After My Mate Dumped Me, the Lycan King Claimed Me

The rejection came at 8:47 on a Saturday night, and I felt Carter reach for me through the bond before I saw Silas moving.

I was standing in the last row of the great hall, pressed against the stone wall where no one had bothered to notice me. Three years of that wall. Three years of standing behind columns, behind taller wolves, behind the version of myself Carter had built out of my silence. Tonight I had worn grey. I had thought grey would help me disappear.

On the dais, Yasmin Castro adjusted the ceremonial furs at her shoulders and lifted her chin toward Carter. Her scent carried across the hall—expensive perfume laid thick over something colder underneath. Carter's hand settled on the small of her back like he had done it a hundred times, which, I suddenly understood, he had.

My mark burned once, sharp, under my collar.

He was reading me through the bond. He was scenting my distress from across the room, and instead of pretending he couldn't, he was using it.

His eyes lifted. Found me.

A muscle moved in his jaw. He gave one small nod, and Silas—his Gamma, standing three paces behind him—turned his head and began pushing through the crowd toward me.

I did not run. There was nowhere in the hall to run to. I watched him come the way you watch weather move across a valley when you have no roof.

Silas's hand closed on my upper arm. His grip was not gentle.

"Alpha wants you at the front."

"Silas—"

"Now."

He pulled. Wolves parted around us. Faces I had scheduled, fed, coordinated, arranged travel for—faces from every allied pack Carter had ever done business with—turned to watch me be dragged down the center aisle of a hall I had helped decorate that morning.

Yasmin's eyes met mine as I reached the front. Her mouth did something slow and pleased.

Carter faced me. Not angry. Not sorry. Just done.

"I, Carter, Alpha of the Ironveil Pack," he said, and his voice carried, clean and formal, to every corner of the hall, "reject you, Aurelia, as my mate and Luna."

The mark on my neck went cold.

Not the slow cold of something dying. The instant cold of a door slamming shut in a room I had lived in my whole life. There was a sound inside my chest that only I could hear—a thin, silver, tearing sound—and then behind it, further in, deeper than I had known I went, my wolf opened her mouth to scream and no sound came out.

She went quiet.

She went so quiet.

My knees folded. The stone came up to meet me and I felt my palms hit it, cold, and I felt the small foolish thought that I should try to stand, and then I felt nothing where the mark had been.

Someone moved behind me.

I heard Silas say, "I've got her—" and then I heard him not finish the sentence.

Hands under my arms. Not Silas's. Larger. Steadier. Lifting me up off the stone before my face touched it.

And then a scent hit me that I had never noticed in three years of standing three feet from this man every morning of my life.

Cedar. Wet cedar in the dark. The ozone smell that comes before lightning cracks over a ridge.

He straightened, holding me against his chest, and the hall changed.

I felt it before I understood it. Pressure. A weight in the air like the whole room had dropped underwater. Around us, wolves went to their knees—not slowly, not in submission, but dropped, as if their legs had been cut from under them. I heard the sound of hundreds of bodies hitting stone at the same time.

Carter staggered. His hand shot out for the dais and missed it. His aura, the one I had been afraid of for three years, guttered like a candle in wind.

The man holding me turned his head, and I saw, from very close, the amber burning in Dashiell's eyes.

Dashiell. Beta Dashiell. Quiet Dashiell, who took notes in Carter's meetings and never looked at me twice.

He looked at Carter across a room full of kneeling wolves and said, in a voice I did not recognize, "She leaves with me."

Carter's mouth opened. Nothing came out.

Dashiell shifted me in his arms so that my head rested against his shoulder, and he walked. Down the center aisle. Past Silas, still on one knee, staring. Past the rows of allied Alphas who could not lift their heads. Past Yasmin, whose slow pleased smile had frozen halfway across her face.

Through the doors. Into the night.

Cold air. My hair moved against his throat. His stride did not slow.

Somewhere behind us, inside the hall, Carter was shouting something. It sounded very small.

We crossed the gravel courtyard. We crossed the north lawn. We crossed the low stone marker where Ironveil territory ended, and I felt the border pass over my skin like a hand brushing off dust.

My fingers found the scar on my neck.

Cold. Empty. Nothing where the mark had lived.

I did not cry. I did not speak. I lifted my eyes as far as I could and saw only the edge of his jaw, set hard, and above it the sky, and above the sky the moon, thin and white and watching.

His chest rose and fell against my cheek.

He kept walking.

Somewhere behind us, in a hall of kneeling wolves, my old life was still trying to stand up.

It would not make it.