Chapter 1: The Rejection

The whole pack was watching.

Wren felt it in the back of her neck, in the itch between her shoulder blades, in the way her palms had gone slick against the fabric of her claiming dress. It was too tight across her stomach. She'd told the seamstress twice to let it out and the woman had smiled and said it would be fine, and now she stood in the center of the ceremony circle wondering if everyone could see the seams straining when she breathed.

Kade would not look at her.

"Alpha." The Elder's voice rang out over the crowd, steady and formal. "The moon has chosen. Will you claim your mate?"

Kade's jaw ticked. His gaze slid past Wren, past the space where she stood in front of the entire pack, and landed on the edge of the circle. On Selene, standing there in silver silk with her arms crossed and her chin lifted, watching him the way a hunter watches something already caught.

Wren's stomach dropped before he opened his mouth.

"No."

The word cracked over the clearing. A ripple moved through the crowd, dozens of heads turning at once, murmurs breaking out like static.

"I reject you." Kade said it louder the second time, like he needed every wolf in that circle to hear it without doubt. "As my fated mate. I reject the bond."

Someone laughed, sharp and delighted, off to the left.

Wren's knees went first. She locked them before they could buckle, planted her feet, and pressed one hand flat against her sternum like she could physically hold the pieces of herself together. The air left her lungs and did not come back. She counted her own heartbeat, one, two, three, waiting for her body to remember how breathing worked.

She would not fall. Not here. Not in front of them.

"Look at her," a voice muttered somewhere behind her, not even bothering to whisper. "No wonder he didn't want her."

"Poor Selene. Imagine almost losing him to that."

Heat crawled up Wren's throat and into her face. She kept her chin level and her eyes forward, on Kade, who was already turning his back on her, already crossing the circle toward the girl in silver silk. Selene's mouth curved, small and pleased, the kind of smile she only wore when she thought no one was watching closely enough.

Wren was watching. She'd been watching her whole life. She just hadn't understood, until this exact second, standing gutted in front of the entire pack, what that smile actually meant.

"Kade." Selene's voice pitched soft, sweet, pitched to carry. She reached up and touched his jaw like she'd done it a thousand times before. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine." He caught her hand in his, folded his fingers around it. "Better than fine."

The Elder cleared his throat, glancing between the three of them, some flicker of unease crossing his weathered face. "The bond is rejected. It is done. Wren, daughter of Maren, you are released."

Released. Like she'd been a prisoner. Like this was mercy instead of the thing it actually was.

Wren made her legs move. One foot, then the other, down the aisle between rows of watching faces, past whispers that didn't bother lowering themselves anymore, past her mother standing frozen and useless at the edge of the circle, hands twisted into her skirt, saying nothing. Wren kept walking. She kept her chin up because the second she let it drop even an inch, she was going to come apart right there on the packed dirt, and she was not giving Selene the satisfaction of watching it happen.

She almost made it to the tree line.

Selene's fingers closed around her wrist.

"Wren." The word came out soft, sisterly, a blade dressed up in silk. "I'm so sorry it happened this way."

Wren looked down at the hand circling her wrist, the manicured nails, the familiar gold ring their mother had given her for her sixteenth birthday. Then she looked up, into her sister's face, and for one long second the practiced sympathy slipped, just enough to show something underneath it. Something sharp-edged. Something that had been there for years, maybe her whole life, hiding behind shared blood and shared bedrooms and every soft thing Wren had never once thought to guard against.

"Are you happy now?" Wren's voice came out low, rough, barely above a whisper.

Selene's smile didn't waver. But her grip tightened, just slightly, just enough that Wren felt the bite of nails against her pulse point.

"Rest tonight," Selene said. "You'll feel so much better in the morning."

It didn't sound like comfort.

It sounded like a warning.

Wren yanked her wrist free and kept walking, telling herself it was nothing, that grief was making her see things that weren't there, that her sister had never once given her a real reason to look twice.

She was almost at her front door when she heard the second announcement ring out behind her, carried on the wind from the ceremony circle, loud enough that the whole pack could hear it too.

Kade wasn't just rejecting her.

He was marrying Selene at the next full moon.