Not yours to reject

"I reject you, fatass."

Dean says it laughing, like it's the punchline to a joke only he finds funny. The sound bounces off the rafters of the pack hall and lands right in my chest.

I stand there in the dress I picked out three weeks ago, the one that took me two hours to zip up alone in my room, and I wait for the ground to open up and swallow me whole. It doesn't. It just sits there under my feet, solid and unforgiving, while two hundred people I've known my whole life watch the boy I was promised to reject me in front of all of them.

Somebody laughs. Then somebody else. It spreads through the hall like a fever.

My mate bond, the one the Moon Goddess herself stitched into my chest before I was even born, snaps clean in half. It doesn't feel like heartbreak. It feels like someone reached into my ribs and yanked something out by the root.

I don't cry. I refuse to give them that.

Dean's already turning away, already laughing with his friends like he didn't just gut me in front of the whole pack. Like I'm nothing more than an inconvenience he's finally free of.

"Dean." My voice comes out steadier than I expect. He doesn't even look back.

I've spent my whole life being the sister nobody looks at twice. Mara got the face people stop and stare at. I got the clinic, the long nights stitching up fighters twice my size, hands that know exactly how to save a life and apparently not one thing about how to make a boy love me back.

I turn and walk. Chin up. Shoulders back. I learned a long time ago that the fastest way to survive humiliation is to act like it never touched you.

Nobody follows me outside. Nobody needs to.

The night air hits my face and I let my hands shake once I'm sure no one's watching. My palms are bleeding where my nails dug in. I don't remember doing that.

I've had a bag packed under my bed for three weeks. I knew, somewhere underneath all that hope, this night was coming. I just didn't think it would hurt this much when it finally did.

That's when I see him.

A man leaning against the porch rail like he's been standing there the whole time, arms crossed, watching me with an expression I can't read. Tall. Still. The kind of still that makes you nervous, like he's a held breath waiting to be let out.

I don't know his name yet.

"You're bleeding," he says. Not a question.

"I'm fine."

"Didn't ask if you were fine."

Something about the flatness of his voice almost makes me laugh. Almost. It's the first crack in the numbness all night.

I look at him properly now. Dark hair, jaw like it was carved out of something harder than bone, eyes that don't flinch away from mine the way everyone else's have all evening. He's not a pack member. I'd know his face if he was.

"Who are you?"

"Here for the treaty talks." He doesn't offer more than that. His gaze drops to my split palms again, then back to my face, like he's cataloging something he doesn't have a name for yet.

I should go inside. I should finish packing and leave before Dean decides humiliating me once wasn't enough for the night. But my feet don't move, and neither do his.

"You should get that looked at," he says.

"I run the clinic. I know how to fix a cut."

Something flickers across his face. Not quite a smile. "Course you do."

I don't know what that means and I don't have the energy to ask. I turn to go back down the porch steps, bag digging into my shoulder, and that's when a hand locks around my arm hard enough to bruise.

"My mate isn't going anywhere."

Dean. His grip is too tight, his eyes too bright, wolf pushing up close under his skin like he's forgotten how to hold it back.

"You rejected me." My voice shakes now, and I hate it. "In front of everyone. You don't get to grab me and pretend that didn't happen."

"Doesn't matter what I said in there." His fingers dig in deeper. "You're still mine."

I open my mouth to tell him exactly where he can shove that, and then it happens.

A pull rips through my chest so hard it steals the air right out of my lungs. Not toward Dean. Away from him.

Toward the stranger standing three feet away, whose whole body has gone rigid like he felt it too.

The world narrows down to nothing but that pull, warm and terrifying and undeniable, humming underneath my skin like it's been there my whole life and just woke up.

Dean feels it too. I watch it land on his face, confusion sliding into something uglier.

The stranger steps between us before I can find words, his shoulder angled slightly in front of mine, not touching me, just there.

"Let go of her."

"Who the hell are you to tell me anything about my mate," Dean snaps.

"She was never yours to reject." His voice doesn't rise. It doesn't need to. "You made sure of that yourself."

Dean's grip finally loosens, more from shock than obedience. His eyes flash gold, wolf riding too close to the surface, and for one strange second I see something underneath the anger that looks almost like fear.

Then it's gone. He storms off without another word, leaving me standing there with my heart hammering and my arm throbbing and a bond I never asked for lighting up in my chest like a struck match.

The stranger turns to look at me fully now, and something in his eyes has shifted, gone sharp and focused in a way it wasn't a minute ago.

"What's your name?" I ask, because it's the only question my scrambled brain can hold onto.

"Jaxton Cole." He says it like it should mean something to me. Maybe it will, soon.

His gaze drops to my chest, right where the bond just lit up, and I watch something lurch wrong behind his eyes, like he's just realized exactly how much trouble we're both in.

"You feel that," I say. It isn't a question either.

He doesn't answer. He doesn't have to.