Semua Bab THE REJECTED LUNA: Bab 1 - Bab 10

The barn at Wolf Creek smelled like hay and gasoline and cheap perfume.They’d hung fairy lights from the rafters for me. Someone’s old bedsheets were tacked up to hide the rusted tools. My birthday. My Shifting Ceremony. Eighteen years they’d all been waiting to see what I was.I stood in the middle of it in a borrowed dress.It wasn’t mine. Nothing ever was. Mrs. Holloway from the main house had let me borrow her daughter’s old graduation dress, white lace with a zipper that stuck at the back. It was two sizes too big and I had to keep pulling the sleeves up over my wrists. My hands wouldn’t stop sweating.“Amelia Quinn,” Alpha Stone called from the front.I flinched. Everyone was looking.Kaden’s father stood up there in his clean denim shirt, his beard trimmed. The Alpha. Next to him was Kaden. My Kaden.He was in a black button down shirt, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He wouldn’t look at me. He stared at the floor like the wood grain was the most interesting thing in the worl

I didn’t get in.I stood there in the rain staring at that open passenger door like it was a trap, because it was. Every door at Wolf Creek had been a trap. Pretty fairy lights and then public humiliation. A borrowed dress and then laughter. A bond and then a rejection.The rain was hammering so hard it hurt. The white lace was transparent now, stuck to me, and I crossed my arms over my chest without thinking.The man in the truck didn’t look away. He didn’t do that slow, gross up and down look the ranch hands did either. His gray eyes stayed on my face, on the mark on my neck that was still burning.“Amelia,” he said.My blood went cold. I hadn’t told him my name.“How do you know my name?” My voice was raw from screaming.He didn’t answer right away. He pushed his black hat up a little and I could finally see his face properly. Older than Kaden, maybe thirty. A short beard, rain in it. A scar cutting through his left eyebrow. Not a pretty boy like Kaden. A man.“I know everyone on m

I don’t know how else to explain it. It was just a normal fireplace, logs cracking, but after Jax said it, after “She’s just not a wolf,” the sound filled my whole head and I couldn’t hear the rain anymore.I was looking at my wrist. At that stupid pale crescent I’d had since I was seven. I’d always thought it was a scar from falling off the tire swing. Mom told me it was a birthmark.“White,” I whispered. “You said white.”Jax was still kneeling in front of me. He hadn’t touched me since he showed me my wrist, like he was afraid if he touched me now I’d shatter.“Amelia,” my mom said from the couch, her voice shaking. “Your grandma. My mom. Her name was Mara. She didn’t have a wolf either, not the way they mean here at Wolf Creek. The pack up north didn’t call themselves werewolves. They called themselves the first wolves.”I swallowed. My throat was still raw from screaming in the barn.“First wolves?”“They’re born as wolves,” she said. “Not people who turn into wolves. Wolves who

The trucks didn’t stop at the bottom of the hill.I heard them from the porch before I saw the headlights. Two of them. One was Harlan’s black Ford that never got washed. The other was Kaden’s blue one, the one he polished every Sunday.My mother grabbed my wrist.“Amelia. Inside. Now.”My bare feet stayed frozen to the cold wood. The tea in my hands was shaking.Jax was already moving. He didn’t run. He walked down the steps of his cabin like a man going to check his fence.He was in a t shirt. The cold didn’t touch him. The four white scars on the side of his neck glowed faintly in the dark, just like before.He stopped at his property line. There is a line there, an old barbed wire fence and a wooden post that reads PRIVATE. STONE. NO TRESPASS. In Wolf Creek, that line means something. No Alpha can cross another Alpha’s line without permission. Not even Harlan. Eliza had told me once, back when I still thought it was just a story for children, that the Council itself couldn’t overr

The porch light had gone out because a branch had come down on the line in the wind, nothing more. Jax checked the tree line for a full minute before he let his shoulders drop and came back inside, and only then did the kitchen feel like a room again instead of a held breath. I didn’t say yes right away. I couldn’t. Kaden’s rejection was still hot on my skin. Every time I breathed, I caught that smoke smell, like burnt hair, like my wolf had been branded. Jax was kneeling in front of me again. He wasn’t touching me. His hands stayed on his own knees, giving me room. His eyes were yellow, his wolf close, watching and waiting for me to decide. My mother stood up so fast her chair scraped the floor. “No,” she said. “No, you can’t. She’s eighteen, Jax. She just got rejected. She doesn’t know what a Guardian’s soothe even costs her.” “It’s not a mate mark, Eliza,” Jax said, still looking at me. “You know that. Mara explained it to you once. It covers the pain. It fades.” “It doesn’t