Chapter Four

~Selene’s POV~

The rejection is scheduled for nine o'clock.

I know because Caden's message at six in the morning is clinical and precise, as if he is confirming a conference call.

Pack Hall, third floor, nine a.m. Come alone.

My mother reads the message over my shoulder and says nothing. She presses a warm cup of tea into my hands instead, and that silence is more comforting than any words she could offer.

I dress carefully.

Not for him. I need to be clear about that. Not for the man who handed me divorce papers over the dinner table I had spent hours making beautiful. Not for the Alpha who let Vivienne Cole deliver his messages like he couldn't be bothered.

I dress for myself.

Deep burgundy dress, fitted at the waist, falling just below the knee. My dark chestnut hair —which Caden always called the colour of autumn, on his rare, unguarded evenings — I leave down. Soft and deliberate. My eyes are clear despite the night I've just survived.

I look like a Luna.

Because regardless of what happens in the next hour, I am one.

My mother drives me to the Pack Hall. She parks at the bottom of the wide stone steps and reaches across to squeeze my hand.

"You come back out of there on your own two feet," she says quietly.

"I will," I promise her.

---

The Pack Hall is hushed at this hour. A few guards at the entrance, who dip their heads respectfully when they see me — still Luna to them, still theirs — and a young Omega at the front desk who looks quickly at her paperwork rather than meet my eyes.

She knows.

Of course she does. News moves through a pack the way blood moves through a body — quietly, everywhere, all at once.

I take the stairs to the third floor.

The familiar pin code. My fingerprint still accepted.

He hasn't removed it yet.

I don't know what to feel about that.

I pause outside his office door. Through the solid wood I can hear voices — a murmur and then a distinct, bright laugh that I recognise immediately.

Vivienne.

I close my eyes briefly.

Then I open them, straighten my spine, and knock.

"Come in."

Caden's voice. Low and even.

I push the door open.

He's standing behind his desk, one hand resting on the surface, dressed in a charcoal suit that he wears like armour. He looks like every inch the Alpha that this pack has built legends around.

He looks like a stranger.

Vivienne is perched on the corner of the leather sofa along the far wall, legs crossed, the picture of studied elegance. Her pale eyes find me immediately.

"Vivienne," Caden says, without looking at her. "Wait outside."

Her lips part. "Caden—"

"Outside."

A beat. Then she stands, smoothing her blazer, and crosses the room. She passes me in the doorway close enough that I can smell her perfume — something sharp and sweet and wrong — and she turns her head just slightly, a small, victorious tilt to her chin.

Then she's gone, and the door closes, and it's just us.

Caden and I stand in the space between his desk and the door for a moment that feels much longer than it is.

"You look—" he begins, then stops himself.

I wait.

He shakes his head once. A small, private motion, as if correcting a thought he had no right to have.

"Let's proceed," he says.

"Yes," I agree.

He takes a breath. His eyes find mine, and for one suspended moment I see it again — what I saw at the dinner table two nights ago before the walls came up. That fracture line. That something raw and unresolved behind the resolution.

Tell him. The thought surfaces sharp and urgent. Tell him now. Show him the scan. Make him look at what he is throwing away.

But I remember Vivienne's pale eyes across the linen tablecloth.

I will make sure Caden hears the version of you that I choose to tell him.

Whatever she has told him — whatever poison she has carefully, artfully poured into three years of trust — he believed it enough to stand here. He believed it enough to draw up those papers.

If I tell him about the twins right now, he will either use them to bind me into something that looks like a marriage but is nothing like one, or Vivienne will twist it into something else entirely.

I press my lips together. My hand aches to move to my stomach, but I hold perfectly still.

"I, Alpha Caden Blackwell of the Cresthaven Pack," he begins, and the formal cadence of the words is somehow the most brutal part, "formally reject you, Selene Ashford, as my fated mate and Luna."

The force of it hits me like a physical blow — a tearing sensation beginning in my chest and radiating outward into my limbs, into my fingertips, behind my eyes. A sound tries to leave me and I seal my lips against it with every ounce of will I have.

My eyes burn.

I will not cry. Not here. Not in front of the window behind him where Vivienne is probably watching from the courtyard below.

"I—" My voice catches. I swallow. Try again. "I, Selene Ashford, former Luna of the Cresthaven Pack, accept your rejection, Alpha Caden Blackwell."

The remaining threads of the bond snap.

It is the worst pain I have ever felt. Worse than I imagined it could be, and I had spent the last two nights imagining it. It tears through me in a wave so violent that my vision greys at the edges and my knees soften beneath me.

Caden moves before I fully fall — a sharp, involuntary step forward, his hand catching my elbow.

Our eyes meet.

Up close, in the moment before my vision darkens completely, I see that fracture line again. Wider now. His jaw is rigid. There is something in his grey eyes that looks almost like anguish.

Almost.

"Selene—"

But I cannot hear the rest.

The pain takes me under like a tide, and the last thing I feel before the darkness closes in is his hand — still holding on, as if some part of him doesn't know how to let go.