All Chapters of Rejected Queen: Chapter 1 - Chapter 7

I walked through the crowd and the crowd parted. For the first time since I was five, I wasn’t invincible. I heard the whispers start behind me as I moved. Heard my name. Heard his. Heard the word traitor the way I’d been hearing it my whole life, like a sound they made without even thinking anymore. Automatic, reflexive, a habit of cruelty so old it had stopped feeling cruel to them.I walked to the small room at the back of the east quarters where I’d slept on the same thin mattress for thirteen years. I sat down on the edge of the mattress and pressed my hands flat against my knees and I breathed.The bond was broken. I could feel where it had been. A raw ache in the center of my chest, the ghost of something that had existed for approximately six minutes before it was destroyed.Six minutes.That was all I got.I sat with that for a long moment.Then I reached under the mattress and I pulled out the only thing I owned that actually mattered. A small, cracked photograph. My father

I took a step back. My heel caught the uneven ground, and I caught myself, barely, one hand shooting out to find the nearest tree trunk.I breathed.Slow.I stared at him.He was watching me with that same still silver gaze, and I was watching him back, and something about the way he was standing was doing something to my head that I needed to stop immediately. My eyes were cataloguing him without my permission. The absolute absence of anything uncertain in his posture. The way he had walked through these woods in the dark without a torch, without caution, without any indication that the darkness was an obstacle rather than simply the current condition of the air around him.The way even the silence around him felt different.Heavy. Deferential. Like the quiet you heard not in an empty room but in a room full of people who had all decided at once not to speak.Something was assembling in the back of my mind. Slow and terrible.There were no packs in the neutral territories. No Alpha

I went with himLet the record show, I didn’t want to.But there’s a specific kind of logic that kicks in when you’re packless, bleeding, alone in neutral territory at midnight, and the most powerful wolf on the continent is standing in front of you offering shelter.It stops being a choice. It just becomes math.“Fine,” I said.He was already walking.Infuriating.“We shift here.”I looked at him.“You want to travel as wolves.”“It’s faster.”“You couldn’t have mentioned this before I spent an hour walking on two legs through dark woods?”Nothing. Not even a blink.I shifted.My wolf is ash and white.Grey along the spine, white at the chest and paws. The kind of colouring that looks like something that was once bright and got weathered down by too many hard winters.I’d always thought she was beautiful, but I didn’t get many chances to shift at Ironmoor.Then he shifted.And I understood for the first time in my life what the word enormous actually meant.Midnight black. Every inch