All Chapters of The Lycan King's Rejected Luna : Chapter 1 - Chapter 6

The ballroom smelled like roses and lies. I stood at the center of it in a white dress that felt more like a costume than a wedding gown, watching two hundred pack members stare at me like I was something they'd found stuck to the bottom of their shoe. My hands were shaking. I pressed them flat against my thighs so nobody would notice, but wolves noticed everything. That's the whole problem with being surrounded by people who can smell fear. Alpha Kane Voss stood three feet away from me, close enough to touch, far enough to matter. He hadn't looked at me once since the ceremony started. Not once. His jaw was tight, his eyes fixed somewhere over my shoulder like I was furniture blocking his view of something more interesting. I'd told myself all morning this was a good thing. An honor, even. The disgraced Hart bloodline, finally elevated by a mate-bond to the strongest Alpha in the territory. My mother had cried happy tears while lacing up my dress. My father hadn't cried at all — h

The eastern quarters turned out to be nothing like what I expected from creatures the packs whispered about like nightmares. The room they led me to was warm, lit with soft amber light, a fire already crackling in a stone hearth like someone had known I was coming before I did. A woman with kind eyes and steady hands cleaned the cuts on my feet without a word of judgment about the state of me — torn dress, ruined makeup, hair still half-pinned from a wedding that had ended in less than an hour. She wrapped my ankle where I'd twisted it running and left a change of clothes folded neatly on the bed before disappearing without asking a single question. I should've felt relieved. Instead I just sat there on the edge of that unfamiliar bed, staring at the fire, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Because kindness like this always came with a price. I just didn't know what mine was yet. The door opened without a knock. He filled the doorway the way some people just naturally do, not beca

For a moment nobody in that room said anything at all. I heard the fire crackling somewhere behind me, heard my own pulse pounding hard enough that I was half convinced everyone else could hear it too. A Lycan bonding. Between you and me. The words just sat there in the air, too big and too strange to actually process. Selene recovered first, and when she laughed, it wasn't a real laugh — sharp, brittle, designed to cut. "You can't be serious." "I'm entirely serious," Ronan said, not taking his eyes off me. "She's a rejected pack wolf, not some prize you can just claim because it's convenient for your politics." Selene's voice climbed, the composed mask slipping for the first time since she'd walked in. "There are laws, Ronan. Even you don't get to rewrite centuries of treaties because you've taken a sudden interest in someone else's discarded mate." "Watch how you speak about her." His voice dropped low, quiet in the way that felt more dangerous than shouting ever could. Selene