Chapter 3

ELOWEN

~•~

Jade Mercer saw me before I even made it through the door.

She was standing just inside the entrance with Talia at her shoulder, both of them dressed like they had spent the entire day preparing, which they probably had. Jade’s eyes landed on me and that familiar smile came up, the one that never meant anything good.

“No.” She said it like she was correcting a mistake. “What are you doing here?”

I kept walking.

“Hey.” She stepped sideways, putting herself in my path. “I’m talking to you. The ceremony hasn’t started yet, which means the hall still needs attending to. You can come back in after we’re done and start on the cleanup.”

Talia laughed behind her hand.

Every other version of tonight, every other version of me, would have dropped my eyes and found a way around her. Would have swallowed it down and moved to a corner and made myself small enough that she lost interest.

But tonight was going to be different.

I stopped walking and I looked at her directly.

“Move,” I said.

Her smile faltered for half a second before it came back sharper. “Excuse me?”

“I said move, Jade.”

She looked back at Talia with an expression of exaggerated disbelief, then back at me. “She’s lost her mind.”

“Enjoy tonight,” I said, keeping my voice even. “Enjoy every second of it. Every word you’ve said to me, every time you put your hands on me, every single thing.” I held her gaze. “You’re going to regret all of it. I promise you that.”

The silence between us lasted about three seconds.

Then Jade laughed loud enough that a few nearby wolves turned to look. Talia joined in immediately and even Brynn, standing a little further back, allowed herself a small smile.

“She’s not getting a mate tonight,” Talia said to Jade like I wasn’t standing right there. “Not tonight. Not ever. Look at her.”

“Go find somewhere to stand that’s out of the way,” Jade said to me, already turning back to the room. “You’re embarrassing yourself.”

I walked past her into the hall.

The space looked different now than it had this afternoon when it was just me and the mop and the echo of my own footsteps. It was full now, warm with bodies and voices and the low hum of anticipation that a mating ceremony carried. Candles had been lit along the walls. The ranked wolves were gathered in loose clusters, dressed up, electric with the possibility of the night. Everyone was waiting for the same thing.

I found a space near the back and stood in it and kept my breathing steady.

The ceremony started shortly after.

I had never been part of one before. I only ever heard them described secondhand or caught fragments through walls when I was supposed to be somewhere else doing something else. But feeling it from the inside was different. The moment the Elder called it open was like something in the air changed frequency, like a current switched on that you couldn’t see but could absolutely feel moving through your chest and down into your bones.

Around me, it started happening. The recognition. Two wolves on the far left of the room turning toward each other with that particular arrested look, that moment of absolute certainty. Then another pair near the front. Then two more. One by one the room was resolving itself into its paired halves, and the noise of it shifted from anticipation as each bond clicked into place.

I watched it happen and I waited.

The room kept narrowing. More pairs found each other, moved together, stepped out of the remaining pool until the crowd had thinned enough that the ones still waiting were visible to everyone. I was aware of my own heartbeat. Aware of the space around me and the eyes that were beginning to track what was left, beginning to do the math.

Then I felt it.

Not the bond itself, not fully, but the edge of it, the awareness of a specific presence in the room pulling at something inside my chest like a hook. I had felt versions of it before in his company but never like this, never this direct and undeniable, and I knew before I even found him with my eyes that it was him.

Dorian was standing across the room.

And then the whispers started.

I caught pieces of sentences drifting from different directions, but I ignored all of it.

I looked at Dorian and I let everything else go quiet.

He started walking toward me. My heart was so loud I could feel it in my ears and my hands were not entirely steady at my sides but I held still and I watched him come.

“This is it, this is finally it,” I whispered to myself.

He stopped in front of me and when I looked up at him, his eyes were as cold as ever and for one completely disorienting second I didn’t recognise him at all.

Then he said the words that shattered me.

“I, Dorian Cross, future Alpha of Blackthorn Pack,” he said, and his voice carried across the entire hall without effort, clear and formal and utterly without feeling, “hereby reject you, Elowen Gray, as my fated mate.”

Those words pierced through me.

My body went completely numb, and then the hall around me erupted but it sounded far away, like it was happening on the other side of glass.

Laughter. That was the first thing that broke through. And the next thing that followed it were the side talks.

She actually thought he would choose her.

An omega.

Did she really believe that?

I found my voice somewhere small and distant and I used it.

“You can’t do this,” I said. Low enough that only he could hear it. “Dorian. We are fated. You know that.”

Dorian stared me down like a total stranger.

“I cannot accept a destiny that would make me, as Alpha, the mate of a weak omega,” he said. Still that same formal tone, still carrying to the room. “I reject the bond.”

The laughter got louder.

I felt my tears come before I could stop them and I hated that they were going to see it. I hated giving them that on top of everything else, but my body didn’t ask my permission and the tears came anyway, hot and humiliating, and the laughter around me swelled to meet them like it had been waiting.

“You can’t,” I said again, and my voice broke on it. “We’re destined for each other. You know we are.”

He had already turned away.

I stood there for one more second in the middle of all that noise, all those eyes and all that laughter, until I couldn’t take it anymore and ran off.

Nobody moved to stop me. Nobody called after me. I heard someone say, as I pushed through the door, that I had been delusional to think the future Alpha of their pack would ever want me, and maybe I should have seen it coming.

I ran down to my storage room and shut the door behind me, then I sat on my cot in the dark.

I pressed both hands over my mouth and I cried until there was nothing left to cry and then I sat in the silence after.

All these months, the meetings in the dark, his hands and his voice and his promises, all that hope I had built out of his words, I looked at it now and saw exactly what it was.

I was foolish to think a common pack servant like me would be picked by the Alpha.

They were right. Every single one of them had been right about me.

And with the disgrace of tonight on top of everything else, I already knew what the coming days were going to look like. The treatment that had already been bad was going to become something I couldn’t survive, no doubt about that

I had nothing. I had no one. I had nowhere to go, no reason left to stay, and no more future to hold on to.

It was high time I put an end to all of this suffering. Taking my life now seemed a lot better than surviving this cruel pack.

The moment I stood up to look for a rope around, a strong wave of nausea hit me so fast that I barely made it to my knees before I was sick, both hands flat on the cold floor, gasping. I stayed down until it passed, chest heaving, and eyes watering from the force of it.

I sat back on my heels.

“No,” I mumbled to myself. “It can’t be.”

There could only be one reason why I suddenly felt a shock of life inside me.

There was only one person who could be responsible.

And he had just rejected me in front of everyone.