CHAPTER ONE

Serena's POV

The ceremony was supposed to be the best night of my life.

The most wonderful moment in the life of any female wolf. 

Older wolves would always pull you aside to talk about the mating ceremony.

Everything you had ever been through would make sense. Every hard year, every lonely night, every moment of feeling like an outsider because of your low background. 

It would all make sense, they said.

I believed them.

I was twenty one years old and I believed every word of it.

The pack hall was full. Every member of the Blackthorn Pack standing in their rows, dressed in the formal colors, the candles lit the way they were only lit for ceremonies that mattered. I stood at the front of it in a white dress that someone had pressed that morning and I held myself very still and I did not let my hands shake even though they wanted to.

Kael stood across from me.

He was twenty five and already Alpha and already everything the pack needed him to be, tall and broad and carrying that particular gravity that Alphas carried, the weight of a position that had shaped every decision he had made since he was old enough to understand what it meant. 

I loved him quietly at first, but now my entire world literally revolved around him.

I looked across the hall, his eyes locked into mine.

I could not read his expression from where I was standing.

Kael was a different person in public and when he was with me.

That was not new. I knew him. I knew the difference between his public face and the one he had at two in the morning when it was just the two of us and he forgot to be the Alpha for a few hours.

The elder who was conducting the ceremony said a few words to open it.

The hall was filled with people, a lot of them came from far away to see the woman the alpha would bond with.

The woman who had captured his heart.

Then the elder turned to Kael, gave him the signal to speak.

And Kael spoke, his voice echoed across the room.

"I cannot complete this bond."

The hall went absolutely silent, someone gasped at a distance.

I stood very still, I felt my chest tighten.

"The bond between a pack Alpha and his chosen mate must serve the pack above all things," Kael said, and his voice was steady in a way that told me he had rehearsed this too. "I have given this consideration and I have determined that this union does not serve the Blackthorn Pack in the ways that are required."

The elder said something low that I could not catch.

Then before I could pick up on what was happening Kael said the words.

The formal words. The ones that could only be used once, that could not be taken back, that severed what had begun to form between us.

“I reject you as my mate, Serena”

My chest tightened even more, I felt the air leave my lungs like I would collapse anytime soon.

Then I felt a sharp sting in my chest like I was being stabbed in the chest.

So this was how it felt.

The rejection hurt more than anything I had ever experienced.

I stood in the front of the Blackthorn Pack hall in my pressed white dress.

All eyes were on me, some looked at me with pity while others were visibly mocking me, saying I was delusional to think an Alpha like him could settle for someone like me.

Maybe they were right, maybe I wasn't worth it.

I turned to Kael. He was not looking at me anymore.

He was looking somewhere past my left shoulder with the expression of a man who had made a decision he considered necessary and had moved on to the next thing already.

There was no point staying here any longer.

I turned around and walked out of the hall.

I wanted to scream and run out but I held myself back. Running would have given them something and I had just had everything taken from me in front of every person I knew and I was not giving them anything else on top of that. 

I walked at a steady pace through the rows of people who moved aside as I came and I pushed the hall doors open and I walked out into the cold night air and I kept walking until the sound of the ceremony behind me was gone and there was nothing around me except dark and trees and the specific silence of being completely alone.

Tears blurred my sight a bit, the pain in my chest still sharp as ever.

Then I sat down on the ground in my white dress not bothered about it getting stained.

I placed my hand on my face, trying my best not to cry, there was no point crying.

I just sat there on the cold hard floor, surrounded by dirt and stones.

My white dress already a bit stained.

I allowed the grief sit with for a bit in silence.

I sat there for a long time.

I was still sitting there when I registered that I was going to be sick, and I pressed my hand flat against the cold ground and breathed through it until it passed, and it was only afterward, sitting back on my heels in the dark, that I did the calculation that I had been refusing to do for three weeks.

The tiredness that had not gone away no matter how much I slept.

The nausea that came and went without explanation.

It's been three weeks now and I had been feeling that way.

I sat very still in the dark outside the hall where Kael Blackthorn had just rejected me in front of everyone I knew, and I counted backward, and the number I landed on sat in my chest like a stone.

Three weeks.

I pressed my hand flat against my stomach as realization hit me.

I hadn't seen my monthly flow.

I felt my heart sink.

“There has to be a logical explanation for this.

I can't be what I think it is” I muttered to myself.