The rejection

Chapter 1:

The dress didn't fit.

Luna knew it the second she pulled it over her head, the way the silver fabric pinched at her ribs and pooled too long at her feet. She had ten minutes to fix it before the whole pack watched her become someone's mate.

"Stand still," her mother said, pins between her lips, kneeling on the floor of Luna's small room. "If you keep shaking, I will stab you."

"I'm not shaking." Luna was shaking.

Outside her window, the pack grounds were already full. She could hear it — wolves laughing, boots crunching over frost, someone tuning a fiddle badly. Tonight was the Claiming Ceremony. Tonight, in front of everyone, Alpha Damon Cross would call her his mate, and Luna Hart, the girl who tripped over her own feet at her father's funeral, who once set her own hair on fire trying to light a bonfire, who had been laughed at more times than she could count — that girl would belong to someone. Would matter to someone.

She had loved Damon since she was twelve years old and he pulled her out of the river when she couldn't swim. She used to think that was the moment the moon chose them for each other. Some fated, secret thing, written before either of them was born.

Her mother finished the last pin and sat back on her heels. "There," she said, and her eyes went soft and wet. "You look like your father's girl tonight."

Luna looked at herself in the cracked mirror propped against the wall. The dress was too big in the shoulders. Her dark hair refused to stay in its braid, little pieces already falling loose around her face. She was not beautiful the way Ivy was beautiful. She did not walk into a room and make it go quiet.

But her eyes — her eyes looked steady tonight. Almost brave.

"I'm going to be someone's mate," she whispered, and her wolf, curled somewhere deep inside her chest, stretched and hummed with something that felt like hope.

Careful, her wolf said. It was the first thing her wolf had said all day, and it did not sound excited. It sounded like a warning.

Luna didn't listen. She never did.

The clearing was lit with a hundred torches, fire licking orange against the black trees. Silver Moon Pack stood in a wide circle, three hundred wolves in their human skins, dressed in their best clothes, waiting. Somewhere near the front, Luna's cousin Ivy stood in deep green, her golden hair loose down her back, looking like she belonged exactly where she was standing. Ivy always looked like that.

Luna walked into the circle and felt every eye land on her at once. She felt her cheeks go hot. She kept her chin up the way her mother taught her — shoulders back, Luna, you are not something to be ashamed of — and she walked to the center of the clearing, to the raised stone platform where Alpha Damon Cross stood waiting.

He was so beautiful it still stole her breath, even after five years of loving him from a careful distance. Tall, dark-haired, eyes the color of a storm right before it breaks. Tonight he wore his ceremonial black, the Alpha mark stitched in silver thread across his chest, and when Luna climbed the steps to stand in front of him, he did not smile at her.

That was the first crack. She noticed it and told herself it was nerves. Everyone got nervous.

The Elder, old Marcus with his crooked spine and kind eyes, stepped between them, raising his arms to quiet the crowd.

"Tonight," he said, his voice carrying over the fire and the wind, "Alpha Damon Cross claims his mate before the pack and the moon. Damon. Do you accept the bond the moon has given you?"

Silence.

Luna looked up at Damon's face, waiting for the words she had imagined a thousand times. I accept her. I claim her. She is mine.

Damon's jaw was tight. His eyes were not on Luna at all. They were somewhere behind her, over her shoulder, in the crowd.

"Damon?" Marcus said again, and now there was a small frown pulling at his old face.

The silence stretched too long. Luna felt her heart begin to slow down, the way it did right before something terrible happened, like her whole body already knew and was trying to protect her by shutting down first.

"I can't," Damon said.

The words landed in the clearing like a stone dropped into still water. Ripples of confusion moved through the crowd. Luna heard her mother's sharp breath somewhere behind her.

"I can't do this," Damon said again, louder now, and he finally looked at Luna. There was something in his face that might have been pity, and pity was so much worse than anger would have been. "Luna, I'm sorry. I never should have let this go this far. I don't — I can't feel the bond with you. Not the way a mate should."

"What are you saying." Luna's voice came out very small. She hated how small it sounded.

"I reject you," Damon said.

Three words. Three words to burn down five years of a life she had built around the shape of him.

The pack gasped as one body. A rejection at a Claiming Ceremony had not happened in Silver Moon Pack in forty years. Luna felt the words hit her chest like a physical blow, felt her wolf howl somewhere deep inside her, a sound of pure animal grief that had no shape yet, only pain.

"Why," Luna whispered. It was the only word she had left.

Damon looked past her again, to the crowd, and this time Luna turned to follow his gaze, already knowing, some old and terrible instinct in her already understanding before her mind caught up.

Ivy stood at the front of the circle, one hand pressed to her mouth, green eyes bright with tears that did not look like sadness.

"Her," Damon said, and he walked down the platform steps toward Luna's cousin, past Luna, without even touching her, without even saying goodbye. "I choose Ivy."

The crowd exploded into noise — shock, whispers, someone laughing in disbelief, a low growl from an older wolf who did not approve. Luna stood alone on the stone platform in her too-big silver dress, and she watched Damon take her cousin's hand in front of three hundred witnesses, watched Ivy's face crumple into something that looked almost like guilt before she let Damon pull her close.

"I choose Ivy," Damon said again, to the whole pack now, his voice strong and sure in a way it had never been when he said Luna's name. "She is my mate."

Someone in the crowd said Luna's name, softly, like an apology. Someone else said, poor girl, not quietly enough. Luna felt herself go very still, the way prey goes still right before it runs, every instinct in her body screaming at once.

