Chapter Six — The Price of Rejection

THE REJECTED MATE IS THE MOON GODDESS'S DAUGHTER

Chapter Six — The Price of Rejection

Sophia POV

For one endless second, I don't understand what I've heard. His voice hangs in the air behind me — I reject you — and my mind refuses to catch up.

The torches. The silence pressing in from every side. Three hundred faces I can feel more than see, all of them waiting to watch what I'll do next.

Then my body decides for me.

Tears blur my vision before I even realize I'm crying. I run.

I don't stop at the main hall. I don't stop in the corridors, though I pass people who turn to stare, though someone laughs somewhere behind me, high and delighted, like my whole life just became the evening's best entertainment. I don't stop until I'm down the basement stairs, until the door is shut behind me and locked, until there's nothing between me and the dark except my own ragged breathing.

I sink down against the door and let myself, finally, fall apart.

Last night I lay right here replaying his hands, his voice, the way he'd said mine like it meant something. Tonight I can't stop hearing the other three words instead, the ones that erased all of it in front of three hundred people.

I don't know how long I sit there before the pounding starts on the other side of the door.

"Open it."

I don't recognize the voice. I open it anyway, because I've never once been allowed to refuse.

Two guards. Behind them, Mara, her face carefully blank in a way that somehow frightens me more than anger would.

"You're to continue your duties under new conditions," the taller guard says, "effective tonight."

"New conditions." I don't understand. "Why?"

He doesn't answer that directly. "The Alpha Prince has approved the terms."

Something in my chest goes very still.

"Approved what? I don't understand what I'm meant to have done."

It's Mara who finally answers, quiet, like she'd rather not be the one to say it. "There was an attack near the boundary path this morning. Seraphina was hurt. She says she saw you there, with the man responsible."

The words don't make sense at first. I wasn't anywhere near the boundary path this morning. I was here, exactly where I'm always kept.

"That's not true," I say. "I wasn't there. I don't even know what she's talking about."

"That's not for us to decide," the guard says.

"Damon approved this? Based on that?"

"Yes."

I don't say anything else. There isn't anything left to say to that.

They tell me the terms on the walk back down. I'm to scrub the outdoor kennels before sunrise, every morning, starting tomorrow. I'm to carry water and supplies the length of the grounds throughout the day. I'm to keep working after the other servants are dismissed for the night. I'm forbidden from any pack gathering. I'm not to approach the Alpha Prince, not for any reason, unless he summons me.

I listen to all of it and think, distantly, that for one entire night I let myself believe I might finally be allowed to belong somewhere.

For a moment, standing there in the dark with the terms of my punishment still settling over me, I think about telling them the truth. I was with him. The night before the ceremony. I was the one. The words sit right at the edge of my mouth.

I don't say them.

Because I already know exactly how that would go — I'd stand in front of the pack and say it, and either they'd call me a liar reaching for anything to save herself, or worse, he'd stand there and deny it too, calmly, in front of everyone, the way he denied wanting me at all. I've already been humiliated once tonight. I won't hand them a second chance to do it again.

I say nothing. I go to sleep with my hands already aching from a day of work I haven't even started yet.

The kennels smell exactly as bad as I expect. Worse, maybe, in the cold hour before sunrise, my knees pressed into wet stone, my hands raw within the first hour from the brush and the cold water. By midday my arms are shaking from the water containers, the rope handles cutting new lines into palms that never quite healed from the last set. I keep moving anyway. There isn't a version of this where stopping helps me.

It's in the late afternoon, crossing the training yard with a container I can barely lift, that I see him.

Damon is standing near the west wall, and for one unbearable second, I let myself hope. Maybe he'll look up. Maybe something in him will crack. Maybe he'll say, Stop. This isn't right..

He does look up. His eyes find mine across the yard, and something moves through his face that I don't have time to read.

"Continue," he says, flat, already turning away.

But his jaw tightens.

I don't know why.

And I don't care enough to wonder.

Something in my chest finishes breaking, quietly, without any drama at all.

I pick the container back up and keep moving, and it's a few steps later, rounding the corner of the training hall, that I see the rest of it.

Seraphina is with him. Standing close — far too close, close enough that when she reaches up to fix the collar of his shirt, her fingers linger there a moment longer than the gesture requires. Damon doesn't step back.

I stop walking before I mean to.

"You don't have to worry about her anymore," Seraphina says, not bothering to lower her voice.

Damon doesn't answer right away. I stand there with the container cutting into my palms, waiting for something, though I couldn't say what.

"I already made my decision," he says finally.

I don't know if he means me. I don't know if he means her. I don't know if he means something else entirely, some third thing I have no way of guessing at from where I'm standing. All I know is the way Seraphina turns her head at exactly that moment and finds me watching.

She smiles.

Not the soft, wounded smile from the ceremony. Something colder. Something that knows exactly what it's looking at and is enjoying it.

I make myself walk. One foot, then the other, the container heavier now than it was a moment ago, though nothing about its weight has actually changed.

I'm almost past the training hall when it happens again — that sharp, sudden pull across my own chest, not quite pain, not quite mine. I glance back without meaning to.

Damon has gone still, one hand pressed to his side, his jaw tight.

For a second I wonder if the pain belongs to him.

No. That's impossible. Whatever that feeling is, it has nothing to do with me. I keep walking, and this time I don't look back again.

By the time I'm allowed back to the basement, the sky has gone fully dark and my whole body has become one long, uninterrupted ache. I sit on the edge of my torn fabric and let myself, one last time, remember him the way he was that night — his voice low in my ear, his hands careful, the way he'd made me believe, for one single night, that I mattered to someone.

Then I remember him in the courtyard. I reject you.

Then I remember him this afternoon, Seraphina's hand at his collar, his own voice saying I already made my decision like it settled something.

My eyes fill. I let them, just for a moment.

Tomorrow I'll wake before the sun and scrub the kennels again.

But this time, I won't look for him while I do it.

Because if choosing her was the decision he'd meant, then I'll learn to live as though whatever this feeling is between us — this strange, unwanted pull that keeps finding me even when I don't want it to — had never existed at all.

End of Chapter Six.