Chapter One: The Rejection

The pain hit before the words did.

Luna felt it crack through her chest like a bone snapping sharp, then hollow, then a silence so total it was worse than the pain itself. The mate bond, the thing that had hummed under her skin for four weeks like a second heartbeat, went dark.

“I, Kane Ashford, reject you, Luna Reyes, as my mate.”

The Great Hall didn’t gasp. It went dead quiet, three hundred wolves holding their breath at once, because everyone knew what a rejection spoken aloud, in front of the pack, at the equinox gathering, meant. It wasn’t a private ending. It was a public execution of everything Luna was supposed to become.

She stared up at him golden hair, gold eyes, the face she’d traced with her fingers three nights ago while he whispered that she was unexpected, but not unwanted and she understood, with perfect clarity, that he was a stranger.

“Kane.” Her voice didn’t shake. She was proud of that, later, when she let herself feel anything again. “Look at me and say it like you mean it.”

He looked at her. His jaw was tight, his eyes were wrong not cruel, not cold, just absent, like he’d already left the room in every way that mattered. “It’s done, Luna. The bond can be severed. You know that.”

Behind him, Seraphina Cole stood in a silver dress that matched the Cole Pack colors, her expression carefully arranged into something that might have been sympathy if you didn’t know better.

Luna’s knees wanted to buckle. She didn’t let them.

“Fine,” she said, and the word tasted like blood. “Then I’m done too.”

She turned before he could see her face crumble, walked the length of the Great Hall with three hundred pairs of eyes on her back, and did not run until she hit the tree line.

She didn’t hear the second set of footsteps until they were already beside her.

“You’re bleeding,” said a voice, low and rough as gravel dragged over stone. Not Kane’s voice. Older. Deeper. A voice that made the wolf inside her go very, very still.

Luna turned, and found herself looking up way up into the amber eyes of Magnus Ashford. Alpha of the Northern Territory. Kane’s father.

“I’m fine,” she said, swiping blood from her lip where she’d bitten through it without noticing.

Magnus didn’t move closer. He didn’t need to his presence took up all the air anyway. “My son,” he said, “is a fool.”

Luna laughed, and it came out broken. “Careful, Alpha. That’s treason.”

“It’s a fact.” His eyes didn’t leave hers. “Facts aren’t treason. They’re just inconvenient for the people who don’t want to hear them.”

She should have walked away. Every instinct told her to. Instead, she stood frozen in the moonlight, staring at a man twenty-two years her senior, feeling something low in her belly that had absolutely no business existing.

“Why are you out here?” she asked.

Magnus’s gaze dropped, just briefly, to the mark on her neck Kane’s mark, already fading, already meaningless. When his eyes came back to hers, something in them had gone dark and decided.

“Because I don’t like waste,” he said. “And you, Luna Reyes, are the least wasteful thing this pack has produced in a decade.”

He left her standing in the trees, wondering why her heart the same heart Kane had just shattered was suddenly beating so hard she could feel it in her throat.