All Chapters of Chasing The Rejected Luna's Heart: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

I woke up before the sun, which was normal for an omega. Omegas in Silverwood did not get to sleep in, not even on their birthdays.By five I had scrubbed the pack house kitchen floor, hauled two sacks of flour up from the cellar, and burnt my thumb on a pan that belonged to a woman who had never once said thank you. I sucked on the sore skin and smiled anyway, because today I was nineteen. Today, when the moon rose over the training field, every wolf my age in the pack would feel the pull of the person the Moon Goddess had chosen for them. Some would get a stranger. Some would get a friend. I was going to get Jaxon Vance.I had known it for two years, even if I had never said it out loud. Jaxon was the one who sat with me behind the food stores when the other pups threw rotten fruit at me. He was the one who learned my favorite songs. He had been crowned Alpha only three months ago, and the whole pack whispered that he needed a strong Luna. I tried not to listen to that part. Mates w

The moon rose at ten past nine.I spent the three hours before it locked in the omega bathroom with the tap running so no one could hear me being sick. It was a tiny room with a cracked mirror and a bar of soap shaped like a thumb, and I knew every inch of it, because it was where I had always gone to cry. I sat on the cold tiles and held my knees and rocked, and after the second hour I started to hear something under the sound of the water, a low, steady whining, like a dog outside a door.It was Wren. She had not stopped since the forest."Talk to me," I whispered."I can't." Her voice came out of the dark, small and raw. "It hurts too much to talk.""Is it the bond?""It's pulling. Sage, I can feel it pulling. Like a hook behind the ribs." She made a sound that was almost a laugh. "It's real. It's him. The Goddess gave us him, and he's the one who did that."I pressed my forehead to my knees. For two years I had told myself that fate could not be wrong. I had said the words in the

I lifted my head, and I forgot what I had been about to say.He was tall. That was the first thing, the sheer height of him against the headlamps, in a dark suit gone damp at the shoulders and a long black coat that hung open as though he had not bothered to button it. He had black hair pushed back from a hard, handsome face and a jaw that looked as if it had never relaxed in its life. But it was his eyes that held me. In the glare of the lights they were silver, a bright, molten silver, as if the moon had decided to live inside a person."I said get up," he repeated, quieter this time. He was frowning. He was also, I realized with a hot flush, sniffing the air. He was reading me the way every wolf reads a stranger, from the blood on my hands down to the river water still dripping from my hair."Sir." Another voice from the driver's seat. It was flat and dry and had no wasted words. "That's a Silverwood omega.""I can smell that, Gideon.""Their Alpha will call it an incident.""Let h

It was Kaelen who finally broke the silence, and he did it by ordering enough food to feed a small army."You haven't eaten," he said, already halfway across the room with a phone to his ear. "Don't argue. You smell like someone who hasn't eaten in two days.""I'm not hungry.""Wren is." He covered the receiver and looked at me with perfect gravity. "I can hear her stomach from here."It was true. Somewhere in the middle of my chest Wren was making a small, mournful, undignified sound. I put a hand over my sweater and felt my face go red, and Kaelen turned away to hide a smile and told whoever was on the line that he wanted soup, toast, rice, anything with lemon in it, and he did not care what time it was.Twenty minutes later we were sitting cross-legged on his marble floor with a spread of dishes between us. He had refused to let me eat on the couch like a guest. "You look like you'd apologize to the furniture," he said, and then he sat down on the floor himself, in a suit that prob

Eleven weeks later, I fainted in the middle of a grocery store.It was embarrassing, but it was also, I would learn, the best thing that could have happened. I had been living on stale bread and bus tickets for three months. I had slept in a motel room that rented by the week, scrubbed dishes in the back of a diner, and tried very hard to think about nothing. I had been standing in the canned goods aisle holding a tin of beans and trying to decide if I could afford it when the shelves began, very gently, to tilt.A woman in a white coat happened to be buying instant noodles two aisles over. She caught me before my head hit the shelf, propped me against a stack of beans, and said in a voice like a rusty hinge, "Okay, kid. You're coming with me."That was how I met Evelyn Cross.She ran a tiny clinic above a laundromat in the human quarter, a place with peeling green paint and a single chair that doubled as an exam table. She was twenty-eight and sarcastic and wore her hair in a messy k