Rejecting My Alpha

Athena's POV

The ballroom smells of power. This is the first thing I notice the moment I step into the room. Eyes shift to me, like they always do, but I am used to it by now. I have learned it is better to ignore them than to react. A room full of Alphas has a certain weight to it, one I felt long before I understood what I was feeling, back when I was small enough to hide behind my mother's dress at gatherings like this one. 

I can still remember my mother's voice echoing clearly in my head, "Head high. Eyes forward. Fear no one, not even the ones who could tear you apart."

Head High...

Eyes forward...

Fear no one...

My heels click softly against the marble floor, catching the light thrown down from the chandelier towering over the ballroom. 

This year's Alpha ball is being held by the Voss pack, and they have left no stone unturned to make it spectacular. Everything here screams old money.

My lips curl into a discreet smirk because I can feel the hungry eyes of unmated wolves tracking me across the room, but none of it matters to me. I am twenty four and I still haven't found my mate, which for some reason makes half the room think that means I am open game. I have been the girl men wanted to marry into since I was eighteen. Not for my face, though that helps, but for the blood in me and the pack behind me. I am the only daughter of the King family, sister to Alpha Asher King.

"You're doing the thing," Hailey says, appearing at my elbow with two glasses of something dark red that is definitely not for drinking, just for holding, because holding a drink at these things gives you an excuse to step out of a conversation before it starts.

"What thing."

"That face. The one that tells every good-looking Alpha in this room, half of whom would start a war with each other just for the chance, that you are not interested. Not even a little."

"Good." I shrug and glance at her. "Then it's working."

"You could at least look like you're considering it. For sport." She rolls her eyes, playful.

She has been my best friend since we were pups running wild through pack territory, long before she became Asher's mate, long before she became the Beta's daughter turned future Luna.

Across the room, Asher is deep in conversation with two Alphas twice his age, nodding along with the patient expression he wears when he is letting older men feel important while giving nothing away. He learned that from our father. I learned other things from our father, and different things from our mother, and when both of them died within a year of each other, I had to learn the rest on my own, the same way Asher did. I was fourteen. I remember standing beside him at our mother's funeral in a dress that still smelled like her closet, and understanding, in the quiet way children understand things too big for them, that nobody was coming to save either of us. Our father's death, we survived it as children, because our mother was still there to hold us. Her death took that away too. We stopped being children the day we buried her.

Asher and I held our pack together by standing beside each other, being each other's support. It was never easy, but we could not let our parents down, or our pack, by failing to step into what we owed them. There were nights I cried where no one could see me and mornings I walked into pack meetings like I hadn't, because that was the only version of grief I could afford.

"Any Alphas caught your eye tonight," Hailey asks, half joking, half curious.

"No." I shake my head and set my glass down as a server passes by.

Behind Hailey, I catch a cluster of unmated Alphas doing a poor job of not staring. The Delacroix heir is among them, who has tried twice now to court me through council, like I am a treaty to be negotiated instead of a person. So did the younger Voss brother, before he found his own mate last spring. So did a Hale's Alpha's nephew two winters ago, and a Sokolov Beta's son the year before that, each of them working up the nerve in his own way, some through the council, some through gifts sent to the pack house that I never opened, one memorably through a poem so bad that Hailey read it out loud at dinner until I made her stop. Asher looks ready to end every one of them just for thinking they might be good enough for me. According to him, no one is. I used to find it funny, all of it, the flowers and the letters and the careful visits timed to catch me alone. Lately it just feels tiring, like being asked the same question in a dozen different voices and having to find a new way to say no every time.

Twenty-four and unmated is not unheard of, not for someone of my bloodline, but it draws attention anyway. Pure Alpha blood on both sides means people watch me the way they watch rare things, waiting to see what I do with myself, who I choose, whether choosing is even something I get to do or whether my future has already been decided for me by two packs and a treaty.

Suddenly, for no reason I can name, my wolf goes restless.

