After My Alpha Rejected Me, I Became Lycan Princess

The bond broke at 10:14 p.m. under a full moon I would never forget.

I stood at the altar in ceremonial white, three hundred witnesses behind me in silence. The moonstone pendant rested against my collarbone—my grandmother's heirloom, the only thing I had that felt like it belonged to me. My thumb pressed the hollow of my throat, the habitual gesture I didn't know I was making until Diego's hand closed around the chain.

He pulled.

The metal bit into my skin before it snapped. I felt the break—sharp, immediate—and then his hand was already moving, already crossing the altar toward Brianna Reed, who stepped from the crowd in Luna white I had not known she owned.

He draped the pendant over her neck.

The crowd did not gasp. They had known. All of them had known.

Diego turned back to face me, and his voice was steady, formal, every word enunciated for the pack to hear. "I, Diego Ford, Alpha of Ironvale Pack, reject you, Liv Sanders, as my mate."

The bond tore.

It did not snap cleanly. It peeled, layer by layer, like skin coming off bone. The mate mark on my neck—three years old, faded but mine—burned. Not metaphorically. It burned, the edges curling to ash against my skin, and I smelled it before I felt the pain: scorched flesh, my own.

My wolf—silent for so long I had stopped listening for her—spasmed once inside my chest. A single howl tore through my mind, high and desperate and then gone. The emptiness that followed was worse than the sound.

My knees hit the altar floor.

I did not choose to fall. My body simply stopped holding me upright. The white dress pooled around me, and I could feel every eye in the clearing on the back of my neck, on the burned skin, on the girl who had always been wolfless and was now also mateless.

"Liv Sanders is a wolfless Omega," Diego said, his voice carrying across the silent pack. "Unworthy of the Luna title. Effective immediately, she is declared rogue. Warriors, escort her beyond Ironvale borders before dawn."

I heard boots on grass. Multiple pairs, closing in.

I reached for the pendant.

It was instinct, not thought—my hand lifting toward Brianna's throat, toward the moonstone that still held the warmth of my skin. I did not get close. Brianna's claws sank into my neck, right over the burned mark, and shoved.

My face hit the mud at the altar's base.

The impact knocked the air from my lungs. Dirt filled my mouth. I tasted blood and earth and the bitter edge of wolfsbane someone had mixed into the ceremonial incense. Above me, Brianna's voice was light, almost amused. "Stay down, Omega."

I turned my head just enough to see Diego. He stood three feet away, watching. His face was calm. His hands were loose at his sides. He did not move.

Two warriors hauled me upright. I recognized them—Caleb Rowe and another whose name I had never learned. Caleb would not meet my eyes. The other one gripped my arm hard enough to bruise.

They marched me through the territory.

Past the eastern alliance roads I had mapped in the Ironvale library during the Omega hours when no one thought I was paying attention. Past the training grounds I had funded with resources from a benefactor I had never met, whose instructions had always come through sealed letters and whose generosity I had believed was pack fortune. Past the hall where I had served meals and cleaned floors and made myself small enough to be invisible.

No one followed.

The warriors stopped at the border marker—a stone cairn older than the pack itself. Caleb released my arm first. The other warrior shoved me forward, and I stumbled but did not fall.

"Don't come back," the nameless one said.

They turned and walked away.

I stood alone at the border in the dark. The wound on my neck was still bleeding, slow and sticky. The bond was gone, a hollow space in my chest where something had lived for three years. I had no pack. No wolf. No pendant. No bond.

I should have collapsed.

Instead, I took the first step across the border onto unclaimed land.

The ground felt the same under my feet. The air smelled the same—pine and damp earth and the faint metallic edge of the boundary wards fading behind me. I did not look back. There was nothing behind me worth seeing.

Inside the silence left by the severed bond, something pressed faintly against the edges of my consciousness. Not a voice. Not yet. Only a presence, only heat, like a coal buried under ash that had not gone cold.

I pressed my thumb against the hollow of my collarbone where the pendant used to rest.

My fingers came away wet with blood.

I kept walking.