Rejected By My Alpha Mate, Claimed By The Cursed Lycan King

Elara's POVThe smell hit me before I saw anything, thick and metallic, wrong in a way that made every hair on my arms stand up.I stopped walking immediately and my first thought was that an animal had made a kill nearby, a deer maybe, something the forest did every night without anyone caring. But this smell was heavier than that, it clung to the back of my throat.I should have turned around, I know that now. But my whole body was still buzzing from the rejection, and some reckless part of me wanted to keep walking, wanted to be anywhere that wasn't behind me.That was how I found a wounded warrior.He was young, maybe a year or two older than me, wearing the gray of the Ashwood border patrol. He was on the ground with his back against a tree, one hand pressed to his side, blood soaking through his fingers."Help," he rasped, when he saw me. "There are Rogues, three of them. please get back to the pack house."I froze, rogues didn't come this close to Ashwood land, not since the

Elara's POVKael didn't let go of my hand as we walked, and I didn't pull away either, even though every part of my upbringing told me that a woman who followed a stranger into the deep woods after dark was asking for whatever happened to her next.Instead I kept waiting for that fear to win out over the strange calm that had settled into my chest since his fingers wrapped around mine."Where exactly are we going," I asked, because the silence between us had started to feel heavier than the mark burning quietly under my skin."Somewhere safer than an open forest with rogues still loose in it," he said, not slowing his pace, though he did glance back at me like he was checking whether I could keep up, which annoyed me more than it should have given that I was, in fact, struggling to keep up in a dress that had never been made for running through trees. "There's a house not far from here that belongs to me. No one will look for you there tonight.""You have a house just sitting in the m

Elara's POVI woke up the next morning in a room I didn't recognize, tangled in blankets that smelled like cedar and something faintly smoky, and for one long, disoriented moment I forgot everything that had happened the night before. Right up until I turned my wrist over and saw the mark still sitting there, dark and quiet against my skin, proof that none of it had been some strange dream brought on by heartbreak and too much wine at the ceremony.Someone had left a plain gray dress folded over the chair near the window, simple, nothing like the wedding dress still lying in a ruined heap somewhere in the woods, and I was grateful for it in a way that surprised me, because putting on something that wasn't stitched with Ryker's rejection woven into every seam felt like the first real breath I'd taken since the clearing.When I made my way downstairs, Kael was already at the table, a cup of something steaming in front of him that he wasn't drinking, staring at it like it might have ans

Elara's POV"Show me your wrist," Alpha Cross said, and the words landed so plainly in the quiet morning air that for a moment nobody moved at all, like the whole clearing was holding its breath along with me."Excuse me?" I said, though my hand had already curled instinctively toward my sleeve, some old animal part of me trying to hide the mark before I'd even decided whether hiding it was the right choice."You heard me." Alpha Cross took a step forward, and one of Kael's own border guards shifted subtly to block his path, close enough to be a message without being an outright threat. "There are rumors moving through the packs already, about a mark, about something that happened in these woods last night. I'd like to see for myself whether there's any truth to them before I decide what to tell my son."My stomach turned at the mention of Ryker, at the thought of him hearing about the mark before I'd even had a chance to understand it myself, and I felt Kael's attention sharpen besi

Elara's POVKael was on his feet before Nyra finished speaking, and I followed him into the library proper, my heart still unsteady from the moment we'd just left hanging unfinished between us, though there wasn't time to dwell on that now with the way Nyra's hands were shaking around the old scroll she carried."Sit," Nyra said, gesturing to the table where she'd already cleared a space, spreading the brittle paper out carefully like it might crumble if she moved too fast. "This isn't from the texts I usually work from. I found it tucked behind a false panel in the old archive, records that someone went to a great deal of trouble to hide.""Hidden records don't usually mean good news," I said, and Nyra's grim expression told me I wasn't wrong to be worried."Three hundred years ago, a mark like yours appeared on a woman named Wren," Nyra said, tracing a finger along a line of faded script. "She was born into a small pack, unremarkable by every account, until a Lycan lord touched her