Chapter 10

FREYA

Nobody in that hall was ready for what came next. I could see it in the way they leaned forward, hungry for the apology, for the tears, for the version of me they’d already decided I was.

I gave them none of it.

I walked straight past the elder, past my father’s tight, expectant expression, and stopped directly in front of Lucian. He straightened when I got close, some old instinct still expecting me to soften the way I always had, to find some excuse for him the way I’d been doing since we were teenagers standing under a full moon making promises he never intended to keep.

“Freya,” he said again, quieter this time, something uncertain creeping into his voice for the first time I could remember.

The whole hall had gone utterly silent, three hundred pairs of eyes fixed on the two of us standing at the center of a ceremony that was never going to happen the way any of them had planned. Somewhere behind me I could hear the faint rustle of fabric, someone shifting in their seat, the creak of old wood under the weight of collective anticipation. Nobody breathed too loudly. Nobody wanted to miss whatever came next.

“I reject Prince Lucian Aurelius as my mate,” I said.

The words came out clean and even, carrying easily through the silence, and the reaction was immediate. Gasps broke out across the hall, a wave of sound rolling from the front rows to the back, someone’s champagne glass shattering against the floor. I felt the bond between us give a violent lurch, something tearing loose deep in my chest, sharp and hollow all at once, the physical proof of eleven years unraveling in the space of eight words. My knees wanted to buckle with it. I didn’t let them.

Lucian’s face went white. For the first time since I’d known him, every trace of that easy, careless composure dropped away completely, and underneath it was something raw and stunned, a man who had never once considered that I might be the one to walk away first. His hand came up like he meant to reach for me, then dropped back to his side, useless.

“You don’t mean that,” he said, and his voice cracked in a way I’d never heard it crack before, not even close. “Freya, think about what you’re doing. Think about the alliance, think about your father—”

“I have thought about it,” I said. “I thought about it for eleven years. I’m done.”

“I do.”

The word landed and seemed to keep landing, echoing outward through the crowd in overlapping murmurs. Somewhere to my left, an elder from a visiting pack leaned toward his neighbor and whispered something I didn’t bother trying to catch. It didn’t matter what they said. Nothing they said tonight was going to matter half as much as what I did next.

Near the front, Lilith’s face had transformed entirely, the practiced grief melting into something bright and victorious, her eyes darting toward my father like she was already measuring herself for a crown. She thought this was her win. She thought I’d just handed her everything she’d spent months stealing piece by piece, every stolen glance and secret meeting finally paying out in front of an audience. She couldn’t quite keep the joy off her face long enough to pretend otherwise, and for a moment I almost pitied her for how transparent it was, how little she understood about what was actually happening.

She had no idea what was coming.

My father stood from his seat near the front, his face a mask of fury barely restrained by the formality of the setting. “Freya,” he said, low and warning, the tone he used when he wanted a room to remember exactly whose daughter I was, the tone that used to make me shrink two sizes smaller without even trying. “You will not do this. Not here. Not tonight.”

“I already have,” I said, without turning to look at him.

A ripple of scandalized whispers moved through the crowd at that, at the sight of an Alpha’s daughter speaking to him like that in front of nine packs’ worth of witnesses. I felt the weight of every stare in the room, felt the old instinct claw up in me to apologize, to shrink, to fold myself back into the smaller, quieter version of Freya who never made anyone uncomfortable. I let the instinct pass through me and out the other side without taking hold.

Somewhere behind me, my mother had gone completely silent, and I didn’t need to see her face to know what was on it. Grief, probably. Fear, certainly. Maybe even something like pride, buried somewhere too deep for her to let it show in a room like this one. I didn’t turn to find out. I couldn’t afford to, not yet, not while I still had Lucian’s stricken face in front of me and Lilith’s triumph burning at the edge of my vision.

Lucian took a step toward me, his composure cracking further with every second the silence stretched. “This is insane,” he said, quieter now, meant only for me, though half the hall could still hear it. “You’re going to throw away everything, the alliance, your family’s standing, all of it, over some misunderstanding at a party?”

“A misunderstanding,” I repeated, and something in my chest went very cold and very still. “Is that what we’re calling it?”

Something flickered across his face, quick and guilty, gone before anyone else could have caught it. But I caught it. I’d spent eleven years learning every shift and flicker of that face, cataloguing them the way you memorize a language you love, and I knew exactly what guilt looked like on him now.

The elder at the edge of the dais cleared his throat, some attempt to regain control of a ceremony that had already slipped entirely out of anyone’s hands. “Lady Freya, perhaps this discussion is better suited to a private—”

“No,” I said, and my voice carried again, sharp enough that the elder actually stopped talking. “I don’t think it is.”

I turned away from Lucian’s stricken expression, away from my father’s fury and whatever my mother’s silence meant tonight, and looked out instead at the entire assembled court, every pack, every family, every person who’d spent the last two days calling me pathetic behind a screen, safe in the anonymity of a shared feed. They weren’t anonymous now. I could see every one of their faces, could see the hunger in them shifting slowly into something like unease as they realized this wasn’t going to be the story they’d shown up expecting to see. 

The bond between Lucian and me was still unraveling somewhere beneath my ribs, a slow, grinding ache that I refused to let show on my face. It would hurt for a while yet. I’d known that walking in, had braced for it the entire drive over, and it still didn’t change anything I was about to do next. Some things were worth the pain of losing.

“And now,” I said, “let’s discuss what my mate and my sister have been doing behind my back.“​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​