Run, her wolf said. Run now.

Luna ran.

She didn't remember climbing down from the platform. She didn't remember pushing through the crowd, didn't remember the fabric of her dress tearing at the hem as she moved too fast for it, didn't remember her mother calling her name, once, twice, the sound growing smaller behind her as she reached the tree line and kept going.

She only remembered the cold air burning in her lungs. The torches behind her shrinking to orange dots and then disappearing. The sound of her own breath, ragged and wet, because she was crying now, crying so hard she could barely see the ground in front of her feet.

I don't feel the bond with you, he had said. Five years. Five years of loving him quietly, of memorizing the sound of his laugh, of believing that if she just waited long enough, if she was just patient enough, he would finally look at her the way she looked at him.

He had never looked at her that way. Not once. She understood that now, running through the dark with branches tearing at her arms, her silver dress catching and ripping on every root and thorn. He had never loved her. He had let her hope for five years while some part of him was already looking at Ivy.

Her. Beautiful Ivy, who had hugged Luna at breakfast that morning and wished her luck. Who had helped braid her hair for tonight. Who had smiled and lied to her face for who knew how long.

Luna didn't know how far she had run. The trees here were older, taller, thicker than any she recognized from Silver Moon territory. The moon above her was full and huge and strange, throwing long silver shadows across the ground, and somewhere in the back of her mind, some careful, sensible part of her that sounded like her mother was saying, Luna, stop, you don't know where you are, this isn't safe—

She didn't stop. She didn't care if it was safe. She wanted to run until the pain in her chest was smaller than the burn in her legs, until she couldn't feel anything at all.

She ran until the trees changed.

She noticed it before she understood it — the air went cold in a different way, sharp and metallic, like the moment before lightning. The trees here were black and twisted, growing close together, their branches knotted overhead so thick that almost no moonlight reached the ground. Somewhere far off, a sound rolled through the forest that was not quite a howl and not quite a scream.

Luna's wolf went rigid inside her.

Stop. Stop, Luna, look where you are.

Luna stopped running. Her chest heaved, tears and sweat mixing cold on her face, and she turned in a slow circle, finally seeing what her wolf had already recognized.

Carved into an old gray stone at the edge of the black trees, half-covered in moss, was a symbol Luna had seen only once before, drawn onto a map in her grandmother's books when she was a little girl, right before her mother snatched the book away and told her never to ask about it again.

A crescent moon split by a single jagged line, like something struck by lightning.

The mark of the Forbidden Woods.

No wolf from Silver Moon Pack was allowed past that stone. No wolf from any pack was allowed past that stone. Luna had grown up hearing the warnings the way she'd heard every warning meant to keep small children in bed at night — the Forbidden Woods take what they want and they never give it back, wolves who cross the border don't come home, something old sleeps in there and you do not want to be the one who wakes it up.

Luna had never believed the stories were real.

Standing here now, in her ruined silver dress, heartbroken and shaking, with the strange cold air pressing against her skin like a hand, she was no longer sure.

Go back, her wolf begged. For the first time in Luna's whole life, her wolf sounded afraid — truly afraid, not annoyed or embarrassed the way she usually was with Luna's clumsy human body. Please. Please, Luna, this is not a place for us.

Luna looked behind her, back the way she'd come. Somewhere in that direction was the pack. Was Damon's hand around Ivy's waist. Was her mother's face, twisted with worry and shame. Was every wolf who would look at her tomorrow and know exactly what had happened to her tonight, the girl who got rejected in front of the whole pack for her own cousin.

She looked forward, into the black trees, into the place no one was supposed to go.

For the first time since she was twelve years old, standing on a riverbank with a boy who'd just saved her life, Luna felt something other than heartbreak crack open inside her chest. Something that felt almost like defiance.

"I have nothing left to lose," she whispered into the dark.

She stepped over the stone.

The moment her bare foot touched the ground on the other side, the whole forest went silent — not quiet, silent, the kind of silence that has weight, that presses against your ears. The strange metallic taste in the air sharpened. Somewhere above her, the clouds slid back from the face of the moon, and for one heartbeat, everything was bathed in light so bright and so red that Luna gasped out loud, throwing a hand up to shield her eyes.

Blood moon.

Her wolf screamed inside her, not in fear this time, but in something enormous, something that had no name, something that felt like a door being torn off its hinges after being locked for a hundred years.

Pain exploded through Luna's body, starting in her chest and radiating out to her fingertips, to the roots of her hair, down through her legs until her knees buckled and she fell to the forest floor, her hands digging into damp black earth. Her vision blurred silver at the edges. Her heartbeat roared in her ears like something enormous was waking up right along with her own pulse, keeping time with it, matching it.

What is happening to me, Luna thought, and she wasn't sure anymore if the voice in her head was her own or her wolf's, because for the first time in her whole life, the two of them felt like they were becoming one single, terrified, burning thing.

Above her, through the tangled black branches, the blood moon watched, and somewhere deep in the ancient dark of the Forbidden Woods, something that had been sleeping for a very long time opened its eyes.

She's here, it thought, in a voice like old stone grinding against old stone. The last daughter of Moonfire has finally come home.

Luna, on her knees in the dirt, shaking, crying, her whole body on fire from the inside out, had no idea that her entire world was about to change forever.

She only knew that somewhere behind her, very close, something was watching her.

And it was not afraid of her at all.