TOO LATE, MY LUNA

I heard him say her name and my entire world came to a stop.

Not my name. Hers. Selene. He called Selene forward instead of me, and I stood there in my white dress with my heart slamming against my ribs, staring at the side of his face and waiting for him to turn and look at me and say he had made a mistake or gotten confused or anything other than what he had just said. He did not turn. He kept his eyes forward and his jaw set and his expression calm, like he had rehearsed this moment so many times that delivering it in front of three hundred wolves felt completely routine to him.

I had waited six years for this night. Six years of loving Caden, of choosing him over and over again, of telling myself every time the doubt crept in that patience was not weakness and that good things took time. I had turned down a transfer to the Eastern Pack eighteen months ago because I did not want to leave his territory, and I had spent three weeks saving up to buy this white dress because I wanted tonight to be perfect. I had believed all the way down to my bones that tonight was finally going to be our night, and I had been wrong about every single part of it.

Then the rejection bond hit me and every thought I had dissolved instantly. It started deep in the center of my chest and tore outward in every direction at once, hot and vicious and completely merciless, like something woven into the fabric of me for six years was being ripped out by the root.

I had heard other wolves describe rejection before and privately thought they were being dramatic. I understand now that they were not even close to capturing what it actually feels like, because there are no words big enough for it.

My legs stopped working and I went down hard, my knees hitting the cold stone floor of the ceremonial circle and my palms scraping against the ground as I caught myself. I stayed there on my hands and knees for a moment just trying to remember how breathing worked, while the bond continued tearing through me in waves and the white dress spread around me on the stone floor like something broken.

I looked up at the crowd assembled around the circle. Three hundred faces, people I had known and trained beside and trusted for six years, and not one single person moved toward me. Some looked away quickly. Some just stared with the frozen expression of people who have decided that doing nothing is the safest response. I saw Elder Mara in the third row, the woman who had held my hand at my mother's funeral when I was twelve and had nobody else, and she looked at me for half a second before her eyes dropped to her feet and stayed there. That was the moment that broke something in me that the rejection bond itself had not quite reached.

I pressed my palms flat against the cold stone and pushed myself back up. My legs were shaking badly but I locked my knees and straightened my back and lifted my chin and I stood up on my own in the middle of that circle in front of all three hundred of them. My chest was burning and my palms were scraped and the white dress had a dark smear across the knee, but I was standing and I intended to keep standing.

I looked at Caden one last time before I left. He was at the altar where he was supposed to have marked me tonight, and Selene was beside him wearing white too, which told me everything about how long this had been planned. He had a habit of saying my name quietly when we were alone, just Aria, soft and low, like it was something private that belonged only to the two of us, and I had loved that habit for years without ever questioning why he only showed me that version of himself when nobody else was around. He was not looking at me now and I understood he was not going to, so I turned around and walked out of the circle without saying a word to anyone.

The crowd parted without being asked and I moved through them with my eyes forward and my chin level and I did not look at any of their faces, because looking would have cost me the composure I was barely holding onto. I walked through the packhouse gate and down the dirt path and past the training grounds where Caden and I had sparred a hundred times, and I kept walking until the tree line swallowed me and the darkness of the forest closed around me completely.

I pressed my back against the nearest tree and slid down until I was sitting in the dirt with my knees to my chest, and I cried in a way I had never allowed myself to cry in front of another living person. It was the kind of crying that comes from somewhere so deep it does not feel like sadness anymore, it feels like something structural collapsing, like a part of you that has been holding too much weight for too long has finally decided it is done. The rejection bond pulsed hard with every sob and the rain that had started falling soaked through my dress and my hair, and I sat there and let it hurt as much as it actually hurt because there was nobody left to perform strength for.

I thought about six years. I thought about every morning I had woken up and chosen him, every opportunity I had let pass, every version of myself I had made smaller to fit more comfortably inside his idea of what a mate should be. I bit down on my lower lip hard enough to taste blood before I even realised I had done it, and the sharp physical pain was almost a relief because at least it was something I could locate and name.

Eventually the crying slowed down enough that I could breathe between waves. I sat in the quiet forest with the rain still falling and looked up at the dark sky through the branches above me and I made myself a promise. I was done sitting on the ground for Caden of Silverstone. I had one bag to collect and one photograph from my nightstand and I was going to be gone before first light, and I was going to survive this the same way I had survived everything else, by simply deciding that I was going to.

I pressed both hands against my knees and stood up, and that was when the howl came from somewhere deep inside the Darkwood. It rolled through the trees and hit me in the chest like something physical, low and long and unlike any Silverstone wolf I had ever heard, and it stopped me where I stood with my hand pressed against the bark and my breath caught in my throat. It was not a warning or a hunting cry or anything I had a name for. It sounded like something that had been searching for a very long time and was getting closer to whatever it was looking for.

I stood completely still and listened as it came again, closer this time, and deep inside me underneath all the grief and the pain and the broken bond, something stirred that I had no name for. Something old and quiet that felt, as impossible as it seemed standing alone in the rain in the dark, like recognition. Like whatever was moving through those trees had been looking specifically for me, and had just worked out exactly where I was.