Chapter Three — The Night of Fate

THE REJECTED MATE IS THE MOON GODDESS'S DAUGHTER

Chapter Three — The Night of Fate

Sophia POV

The party was too loud.

People talked and laughed over each other, pups darted between legs and table skirts, glasses clinked somewhere behind me every few seconds, and the whole hall smelled of wine and roasted meat and too many bodies pressed too close together. Female wolves in beautiful dresses drifted between groups. Male wolves stood in clusters, deep in conversation. Young wolves flirted in the dark corners near the windows, laughing too easily at things that weren't that funny.

I felt out of place in every direction I looked.

Then the doors at the far end of the hall opened, and the noise changed.

It didn't stop all at once. It just seemed to bend — conversations trailing off mid-sentence, heads turning one after another like something was moving through the room and pulling everyone's attention with it. A few soft gasps rippled near the entrance. Someone murmured a name I couldn't quite catch over the music. Then, just as quickly, the noise rose back up around it, swallowing whatever had caused it, and the hall went back to being loud and bright and indifferent to me.

I didn't think much of it. I was only here to drop off the wine — set it down where I was told, then get back to the kitchen before anyone remembered I existed. That was the plan. It was always the plan.

I set the last bottle down and turned to leave.

I walked straight into someone's chest.

"Watch where you're going."

A few heads turned toward the sound, then went right back to their own conversations. I stumbled back a step, already lowering my head, already bracing.

I didn't know who I'd hit. But I could feel it in the way the space around us had gone strange. the way no one rushed to scold me the way they would if I'd bumped into anyone else, the way even the nearest wolves seemed to instinctively give us room without looking like they meant to.

Panic rose in me before I even understood why. Whoever this is, I've made a mistake.

"Sorry," I murmured, eyes down, and tried to slip past him.

He caught my wrist before I could. Not hard. I could have pulled free if I'd tried, I understood that even in the moment, some part of me registering that this wasn't a grip meant to trap me, only to stop me.

"Wait," he said. Just that.

I stopped. I didn't have to. I chose to.

"I only wanted to ask you something," he said, quieter now, and something in his voice made the panic in my chest ease, just slightly. "Would you walk with me a moment? You can say no."

I could have said no. I understood that clearly, standing there with his hand loose around my wrist, his thumb not even pressing, just resting.

I didn't say no.

He let go of my wrist entirely once we were past the doors, like he'd only needed permission to lead, not to hold. We walked together into the quiet of the pack house beyond the hall, and neither of us said anything until the noise behind us had faded to almost nothing.

He tipped my chin up with two fingers carefully, watching my face the whole time, like he'd stop the moment I flinched.

"Why do you always move like you want to vanish?"

I didn't have an answer prepared. I never do, not for questions like that. So I gave him the truth instead, because it was easier than inventing a lie on the spot.

"I don't belong here."

He looked at me for a long moment. Then looked away, toward the dark window instead of at me.

"Neither do I."

That made me look up at him properly, before I could stop myself. He didn't say his name, and I didn't ask it, but something in the careful way people had moved around him back in that hall told me he wasn't just anyone. Whoever he was, this was not a room he was used to being denied in.

But he didn't sound like someone who believed any of that mattered.

"I feel like I know you," he said, and something crossed his face when he said it, confusion, almost, like the words had surprised him on the way out. He pressed two fingers briefly to his own chest, unconsciously, the way you'd check a wound you didn't remember getting. "I don't understand it. I've never seen you before tonight."

"You don't," I told him. "You don't know me."

"Then why don't I want to let you go?" He said it almost to himself, frustrated with his own question. "I should. I know I should."

I didn't have an answer for that either. And some part of me. the part that should have been terrified, didn't want him to have one.

I remembered the kitchen. I remembered that I was supposed to already be back there, that every minute I stood here was a minute someone could notice I was missing.

"I have to go," I said, and I meant it. I even took a step back.

He didn't reach for me again.

"I know," he said. "I'm not going to stop you."

He wasn't. I could see that plainly,his hands stayed where they were, at his sides, nothing about him closing the space between us again unless I chose to close it myself.

I stayed anyway.

I don't know how to explain it except to say that some part of me that had never once been given a choice about anything wanted, badly, to make this one.

"I don't understand this," he said again, quieter, when I stepped toward him instead of away.

Then he leaned in, slow enough that I had a hundred chances to turn my face aside, and I didn't take any of them. His mouth found mine, and I could taste the wine on him. he'd been drinking, I understood that clearly, the way his hand came up to cup my jaw a little unsteady, a little more open than I imagine he'd otherwise let himself be. I felt the choice in it anyway. Mine, not just his.

Somehow we ended up in a room I'd never seen before, grander than anything I was ever allowed near. He paused once at the door, his forehead against mine, breathing hard.

"Tell me to stop and I will," he said. "I mean that."

"Don't stop," I told him, and I'd never meant anything more in my life.

He undressed me like I was something worth being careful with, not tearing, not rushing, watching my face at every step like my answer still mattered to him even now. His long fingers found their way to my breast, his head lowering, tongue slow against it while his other hand pinched gently at the other side. I felt lost in it, his mouth trailing lower, his fingers finding places I didn't have names for, slow at first and then not slow at all, until pleasure hit me in waves I didn't know how to brace against.

There was a sharp pain, once, sudden enough to make me gasp, but before the sound could turn into anything else, he went still entirely, checking my face, waiting until I nodded before he moved again. He kissed the sound quiet, murmured that I was his, and even though he didn't mark me, something in the way he said it settled somewhere deep in my chest. He kept moving, careful even in his urgency, and I kept saying whatever sound came instead of his name, since I still didn't have one to say. For a while I forgot there was a world outside that room at all.

By the time he was finally still, I was exhausted in a way I'd never been exhausted before,not from work, not from carrying water or scrubbing floors, but from something that had taken more out of me than any chore ever had, and given something back I didn't have a word for yet.

He fell asleep with his hand still resting against my hip, like some part of him didn't want to stop touching me even unconscious. I lay there a while, watching the strange, restless way his brow stayed faintly creased even in sleep, as though whatever had confused him earlier hadn't let go of him either.

I gathered my torn dress from the floor. I looked at him once more before I left,asleep, handsome even like this and then I looked away from the small stain of blood on the sheets and let myself out as quietly as I'd come in.

I made it back to my own room before anyone stirred.

I didn't know, lying there in the dark with his voice still warm in my ears, that somewhere across the estate, he was lying just as half awake,turning over a single word his own wolf had given him the moment our eyes had met across that hall, a word he hadn't said out loud to me, a word he didn't understand yet himself.

Mine.

I lay there afterward, wide awake, replaying it. the way he'd asked instead of taken, the way he'd stopped when I gasped, the way none of it had felt like the ordinary cruelty I'd learned to expect from this house. I still didn't know his name. Some reckless, hopeful part of me told myself it didn't matter.

Tomorrow was the mating ceremony. Tomorrow, that same foolish part of me thought, might be the start of something like freedom.

I kept replaying the night, the weight of him, the sound of my own voice breaking against his skin until, somewhere near dawn, I finally fell asleep.

End of Chapter Three.