After My Alpha Chose His Fake Mate

The bond snapped at 8:47 on the night of the autumn Bonfire, and I felt it before I saw it.

I was standing at the back of the crowd in the threadbare gray dress Elara made me wear to every pack function, my arms folded against the cold. All day the mate bond had been humming wrong in my chest—a low, sick tremor I couldn't name. I told myself it was the weather. I told myself it was the anniversary coming up. I told myself a hundred things because I had spent five years telling myself things.

Then Chandler stepped onto the platform.

I knew him. Five years of watching a man decide something he didn't want to feel had taught me the tell—the shoulders squared, the chin lifted a half inch, the small brace of a body preparing to pretend it didn't feel the blow. He did it now, in front of every wolf in Ironridge, under the torchlight.

He extended his hand.

Kylee Mason stepped up beside him.

She was wearing white. Her hair was loose down her back the way mine had been at seventeen, before the claws. She smiled at him the way a woman smiles when she knows the whole pack is watching and she has already won.

Chandler tilted her neck.

He drove his fangs in.

The mate bond detonated inside my ribs. A silver wire, pulled taut through every nerve I owned, and then—snapped. The mark on my neck, the one he had put there five years ago in a quiet room with tears on his face, went cold. Then colder. Then it went like a door closing on an empty house.

My knees hit the dirt.

Somewhere far away I heard the pack gasp, the wet sound of the mating bite, Kylee's soft breathy cry. Wolves near me stepped back. Not toward. Back. Their boots retreated in the dirt like I was something contagious.

No one touched me.

Chandler did not look back.

I pressed my palms flat to the cold ground. I could feel every pebble against my skin. My hands were shaking so badly the dust jumped beneath my fingertips. Inside my chest something was screaming, but I would not open my mouth around it. Not here. Not in front of them.

I got up.

I don't remember deciding to. My body just did it, the way a body pulls out of a burning car. I stood and I brushed the dirt from my palms and I walked.

The crowd parted for me. Slowly, then all at once. I walked straight down the aisle they made and I did not stop until I was at the foot of the platform where Chandler stood with Kylee's blood on his lower lip.

He finally, finally looked at me.

His eyes were wet. I noted that with a distant, clinical calm. He was crying. He had marked another woman in front of his entire pack and he had the audacity to cry about it.

I spoke clearly. The way you read a verdict aloud.

"I, Naomi, reject you, Chandler, Voss, Alpha of the Ironridge Pack, as my mate and as my Alpha."

His face went white.

"I release you from every claim of the bond. I release myself from every claim on you. I take back my scent, my name, and the years I gave."

My voice did not break. I heard it as though someone else were speaking—someone older, someone I hadn't met yet.

"So it is spoken. So the Moon Goddess hears."

The bond severed the rest of the way with an audible crack inside my sternum. Chandler staggered. He caught himself on Kylee's shoulder—on her, he caught himself on her—and his mating mark on my neck faded from cold to gone. I felt it wink out like a candle. There was nothing left of him inside me.

Somewhere very deep, in a room in my chest that had been locked for five years, an ember pulsed once. Just once. Hot enough that I almost gasped.

Then it went quiet.

I turned.

I walked back through the parted crowd. Elara was standing near the ceremonial table with her mouth open in a small, disbelieving O—the first honest expression I had ever seen on her face. I did not look at her either. I walked past the torch line, past the sentries at the gate, past the boundary stones that marked the end of Ironridge territory.

No one stopped me. No one called my name.

I carried nothing. No bag. No coat. No wolf. The wolfsbane scars along my jaw burned in the cold, and I pressed my fingertips against them once, hard, and kept walking.

Behind me the pack began to cheer for their new Luna. The sound rose and rolled out over the trees, thin and false, and I felt it break against my back and slide off.

I made it four miles down the border road before I let my knees go. I sat down in the wet grass under a birch tree and I did not cry. I put my hand flat over my sternum where the bond used to live and I felt, very faintly, that ember again—one slow pulse, and then another.

Something in me was deciding whether to catch.

I opened my other hand. Inside my palm was the small carved wooden pendant from the Carpenter Pack, the one I always kept in my left pocket. I hadn't remembered grabbing it.

I closed my fist around it and I waited for the sun.