Chapter 13

FREYA

The words landed and everyone in the hall seemed to hold their breath around them, like even the people who’d wanted this outcome hadn’t quite believed they’d get it spoken out loud.

“You can’t do that,” I said, but even as it left my mouth I already knew he could. He was Alpha. Titles lived and died at his word, and I had spent my whole life understanding that fact without ever once imagining it would be turned on me.

“I can,” he said, “and I have.”

Behind me, I heard my mother’s chair scrape back, the sound of it sharp enough to cut through the murmuring crowd. “Marcus, stop this.” Her voice shook, but she pushed through it anyway, and something in me that had gone numb a minute ago cracked open again at the sound of her using his name like that, stripped of every title, like she was speaking to the man she married instead of the Alpha she answered to. “She is your daughter. Whatever else is happening here, she is still your daughter, and you will not do this to her in front of everyone we know.”

For a moment I let myself hope. My mother had never once, in twenty-three years, raised her voice to him in public. Watching her do it now, watching her stand and plant herself between me and the rest of the hall, felt like watching something in the world tilt back into place.

My father turned to her, and whatever softness might have lived in his face a moment earlier was gone entirely.

“Sit down,” he said, and this time the command in his voice wasn’t an edge, it was the whole weight of it, an Alpha order dropped on a room full of people who couldn’t refuse it even if they weren’t the one it was aimed at. I felt it pull at me too, that same old instinct, my knees wanting to bend before my mind caught up and told them not to.

My mother’s mouth opened again, some protest already forming, and then closed. Her whole body went rigid, fighting it, and I watched her lose. She sat.

She didn’t look away from me while she did it. I’ll give her that. Whatever the order took from her, it didn’t take her eyes off mine, and there was so much in that look, apology,  grief and fury on my behalf, that I had to look away first because I couldn’t carry it and stay standing at the same time.

“Freya Ashford,” my father said, and I understood distantly that he was still speaking, that the ceremony of this hadn’t ended just because my mother had tried to stop it, “is banished from this pack, effective immediately. She forfeits all claim to this territory, this bloodline, and any protection it offers. She will leave these grounds tonight.”

Banishment. Not disownment, not disgrace, the actual thing, the word that meant I would stop being pack in every sense that mattered, no bond to fall back on, no border I could cross and call safe.

I looked out at the hall one more time. Nine packs’ worth of Alphas and warriors and elders, people I’d grown up curtseying to, people whose children I’d been tutored alongside, and not one of them said a word. I watched a few faces go tight with something that might have been guilt, watched an older woman near the back lower her eyes like she couldn’t hold mine. Most of them just watched, the way you watch when something happening to someone else, something you’re grateful isn’t happening to you.

Lilith had her hand pressed to her mouth. Lucian was staring at the floor again.

Nobody moved to follow me when I turned and walked toward the doors at the back of the hall.

I don’t remember much about the walk out. I remember the sound of my own shoes on the stone floor, unnaturally loud in a room that had gone that quiet. I remember passing rows of people I’d known my entire life and feeling nothing from any of them, not one hand reaching out, not one voice calling my name. I remember reaching the heavy doors at the back and pushing them open myself, because no one moved to do it for me, and stepping out into a night that felt too cold for how I was dressed, gown and heels and nothing else, no coat, no bag, nothing but what I’d walked in wearing.

The pack house grounds stretched dark and unfamiliar in front of me, familiar and unfamiliar at once, like a place I’d lived my whole life and a place I’d never actually seen.

I started walking toward the border because I didn’t know what else to do with my body except move it.

Somewhere behind me the sound of the ceremony picked back up, faint and muffled through the walls, life going on without me already, the machinery of the pack resetting itself around the hole where I used to be.

I didn’t cry until I was well past the tree line, past the point where anyone from the house could have seen me even if they’d bothered to look. Then it came all at once, the whole night breaking loose in my chest at the same time, the bond tearing, my father’s hand, my mother’s silenced voice, the walk out of that hall with no one following.

I kept walking anyway. My feet were bleeding inside my heels by the time I reached the old marker stones that split Ashford land from the territory beyond it, and I didn’t stop there either, because stopping meant standing still long enough to understand what I’d just lost, and I wasn’t ready for that yet.

The last thing I remember is the ground tilting up to meet me, as I fell. Zooming in and out of consciousness somewhere that wasn’t mine anymore.