and relentlessly, the way it always had.

I hated that moment more than any of it.

I hated that even after everything, every night, every bruise, every cold morning, every rejection I replayed in my sleep, some devastated piece of me still mourned what this should have been. What we should have been. What the Moon Goddess had apparently decided I didn't deserve.

"Leave."

I gathered what was left of myself. Picked up my cleaning supplies with hands that had learned to stop trembling in front of him. Stood on legs that remembered their purpose out of sheer stubbornness.

One day, I told myself as I walked out the door.

One day you'll leave, and you won't come back.

I told myself that every time.

I was still waiting to believe it.