My eyes move to the doors without me telling them to. I don't know what I am searching for, only that something in me has come suddenly and inexplicably unsettled, like the air pressure has dropped before a storm nobody else in the room can feel yet.

Hailey is still talking beside me, but her voice fades into the background along with everything else, because that is when the scent reaches me.

It is warm and dark, cedar and rain, and beneath that a thread of something wilder. The second it hits the back of my throat, every restless thing in me goes still. Not silent. Still, the way water goes still right before it's disturbed again. What replaces the restlessness is a calm so complete it startles me more than the unease did.

I breathe it in again without meaning to.

My eyes find him across the room the way water finds the lowest point, no effort in it at all.

The moment our eyes meet, my wolf surges forward so hard it nearly takes my knees, and one word rises up from somewhere far older than conscious thought, forming on my lips without sound, without my permission, without anything behind it but certainty.

Mate.

Dimitri Romanov. Alpha of the Romanov pack, the strongest territory bordering three others, feared the way people fear weather systems. Not because he is cruel without reason, but because he is cruel efficiently, when it matters, and nobody in three territories has tested that in years. He took his pack at nineteen after killing the uncle who murdered his parents, and he built it into something that makes older, more established packs go quiet when his name comes up.

He is tall in the way that makes a room rearrange itself around him. Dark hair, darker eyes, a stillness to him that reads as danger rather than calm. He isn't smiling at the room the way the other Alphas are. He is looking at it like he's deciding whether it deserves his attention.

Right now his attention is on me.

I can see he has felt what I have felt. The bond between us pulses too hard to ignore. His eyes are locked on mine the same way mine are locked on his, and for one long moment neither of us moves, two wolves recognizing each other across a crowded room.

Then his eyes turn to steel and his jaw ticks, and I don't understand why until a hand brushes near my arm and I shift out of its reach on instinct. I turn to find Stephen Delacroix standing at my side, watching Dimitri like he means to plant a flag in something that already belongs to someone else.

"Athena." Stephen says my name like he has every right to it, tipping his head toward me with the easy smile he's worn every time we met. "I was hoping to steal a dance before the night gets away from us."

I open my mouth to answer, some polite deflection already forming, the kind I've given him a dozen times before, but I never get the chance to say it.

A mistake, though he doesn't know it yet.

Dimitri starts walking toward us with the kind of power and grace only a predator carries. Conversations falter around him without anyone seeming to decide to stop talking, heads turning the way heads turn when something is about to happen that everyone will be discussing by morning. I feel Asher's attention snap toward us from across the room, feel Hailey go still beside me, but none of it matters half as much as the man closing the distance between us.

He stops in front of me. Close. Closer than politeness would allow. His scent hits me at that distance, cedar and rain and, underneath it, something darker I don't have a word for yet.

There is something so comforting in his presence that even though this is the first time I have ever seen him, let alone met him, a feeling of safety wraps around me, and I find myself leaning toward him without deciding to.

He doesn't miss it. He places his hand at the small of my back without hesitation and guides me gently to his side, the softness of the touch a strange contrast to the danger rolling off him in waves.

"Next time, don't even think about invading my mate's personal space," he says, and the warning in his voice is calm and lethal at once. A shiver runs down my spine at the sound of it.

My wolf settles at his words, at the acceptance behind them, and something in my chest unclenches that I hadn't even known was clenched. Twenty-four years of never quite finding this, and here it is, standing in front of me, built for war rather than for me and choosing me anyway.

A low growl rumbles in his chest, and without even thinking, I place my hand on his chest, causing him to calm down instantly. He looks down at my hand like he isn't sure what to make of the fact that it worked, like nothing has ever settled him that easily before, and some small, stubborn part of me wants to ask how long it's been since anyone tried.

Something shifts in his face, quick and gone before I can name it, but I feel it in the bond between us just the same, a pull answering a pull. Behind him the ballroom has gone almost silent, gold light and old blood and the particular electricity of watching something happen that can never be undone. Whatever this is, whoever he turns out to be once the room empties and the politics fall away, I already know one thing for certain.

Nothing about tonight is going to stay the same after this.