Return Of The Rejected Luna: Am The Lycan Queen

Elena didn't flinch. She had stopped flinching at whispers a long time ago. She had simply become something the pack talked about instead of someone they spoke to.

"It's just jewelry, Elena." His voice was flat, bored almost. "If you had given me an heir, maybe you'd still care about things like that. Do you understand how much shame you've brought this pack? Five years, and nothing."

He didn't shout; he simply said things like that and walked away. His tone was always full of despise and disdain, nothing like the man who claimed her as his mate. Sometimes, Elena wonders if this was Damian true self.

His mother was less restrained.

"Barren wolf," Marla spat, hurling a small glass bottle of fertility medicine across the room. It shattered against the wall behind Elena, amber liquid running down the plaster. "Do you know what the elders are saying about this family? About me? Five years, and you couldn't even manage one pup."

"I've done everything the healers asked," Elena said. "Every ritual. Every tea. Every —"

"And still nothing." Marla's lip curled. "Maybe some wolves simply aren't meant to be mothers."

The gathering hall was full the night everything ended, hundreds of pack members gathered for the monthly assembly.

Damian stood at the front, Elena beside him, as she had stood a hundred times before. Then he stepped forward, and his voice carried easily across the silent room.

"I've decided," he said, "to take a new Luna."

The applause started before Elena's mind had even finished processing the sentence.

Vivian walked onto the stage in white, radiant, already crying the practiced tears of a woman who had rehearsed this moment. Damian lifted the Luna necklace, the one that had sat against Elena's collarbone for five years, and fastened it around Vivian's throat instead.

Elena stood two feet away from him, in front of everyone, in front of a thousand wolves who had once bowed to her. And in that moment, she was nothing.

When she returned to her chambers that night, the room was empty. Her dresses, gone. Her jewelry box, gone. Even the wedding portrait that had hung above the fireplace for five years had been taken down, leaving only a pale rectangle on the wall where it used to be.

On the bed, where her pillow should have been, sat a single folder.

Divorce papers.

Elena sat on the edge of the stripped mattress, the rain still falling outside the window, and for the first time in five years, she did not cry.