CHAPTER 2: THREE WORDS

Sera's POV

The hall was full by the time we arrived.

Four hundred people at minimum, maybe more. Every Alpha from every allied pack in the territory, every elder, every ranked wolf who had enough standing to get an invitation. They lined the walls and filled the floor and talked in the low voices of people who were there to be seen as much as to see.

We were not there to be seen.

The Omegas were kept in a side room off the main hall. Twelve of us this year. We sat on wooden benches along the wall and did not talk much. There was nothing to say. We all knew how it went.

Lena sat next to me. She was nineteen and this was her first Presentation and she had spent the walk over asking anyone who would answer what it was actually like.

Nobody told her anything useful.

It's nothing, I said. You walk forward. You stand there for a few seconds. You walk back. That's all it is.

She nodded like that helped. It did not help. I could see it in her face that she had built this up into something and the building was already done and there was no undoing it before the doors opened.

I kept my hand in my lap with my fingers wrapped around my wrist over the bandage. The mark had been quiet since the second burn before dawn. Still there. Present the way it was always present. But still.

I did not trust the stillness.

A woman in a grey dress came in and gave us the order we would be called. I was eleven of twelve. Close to last as always. I listened to my number and went back to looking at the floor.

We waited forty minutes before the first girl was called.

I counted the intervals. Approximately three minutes between each name. Three minutes, then the doors opened, then they closed, then the next name. Nobody came back through to tell us anything. We sat and waited and listened to the muffled sound of four hundred people on the other side of a wall.

By the time the tenth name was called Lena had stopped talking entirely. She sat with her hands in her lap and her shoulders tight and I thought about telling her again that it was nothing and decided against it. Some things you had to find out for yourself.

Eleven.

I stood up. Smoothed the front of my dress. Walked to the door.

The main hall was bigger from the inside than it looked from the entrance. High ceilings, stone walls, candles along both sides burning without moving in the airless room. The crowd was pressed back on both sides leaving a clear path down the center. At the end of it was a raised platform.

He was standing on the platform.

I had seen him twice before and both times from the back of a room and this was different. This was forty feet of open floor between me and him and every person in the hall watching me close that distance. I kept my eyes forward and my pace even and I did not look at the faces on either side.

I looked at him.

Kael Dravon was tall and still in the way that large things were still. Dark hair, dark clothes, a jaw that looked like it had never moved for anyone's benefit. His eyes were on me from the moment I entered and they did not move while I walked toward him and the directness of it after two previous ceremonies where he had looked through every girl like she was not there made my steps slow slightly before I corrected.

I stopped at the mark on the floor where we were supposed to stop.

Three feet between us.

Up close he was harder to categorize. Not just cold. Something underneath the cold that was more complicated than that. He was looking at me the way people looked at things they recognized from somewhere they could not immediately place.

Then the mark on my wrist detonated.

There was no other word for it. Every burn before it had been a warning. This was the thing the warnings were about. White heat from my wrist through my arm and into my chest and outward from there and I pulled my hand to my side and locked every muscle I had against letting it show on my face.

His eyes dropped to my wrist.

One second.

When he looked back up at my face something had changed in his expression. Something had moved through it that was raw and fast and completely uncontrolled before the control came back down like a door slamming. His jaw tightened. His eyes went flat.

He looked away.

He looked away from me while I was standing directly in front of him and the distance of that, the deliberateness of it, told me something was happening that had nothing to do with the ceremony.

Then he spoke.

Three words. I had heard them before from this room, ten times tonight and more times over two previous ceremonies. I knew what they sounded like. I had no feelings attached to them.

I reject you.

The hall went completely silent.

Not the quiet between moments. An absolute silence, four hundred people pulling in a collective breath and holding it. I heard it. I understood what it meant, that this silence was different from the silence that followed the other rejections, that something about this one had landed differently on every person in the room.

I did not look at their faces.

I nodded once. The way you acknowledged information that had been delivered. I turned around and walked back down the clear path between the crowd the same way I had walked in, same pace, chin level, eyes forward.

The doors opened before I reached them.

I walked through.

The side room. The bench. My coat on the back of it. I picked up my coat and kept walking and did not stop at the bench and did not look for Lena and went straight past the side room down the corridor to the back exit that I had noted on the way in because I had learned a long time ago to always know where the other door was.

Cold air outside. Dark sky. The pack transport vehicles lined up along the path.

I walked past all of them.

I was not going back to the pack house. I was not going back to the room with the two beds and the ceiling I had stared at all night. I was done with all of it and tomorrow could move itself up to tonight because I was not spending another night in a place that would never be home.

I got three steps past the last vehicle before my legs stopped working.

It was not a stumble. It was everything switching off at once, knees and muscle and the ability to hold myself upright, and the ground came up faster than I could stop it and I caught myself on my hands in the gravel.

Inside my chest something had torn.

Not physically. But the pain was physical and it radiated outward from the center of my sternum and I pressed one hand flat against it and felt the mark on my other wrist burning with a cold heat that was completely different from everything that came before.

This was not a warning.

This was damage.

Above me the cold sky sat flat and dark and somewhere inside the hall four hundred people were still standing in the silence he had made.

I pressed my forehead to the gravel and breathed.

Behind me, a voice.

Old and very quiet and completely calm.

I have been looking for you for a long time, it said.