The cruelest rejection

Then he spoke.

“No.”…. He answered without feeling remorseful.

My smile fell apart before I even understood why.

“I will not claim Lyra Ashwood.” His expression stayed perfectly cold, like he’d rehearsed this. “I need a mate strong enough to stand beside me. I cannot build my future with a wolfless Omega.”

Every word landed like a stone dropped straight through my chest.

He turned his head, slow and deliberate. “My choice is Selene Ashwood.”

Gasps broke out across the crowd. Somewhere inside me, something that had been holding on for a very long time simply let go.

Selene came toward me wearing a look of sympathy that didn’t fit right on her face. She touched my arm gently, as if she cared. “I’m sorry, Lyra.” Her smile never once reached her eyes. “But you heard him. I didn’t choose him. He chose me.”

Behind her, Luna Seraphina was smiling like a woman watching a plan come together exactly as she’d designed it. Because she had. She’d wanted this all along.

My father rose from his throne. “Enough.” The word alone was enough to silence the whole mountain.

“Alpha Cassian has made his decision.” He looked at me then the way you’d look at something you’d already thrown away. “As for you — you’ve wasted enough of everyone’s time. Floors are waiting to be scrubbed. Return to your duties, Omega.”

No one looked back at me twice after that. They celebrated. They laughed. They gathered around Cassian and Selene to offer their congratulations, and within minutes it was as if I had never stood on that platform at all.

The betrayal, the rejection, the humiliation — all of it would have hurt regardless. But it hurt worse because every soul in the pack had been there to watch it happen.

The one person who had promised he would never leave me had abandoned me the moment it mattered most. By the time night fell, the weight in my chest had grown too heavy to carry through another hour inside that house.

I slipped away from the packhouse and made my way toward the one place that had never once made me feel unwanted — a hot spring hidden deep in the forest, ringed by ancient trees, fragrant flowers, and vines heavy with fruit. Crystal-clear water fed gently into the pool, catching the silver light of the full moon on its surface like something deliberate.

It had always been my sanctuary. Whenever the world grew too heavy to hold, I came here to set it down for a while.

Usually I visit at sunrise. Tonight I wanted the opposite — I wanted the dark, and whatever privacy it could still offer someone who had just been humiliated in front of an entire pack.

I undressed slowly, folded my clothes on a nearby rock, and stepped into the water. The heat wrapped around my aching body like something that had been waiting for me.

I closed my eyes and let a handful of water run over my shoulders, and for the first time all day, I felt something close to peace.

Then — A hand closed around my wrist, firm and sudden.

I gasped, my eyes flying open.

A deep, masculine voice spoke from behind me.

“Goddess!” I shriek, scrambling desperately to climb out of the tub, water sloshing violently around me.

Before I can escape, his merciless hand clamps over my naked breast, fingers digging possessively into soft flesh. Another powerful hand wraps around my throat from behind, yanking me back down hard against a solid, unyielding chest. His body is like heated steel beneath me—every inch carved muscle and raw dominance.

“Are you lost, little flower?” Prince Jai’s voice is a deep, velvet-smooth whisper against my ear, dark and dangerously seductive. The low timbre sends a traitorous shiver racing down my spine. “Or did you come here to offer this sweet body to me?”

I freeze, heart hammering wildly as I feel the thick, hard length of his cock pressing insistently between my thighs, hot and pulsing against my most intimate place……