CHAPTER TWO: I Reject You

Lyra's POV

The courtyard erupts.

"No!"

"It has to be a mistake!"

"The Moon Goddess wouldn't choose that girl!"

Voices crash over each other, rising into a roar that presses against my skull like a physical weight. Somewhere to my left, a woman actually screams — an honest-to-goddess scream, like I've just been announced as a death sentence instead of a mate.

Maybe to her, I am.

I can't breathe. My lungs have forgotten how the motion works. The silver dress suddenly feels too tight, too thin, too see-through, like everyone can look straight through the fabric and confirm exactly what they already believe — that there's nothing to me. Nothing worth choosing.

The Moon Priestess doesn't lower her staff. Her eyes stay fixed on me, calm in a way that makes the chaos around us feel even louder.

"Silence!" she calls, and the crowd quiets by degrees, reluctant, still muttering under their breath.

Draven hasn't moved.

He's still standing at the front, and for one long moment, he just looks at me across the space between us — the same way he did before the Priestess spoke. That unreadable, storm-colored stare.

Then he starts walking.

Every step he takes toward me, the crowd parts like water around a blade. My heart does something stupid and hopeful, some small traitorous flutter that whispers maybe. Maybe the way he looked at me earlier meant something. Maybe he doesn't care what I look like. Maybe—

He stops in front of me.

For one beautiful, foolish second, I let myself believe he's going to reach for my hand.

Then his expression changes.

It's subtle. A tightening around his eyes. A flicker of something that isn't wonder anymore — it's closer to disgust, and it lands in my stomach like a stone dropped down a well.

He starts circling me.

Slow. Deliberate. Like I'm livestock at an auction and he's deciding whether I'm worth the trouble of feeding through winter.

His Beta — a broad-shouldered man with a scar through one eyebrow — leans in close enough that I catch the words meant only for Draven.

"Accept her," he mutters. "You can reject her later, in private. Don't do this here."

Draven doesn't even glance at him.

"I don't hide from decisions," he says, loud enough that the whole courtyard hears it.

My stomach drops another foot.

He stops circling. Steps in front of me. And before I can flinch away, his fingers close around my chin, tilting my face up so I have no choice but to meet his eyes.

Up close, they're not just storm-colored. They're cold.

"Look at yourself," he says.

I don't answer. I can't. My throat has closed around every word I might have said.

"You're too skinny." His voice doesn't rise. It doesn't need to — it carries across the silent courtyard like it was made for exactly this. "A Luna isn't a title, little wolf. It's a duty. She survives the Binding Rite. She carries Alpha heirs through nine months of a pregnancy that breaks stronger women than you. She stands at my side through wars, through winters, through everything this pack will throw at her."

His grip tightens, just slightly, on my chin. "I look at you, and I don't see a Luna. I see someone who wouldn't survive her own wedding night, let alone a war."

Somewhere behind me, someone actually laughs.

I want to disappear. I want the ground to open up and take me somewhere far away from three hundred pairs of eyes.

He lets go of my chin like my skin offends him.

"I refuse," he says, "to make a skeleton my Luna."

The silence that follows is the worst sound I've ever heard.

Gasps ripple outward from the front row, spreading through the crowd like a stone dropped in still water. Somewhere, a woman whispers, “He actually said it," like she can't believe her own luck at witnessing it.

The rejection doesn't just hang in the air. It echoes — bouncing off the stone walls of the sacred grounds, off the ancient trees ringing the courtyard, off every silent, staring face, until it feels like the whole pack is saying it back to me in unison.

Skeleton. Skeleton. Skeleton.

I don't cry. I refuse to give them that too.

I just stand there, silver dress hanging off a body that apparently isn't worth claiming, and I watch Alpha Draven turn his back on me in front of everyone I've ever known.

The Moon Priestess doesn't speak. For the first time all night, she looks... unsettled. Her eyes drop to her staff, then lift back to the sky, like she's checking something. Waiting for something.

I don't understand why until the moon changes.

It happens slow at first — a shift in the color of the light pooling across the courtyard stones, subtle enough that I almost don't notice through the ringing in my ears.

Then someone gasps, pointing upward, and the whole crowd turns their faces to the sky at once.

The moon is turning red.

Not the dull orange of an eclipse. Red. Deep, wet, blood-red, bleeding outward from the center like ink dropped in water, staining the entire disk until it hangs above us like an open wound in the sky.

The temperature drops. Wind picks up out of nowhere, snapping through the courtyard hard enough to whip my hair across my face.

And beneath my skin —

Something cracks.

Not a bruise. Not a break. Something deeper, older, like a seal giving way after being held shut for years, and it burns, spreading from my chest outward in lines of white-hot pain that steal whatever breath I had left.

I hear myself gasp. I hear the crowd go dead silent around me.

I look down at my own hands, and for just a second — just one impossible second before the pain drops me to my knees — I swear I see something silver flicker beneath my skin.