Chapter Eight — The Choice He Makes

THE REJECTED MATE IS THE MOON GODDESS'S DAUGHTER

Chapter Eight — The Choice He Makes

Damon POV

I can't sleep.

Every time I close my eyes I'm back at the boundary, watching Sophia press her hand against a cut she never let herself react to, feeling that same wound bloom across my own chest a heartbeat later. There's one way to know if I imagined it.

I sit up, take the small blade I keep on the nightstand, and press it against my own palm before I can talk myself out of it.

I wait.

Nothing.

So it isn't simple pain-sharing, I think.

Something changed there, Zoar says, quiet, none of his usual certainty in it. I don't know what.

---

Kael sends for me before I've properly slept at all.

"The announcement," he says, without preamble. "It's arranged. Sooner than we discussed. The elders want the succession question settled before there's more talk."

Something in my chest tightens at that — not surprise, exactly, but the sudden, concrete weight of a date I hadn't let myself imagine yet. "How soon."

"Days. Not weeks."

Days. I think of everything unresolved sitting in front of me — the boundary, the scent that doesn't fit, Sophia's silence — and understand, with real force for the first time, that whatever is happening is about to be sealed shut whether I've untangled it or not.

"There's also the question of the omega," Kael continues. "Her continued presence around the pack is becoming inconvenient. People still feel the unresolved bond, whatever you've told yourself about it. Here is your choice. You place limits on her punishment yourself, under your own authority — or I remove her from ordinary pack life entirely and confine her properly until the announcement is made."

"Her work cannot put her in danger of serious injury," I say. "That's the limit. Beyond that, the punishment stands."

Kael nods, satisfied in a way that unsettles me more than argument would have. "See it done, then."

I don't leave it there. On my way out, I find the overseer responsible for assigning her work and give him three direct orders: she's pulled from the kennels entirely, no guard is permitted to strike her for any reason, and her water allotment is to be halved. Small things. Not mercy, I tell myself. Just the limit I already set, made real instead of theoretical.

It isn't until I'm walking again that I let myself notice how narrow the whole choice actually was. Confine her further, or manage the cruelty just enough that it stops short of danger. Not stop it entirely. Not ask what actually happened at that boundary. I only know I've been making choices this small my whole life without noticing the walls around me.

My path back takes me past the boundary itself, and I slow without deciding to.

The ground is still disturbed where the attack supposedly happened. But crouching down, I catch something faint underneath the obvious signs — a scent moving the wrong direction for the story I'd been told, away from the estate, not toward it.

I don't know what it means. I know I accepted Seraphina's account without once standing here myself.

"Damon."

Her voice, warm, coming up the path behind me. I straighten, though not fast enough.

"You're out early," she says, falling into step beside me, close enough that when two warriors round the corner a moment later, there's no mistaking what they're seeing.

"Couldn't sleep."

"What were you looking at?" Her eyes flick toward the boundary. Then, lighter, almost teasing: "You weren't questioning the attack, were you?"

"Nothing important," I say, and the lie lands wrong in my own mouth.

She smiles — easy, unbothered — but her fingers tighten just slightly where they've settled on my arm. She doesn't press further. She simply walks on beside me, and if she's recalculating something behind that smile, I can't read it on her face at all.

I've noticed it building for two days now, in pieces I didn't want to add up. At the ceremony, she looked at me like she was waiting for the words to change. Yesterday, she avoided my eyes entirely, deliberate, like it cost her something to do it. Today, crossing the courtyard with an armful of linens, the strip of cloth still wrapped around her palm, she doesn't even glance in my direction. Doesn't flinch. Doesn't hesitate.

The bond pulls anyway, low and steady, the moment I see the bandage.

She walks past like I'm no more significant than the wall behind me.

I understand it all at once, standing there. This isn't punishment anymore, and it isn't performance either. She isn't avoiding me to hurt me.

She's actually stopped waiting.

That should feel like relief.

It doesn't.

That evening, word comes that the announcement will proceed as arranged. I accept it publicly, composed, the way I've learned to accept most things.

Alone afterward, none of it settles the way it should.

Zoar.

A long silence before he answers.

Something changed, he says again. Nothing more.

I already know Sophia is my mate. I've known since the moment he first said the word. But knowing that doesn't mean she owes me anything — not her forgiveness, not her attention, not the waiting I've apparently spent every day since the ceremony assuming she'd keep doing without my ever asking her to.

She's moving on without me. And somewhere underneath the boundary, the scent, the announcement closing in around me like a door I helped build myself, sits the one question I still can't bring myself to say out loud.

What happens when Sophia finally, completely, stops wanting me back?

End of Chapter Eight.