REJECTED BY MY ALPHA, CROWNED BY THE KING

Banishment, I learned in the first hour, is not a sentence they carry out. It is one they let the forest carry out.I had nothing. No bag, no cloak, no shoes fit for the mountains, only the thin ceremonial dress I had been rejected in and the raw, bleeding ache where my mate bond used to be. Every step past the boundary stones seemed to pull another thread of it loose. By the time the moon stood straight overhead, I was walking with one hand pressed to my ribs, as if I could hold myself together by force.The rogue lands began where Blackthorn's scent markers ended: a valley of broken pines and burn scars, where no law ran but appetite. Every exile knew the rule. Reach the river by dawn and a neutral town beyond it, and you might live. Stop moving, and you would not.I stopped anyway, for one traitorous minute, and listened behind me for footsteps. For a voice calling my name. For Damien, come to his senses, crashing through the trees to tell me it had been a mistake.Nothing came. Of

For three days, the healers purged the poison from my blood one bitter cup at a time.I shook. I burned. I dreamed of a voice telling me to stay small, stay quiet, stay grateful, and every time I woke, my father was there, or Ronan was, posted outside my door like the palace itself might steal me again.On the fourth night, the moon rose full over the palace gardens, and the thing inside my chest stopped pushing at the door.It broke it down.Pain took me off the bed and onto the stone floor, clean and white-hot, nothing like sickness. It was the opposite of sickness. It was every year of wolfsbane unraveling at once, every locked door in my body flying open in the dark."Sera!" Ronan came through the door at a run, sword half drawn, and stopped dead.My hands were changing on the flagstones. My nails lengthened into claws. Silver fire ran under my skin in bright veins, and my shoulder, my crescent mark, blazed like a small moon."Don't fight it," Ronan said, low and urgent, dropping

The sound of breaking glass seemed to go on forever.A thousand faces turned toward me in the doorway, but I saw only one. Damien Thorne stood frozen in the middle of the ballroom floor, wine and blood running together through his fingers, bright shards glittering at his feet like fallen stars. His mouth was open. In three years of marriage I had never seen that face — the face of a man watching his whole world rearrange itself into a shape he did not choose.His hand had crushed the glass. Not dropped it. Crushed it, the way a man crushes something without feeling it, because everything he has is feeling something else."Sera."He said my name across fifty feet of marble and a thousand held breaths, and the part of me that had been scrubbed floors and swallowed tonic and begged the Goddess for a child heard it like a key turning in a lock I had already melted down."Sera!"He started forward. Delegates scattered out of his path. Vivienne caught at his arm, her fingers digging into hi

I was already moving before the last note of the orchestra died, crossing the ballroom toward the woman who had once made me scrub her bathtub with my own toothbrush.Vivienne Locke sat crumpled at the foot of the dais, her emerald gown spread around her like a spilled garden, both hands pressed to her belly. The hem was darkening, red creeping up the silk the way ivy climbs a wall.She was weeping — or performing weeping, and I knew her choreography well. But when her eyes locked on mine across the marble, there was something in them I had never seen there before. Something unrehearsed.Fear.My father was beside me before I knew he had moved, the whole court turning like wheat in the wind. "Vivienne — child, what has happened?""The baby." Her voice came thin and breaking, perfectly pitched to carry. "Something is wrong. Since she arrived, the air itself has turned against me."By "she" she did not need to mean me aloud. Fifty pairs of eyes did it for her.The healer came at a run,

The herald's words did not fade. They hung in the ballroom like smoke after a cannon shot, and every eye in the room turned from Damien to me, waiting to see whether the Crown Princess would be dragged from her own ball by a law older than the crown itself.My father did not move from his throne, but I saw his hand tighten on the arm of it until his knuckles went white. Ronan stood at my side, close enough that I could feel the heat of him, far enough that no one could say he was holding me in place.Damien stood across the floor, pale and resolute, his hands at his sides, and I understood, with a clarity that surprised me, what he had done. He had not come to this ball to win me back. He had come to force a moment no one could interrupt, a private room where the court could not hear him beg, and where I could not refuse him in front of witnesses.He had used the oldest law in the packs as a door."A mate's right," the herald repeated, because the ritual demanded it, and his voice sho