REJECTED

 Elena Marsh had imagined this moment a hundred different ways. In none of them did it feel like this.

 The pack circle stretched wide around her, three hundred wolves in human skin, all silent, all watching. Torches burned along the perimeter even though the clearing had electric lighting rigged into the trees — old traditions died hard in Crimson Hollow, and rejection ceremonies were older than most.

 Damian Cross walked toward her with the unhurried confidence of a man who had never once doubted his place in the world. Elena envied that. She'd spent her whole life doubting hers.

 He stopped three feet away. Close enough that she could feel the heat radiating off him, the low thrum of the bond that had snapped into place the moment they'd first locked eyes two weeks ago at his mother's gala. Close enough to smell cedar and rain and something underneath that was entirely, maddeningly him.

 "Elena Marsh." His voice carried easily across the clearing, pitched for the crowd, not for her. "You carry the mate bond scent. I don't deny it."

 A ripple moved through the gathered wolves. Murmurs. Elena felt something in her chest lift despite every warning Sable had given her that morning — don't hope, El, please don't hope.

 She hoped anyway. She always had.

 Damian's jaw tightened, a muscle ticking there like he was fighting something down. His eyes — pale gray, unreadable — flicked once toward the edge of the circle, toward his mother's straight-backed silhouette and the woman standing beside her in ice-blue silk.

 "But a Cross Alpha doesn't mate with an unranked omega," he said. "I reject you, Elena Marsh, as my Luna and as my mate."

 The words landed like a physical blow.

 She felt it before she understood it — a tearing sensation behind her sternum, right where something had begun stitching itself together two weeks ago and now unraveled in an instant, thread by thread, each one snapping loud enough that she was certain everyone in the clearing could hear it too. Her knees wanted to buckle. She didn't let them.

 Gasps rippled through the crowd. Someone near the back made a soft, pitying sound. Elena kept her spine straight and her chin level, because if there was one thing three years in foster care and a lifetime as an unranked wolf had taught her, it was how to stand still while people decided you weren't worth keeping.

 Margaret Cross's mouth curved into the faintest satisfied smile.

 Beside her, Vivienne Hale reached over and laced her fingers through Damian's arm like she'd been waiting for exactly this cue.

 Elena's vision blurred at the edges — not tears, she refused to give them tears — but something sharper. Hotter. A pressure building low in her stomach that had nothing to do with heartbreak and everything to do with a feeling she'd never had before in her life: rage that had teeth.

 "Fine," she said. Her voice came out steadier than she had any right to expect. "You'll regret this, Damian Cross. Not because I'll make you. Because one day you'll look at what I've become and understand exactly what you threw away."

 Something flickered across his face — too fast to name, gone before she could be sure it was real. Regret, maybe. Or just surprise that the omega girl had a spine.

 She turned before he could answer. Before her legs could betray her. She walked out of the circle with three hundred pairs of eyes on her back, past the torches, past the tree line, out toward the territory border where the packed dirt road would carry her away from Crimson Hollow and everyone in it.

 Behind her, faint enough that she told herself later she'd imagined it, she thought she heard Damian say her name.

 She didn't turn around.

 But at the exact moment she crossed the invisible boundary line where Cross territory ended and the human world began, something happened that she would spend the next three years trying to explain to herself.

 The rage in her stomach didn't fade. It ignited — a pulse of heat and pressure that rolled outward from her core like a second heartbeat starting up beneath the first. For one dizzying second, the world went sharp and strange, colors too bright, sounds too loud, her own reflection in a passing car window flashing back at her with eyes that weren't the familiar brown she'd had her entire life.

 They were gold. Molten, impossible gold.

 Then it was gone, and her eyes were brown again, and she was just a rejected, humiliated nineteen-year-old omega standing alone on a dirt road with nothing but a duffel bag and a broken bond.

 She didn't know that forty yards behind her, hidden in the tree line, a pack elder named Tobias Rourke had gone perfectly still, his phone already halfway out of his pocket.

 She didn't know he was staring at her retreating back like he'd just seen a ghost.

  *****