Chapter 1 — The Rejection

The first time a man threw me away in public, I was wearing my dead mother's dress, and three hundred wolves leaned in to watch.

"I, Damian Blackwood, heir of Mooncrest, reject Aurora Ashwood as my fated mate. By moon and blood, I sever what the Goddess joined."

The words crossed the hall the way a stone skips water — and kept going long after they left him. I felt the bond go before my mind caught up to the sentence.

It is not heartbreak. I need you to understand that, because everyone assumes heartbreak. Heartbreak is slow. This was a tendon snapping behind my sternum. A hot wire dragged out through the bone.

I did not make a sound.

That was the only thing I owned in that room, so I kept it. Three hundred faces waited for the wail, the begging, the wolfless girl on her knees in the center of the circle. The matrons leaned toward me the way flowers lean toward heat.

I gave them my spine instead.

Damian stood at the head of the circle in his ceremonial whites and had the decency to look uncomfortable for exactly one second. Then he put out his hand, and a girl stepped into it.

Liana of Highcrest. Daughter of an alpha with eleven thousand head of pack and a seat two rungs below the Council. Silk, where I was cotton. Pedigree, where I was rumor.

"You understand," Damian said, in a voice pitched for the crowd. "Mooncrest needs a Luna who can give it strength. Not a charity case my father took in out of pity."

"Out of pity," I repeated.

"Aurora—"

"Say it louder." I let it carry to the back of the hall. "The back row missed which one of us you're ashamed of."

Somebody laughed, once, and choked it down. Damian's jaw tightened. He'd had a speech ready for tears. He had nothing for a wolfless girl who looked him dead in the eye and made him the joke.

That was when it got worse.

Elder Brask rose from the high seat, his staff cracking once against the stone, and the hall went still.

"A fated mate, rejected and unclaimed, holds no standing in the pack that housed her." His eyes found mine, almost gentle, which was worse than cruel. "Aurora Ashwood is severed from the heir, and from the protection of these walls. She has until moonset to be gone. After that—" a pause that cost me a year of my life "—she walks as rogue."

So. Not just thrown away. Thrown out. Into a world that kills lone wolves on principle — and I was the kind of lone wolf that didn't even have teeth.

I felt my father somewhere in the crowd. I didn't look. If his face broke, mine might too, and I had decided — somewhere between reject and sever — that not one of these people would ever watch me come apart.

I turned. I walked the length of the circle alone. My heels were very loud.

Behind me, someone whispered, "Look at her eyes — did you see—" and someone else hushed them, fast and frightened, and I didn't understand it, because I had never been able to see what they saw when they looked at me and went quiet.

Here is something I didn't know yet: my eyes, when I am furious, go the color of a knife.

That night I only knew the room got colder around me, and the matrons nearest the aisle leaned away as if I were running a fever they could catch.

I pushed through the great doors into the dark and pressed my thumb to the old scar on my left wrist — a faded white seam I've had since before memory, from an accident no one would ever explain to me. Pressing it is a thing my hands do when the rest of me wants to come apart.

Without deciding to, I hummed three notes of a lullaby about a moonless sky. The only thing I have of a woman I never met. My mother died in a fire before I was old enough to keep her face.

I shouldn't remember anything of her at all.

I do.

I drove to Argent because it was the only direction that wasn't backward.

The capital swallows you. That's its mercy — millions of people stacked in glass and stone in the long valley beneath the Lycan King's heights, and not one of them knows your name or cares to. I left the car at the edge of the moneyed district and walked until my feet hurt, and then I found a bar tucked under a tower so tall I couldn't see where it stopped. Low light. Old wood. The kind of place that doesn't ask questions.

He was already there.

A man alone at the far end of the bar. A single glass of something amber going warm in front of him, untouched. Black hair. A stillness the whole room arranged itself around without noticing it was doing it.

He had the face of a man sitting at a grave.

I sat three stools down. I had no reason to. The pull just — landed.

Not the fated pull; I knew that one now, and its name was a wound. This was different. Quieter. A gravity, like standing at the edge of something deep.

Let me tell you something out of order, because you should know what you're reading toward.

I would not see this man again for five years. The next time, he'd be wearing a crown he never wanted and a smile that cost money, and he would look at me like a stranger. And by then I'd be carrying a piece of him into a hospital with my whole life riding on it — a small, solemn piece, with his exact frown.

That night I knew none of it. That night I was just a thrown-away girl with a bond bleeding out in her chest, sitting next to the only other person in the world who looked as gutted as I felt.

"Bad night," I said. Not a question.

He didn't turn his head. "Anniversary."

"Of what?"

"Of the night I learned that being the most powerful man in a room saves no one in it."

I should have left it there. I didn't. "I got rejected in front of three hundred people tonight," I said. "So if it's a contest, I'd like to enter."

For the first time, he looked at me.

His eyes were dark, ringed in gold that caught the low light like a coin at the bottom of a well. The gold flared — the way heat shivers off a road — and the entire bar moved.

Not loudly. That was the terrible part.

Every wolf in the place went rigid and dropped their gaze to the floor. The bartender. The couple in the booth. The man playing cards alone. Throats bared, chins tucked — a whole room of predators folding like scolded pups.

Everyone but me.

I didn't look away. I couldn't feel what they felt — I'd been told my whole life I had nothing in me to feel it with — so I just sat there and held the eyes of the most dangerous thing I'd ever been near, while it looked at me like I'd done something impossible.

Behind the bar, the old wolf drying a glass with shaking hands sank slowly to one knee. He bowed his head. And he said a single word — one I'd only ever read in history books, a word for the one creature every wolf on the continent answers to.

"Majesty."