CHAPTER 2: The Rejected

The memory hit Gabriel like a physical blow the moment he stepped into his father's bedroom, the smell of smoke and burning wood suddenly overwhelming despite the sterile scent of sickness that permeated the actual room.

Five years ago. The Riverside Pack purge. Gabriel had been seventeen and still believed that the Holy Order served a righteous purpose, that the werewolves they hunted were monsters who deserved the flames.

He had been so fucking wrong.

Patriarch Thorne lay motionless in the massive four-poster bed, his skin gray beneath the curse marks that crawled across his chest like living tattoos. The symbols pulsed with that sickly green light, moving slowly toward his heart with the inexorable patience of poison. Gabriel forced himself to focus on his father's shallow breathing, on the present moment, but the past refused to release its grip.

The Riverside packhouse had been burning when Gabriel arrived with his father's strike team. He remembered the heat against his face, the way the flames had roared like living things, consuming wood and flesh with equal hunger. The Order had received intelligence that the pack was harboring rogue werewolves, criminals who had violated the supernatural peace accords. The sanction had been approved by the Council of Alphas themselves, signed and sealed with all the proper bureaucratic ritual that made murder legal.

Gabriel had believed every word of the mission briefing. He had been young enough, naive enough, indoctrinated enough to think that holy fire could cleanse corruption from the world.

"The curse is advancing faster than we anticipated," Catherine said, pulling Gabriel back to the present. She stood on the opposite side of the bed, her fingers resting lightly on her husband's hand, careful to avoid the curse marks. "The healers estimate we have seventy-two hours before it reaches his heart. Once it does, nothing in this world or the next will be able to save him."

Gabriel watched the marks pulse and writhe, recognizing some of the symbols from his exorcist training. Blood magic, definitely. Old blood magic, the kind that predated the written word, that reached back to when humans first learned to bargain with darkness for power. Someone with significant knowledge and even more significant hatred had crafted this curse specifically to kill Patriarch Michael Thorne.

In the burning packhouse, seventeen-year-old Gabriel had moved through the smoke with his blessed blade drawn, searching for survivors to evacuate despite his father's orders to let the flames do their holy work. The screams had been unbearable, children crying for parents who would never answer, adults trying desperately to shield their young from the inferno that consumed everything.

He had found a woman collapsed near what remained of the main staircase, her leg trapped beneath a fallen beam. She had looked up at him with wolf eyes gone dim with pain and smoke inhalation, and instead of begging for her own life, she had whispered, "Second floor. The nursery. Please."

Gabriel had left her there. He had run up those burning stairs, his cassock catching fire at the hem, his lungs screaming for clean air, and he had kicked open the nursery door to find three children huddled together in the corner, the youngest barely more than a toddler.

"Who did this to him?" Gabriel asked his mother, studying the curse marks with professional detachment, trying to catalog the components so he could understand the methodology. "These symbols require extensive knowledge of forbidden magic. Someone with training, and with access to resources most practitioners don't have."

Catherine's expression tightened, a flash of something that might have been guilt or fear crossing her face before she locked it down. "We don't know. Your father was investigating something before the curse took hold, something he refused to discuss even with me. He burned all his research notes the night before he collapsed."

Gabriel had carried those three children down the burning staircase, one under each arm and the toddler pressed against his chest, their small bodies trembling with terror as flames licked at his blessed robes. The woman with the trapped leg had still been conscious when he passed her, and the gratitude in her eyes had cut deeper than any blade.

He had gotten the children outside, had handed them off to other survivors who had managed to escape the inferno, and that was when he had seen him.

Dominic Ashford stood on the far side of the burning packhouse, silhouetted against flames that turned the night sky orange and red. Even at seventeen, Gabriel had recognized him from the intelligence briefings, from the photographs that circulated through Order headquarters with warnings about the youngest Alpha billionaire in North America, the werewolf who had built an empire before his twenty-fifth birthday and commanded loyalty from packs that had never before bent the knee to anyone.

Dominic had been searching the burning building with his own eyes, golden and bright even through the smoke, looking for survivors the way Gabriel had been. Their gazes met across the flames, across the corpses and the destruction, across the fundamental divide that separated hunter from hunted.

The mate bond had snapped into place like a lightning strike, like the hand of God reaching down to rewrite the laws of nature themselves.

