Chapter Two — The One Who Isn't Invited

THE REJECTED MATE IS THE MOON GODDESS'S DAUGHTER

Chapter Two — The One Who Isn't Invited

Sophia POV

The handle stops turning.

"Sophia." Mara's voice, flat and impatient, right through the wood. "You're not still lying down, are you? Get up. There's more work than there are hands today."

I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding. Just Mara. Just another day that hasn't decided to be kind yet.

I pull my dress on in the dark and climb the stairs before she has to call my name again.

The house is already awake in a way I've never seen it. Every hallway has someone moving through it, carrying flowers, carrying cloth, carrying trays of things too fine for the kitchen I know. Voices spill out of every open door, all of them talking about the same thing.

Tomorrow night.

I'm handed a stack of linens before I've even reached the kitchen. Then a bucket. Then a list of rooms that need airing before the ranked families arrive. Mara doesn't stop moving all morning, and neither do I. When I ask, carefully, whether I might eat something first, she tells me to finish the west wing.

I finish the west wing.

By midday my arms shake every time I lift anything heavier than a folded sheet. Nobody notices. Nobody is supposed to.

I carry a tray of untouched pastries past the sitting room where three of the older omega girls are being fitted for tomorrow. Their dresses are pale and shimmering, pinned at the waist, hemmed while they stand there laughing about nothing in particular.

One of them catches my eye through the doorway. Just for a second. Then she looks away, the way people look away from furniture.

I keep walking.

I tell myself I don't mind. I've told myself that so many times it almost sounds true when I say it now.

It's Mara. I finally ask, late in the afternoon, while we're folding the last of the ceremonial cloth together in the linen room. My hands are raw. My voice comes out smaller than I mean it to.

"Will I be allowed to watch? Tomorrow. From somewhere outside, I mean. I wouldn't need to be close."

Mara doesn't look up from the cloth in her hands.

"No."

I wait for more. There isn't any.

"I only meant —"

"I heard what you meant." She finishes her fold, sets it on the pile, and finally looks at me. Not unkindly. Just plainly, the way she looks at everything. "It isn't for you to watch, Sophia. It's for the unmated wolves. You understand what that means."

I do. I've understood it my whole life. But hearing her say it out loud, today, with the whole house lit up and humming for a ceremony I've quietly imagined since I was old enough to imagine anything.it lands differently than I expect it to.

It isn't that I can't stand in the circle. I already knew that.

It's that I'm not even allowed to stand near it. Not allowed to watch from the dark, from a distance, from anywhere at all. As if my simply seeing it happen might ruin something.

"Yes," I say. "I understand."

Mara goes back to folding. That's the end of it, as far as she's concerned.

I pick up the next piece of cloth and fold it too, and if my hands aren't quite steady, no one is paying enough attention to notice.

It's well past dark by the time my work is finally done. My whole body aches in the specific way it does when I've stopped moving and the exhaustion finally catches up to me all at once.

I should go straight down to the basement. I always do.

Instead, I take the long way back, past the east corridor, past the narrow servants' stair I've climbed a hundred times without ever once stopping at the top of it. There's a small window there, one I've walked by carrying linens and firewood and dirty water more times than I could count, always moving too fast to notice what it looked out on.

Tonight I stop.

From here I can see the back gardens, and past them, just barely, the edge of the ceremonial grounds, where torches are already being staked into the ground in a wide, waiting circle.

I stand there longer than I should.

I'm not part of that circle. I never will be. Mara made sure I understood that today, plainly enough that there's no room left to misunderstand it.

But nobody said anything about this window. Nobody thought they needed to. It's just a window I've passed a hundred times without looking and now that I have, I don't think I could forget it if I tried.

I look at the torches a moment longer, memorizing exactly where I'm standing, exactly what I can see from here and how far I'd have to lean to see more.

Then I go back down to the basement, lie down on the torn fabric, and for the first time in longer than I can remember, I fall asleep already knowing what I'm going to do tomorrow.

I wasn't invited.

I'm going to watch anyway.

End of Chapter Two.