Gabriel gasped in the present, the memory so vivid that he could still feel the exact moment when his entire understanding of the universe shifted. The bond had been recognition, desire and belonging all rolled into a single instant of perfect, terrible clarity. Every story he had heard about fated mates, every legend and whispered tale, had suddenly made sense in a way that transcended logic or faith.

Dominic had felt it too. Gabriel had seen the recognition flash across his face, the way his entire body had gone rigid with shock. For one perfect moment, suspended in time and tragedy, they had simply stared at each other, connected by something neither had asked for and neither could deny.

Then Dominic's expression had shifted. Shock became horror, horror became rage, and rage became the cold, brutal rejection that had shattered Gabriel's world.

"Your father discovered something," Catherine continued in the present, her voice pulling Gabriel away from the memory again. "Something about the purges, about the intelligence that authorized them. He told me once, in confidence, that he suspected someone within the Order was manipulating the system, creating conflicts where none existed."

Gabriel forced himself to focus on his mother's words, on the implications of what she was saying. "You think someone in the Order cursed him? One of our own?"

"I think your father asked questions that powerful people did not want answered," Catherine said carefully. "I think he started investigating things that were meant to stay buried, and someone decided to silence him in a way that would look like an external attack rather than internal betrayal."

Dominic had walked away from the burning packhouse without a word, his back rigid with fury or disgust or both. He had left Gabriel standing there, seventeen and shaking, feeling like his chest had been cracked open and his heart torn out while it was still beating. The other exorcists had found Gabriel minutes later, still frozen in place, tears streaming down his face for reasons he could not articulate without condemning himself.

His father had known immediately. Patriarch Thorne had taken one look at his son's face, at the way Gabriel trembled and stared at the place where Dominic Ashford had been standing, and he had understood exactly what had happened.

The interrogation had lasted three days. Holy water and prayers, isolation and scripture, his father demanding that Gabriel renounce the bond, that he cleanse himself of the spiritual corruption that came from being tied to a monster. Gabriel had tried, had prayed until his voice gave out, had begged God to take the bond away and make him clean again.

The bond had remained, pulsing steadily beneath his ribs, connecting him to someone who wanted nothing to do with him.

"I need you to understand something," Catherine said, her voice dropping to barely a whisper. She glanced toward the door, checking that Marcus was not within earshot. "Your father was wrong to cast you out. I have spent five years telling him that, fighting with him about it, trying to make him see that love is not corruption and bonds are not sins."

Gabriel looked at his mother with surprise, seeing the guilt written across her face. "You never said anything. When he exiled me, you stood there and watched him do it."

"I know." Catherine's voice broke. "I was a coward. I chose my husband over my son, and I have regretted that choice every single day since you walked out that door. When he started investigating the purges, when he discovered evidence that the intelligence had been falsified, he told me he was doing it for you. That he needed to prove your bond was not the corruption he had believed it to be."

The words hung in the air between them, five years of silence and regret given voice at last. Gabriel wanted to feel vindicated, wanted to feel the righteousness of being proven correct, but all he felt was tired. Bone-deep, soul-weary exhaustion that came from carrying shame and rejection for so long that it had become part of his identity.

"Dominic Ashford rejected me in front of his entire pack," Gabriel said flatly. "He looked at me like I was nothing, like our bond was a mistake that offended him. What makes you think he'll help us now? What makes you think he'll give his blood willingly when he made it abundantly clear five years ago that he wanted nothing to do with me?"

Catherine met his eyes with the desperation of a woman who had already lost too much. "Because despite his rejection, despite his cruelty, you are still his mate. The bond does not break simply because one party refuses to acknowledge it. Somewhere inside him, no matter how deeply he has buried it, Dominic Ashford knows you belong to him."

Gabriel thought about golden eyes across flames, about the moment when destiny had tried to rewrite both their stories. He thought about standing before Dominic again, about being forced to confront the man who had destroyed him with five words spoken in cold fury.

"Only an Alpha's blood, willingly given, can break the curse," Catherine whispered. "We need Dominic Ashford. Which means you need to go to him and make him remember what you are to each other."

The mate bond pulsed beneath Gabriel's ribs, a reminder that no matter how much distance or time separated them, he would always be connected to the man who had rejected him.

He had barely seventy-two hours to save a father who had disowned him by begging help from a mate who had destroyed him.

Gabriel closed his eyes and wondered which would kill him first: the humiliation or the hope.