AXIRA

My head snapped up so fast my neck ached.

What? 

The Alpha of Vargulf Valley was standing in front of me. Malakar Drenthe. I'd heard the name my whole life the way you hear a story meant to keep children in line — behave, or the Vargulf Alpha will hear about it — except he wasn't a story. He was real, very tall when next to me, and close enough that I had to tip my head back to hold his gaze, and every part of me wanted to look away and couldn't.

They said he'd killed a rogue Alpha with his bare hands before he turned twenty. They said his own wolf had started slipping the leash years ago, that something in him was cracking slowly and permanently, that the reason he ruled alone in that valley of his was because nobody sane wanted to be close when it finally broke. 

Mothers used him to frighten their children into obedience. I'd used him that way myself, once, half-jokingly, telling Veyla I'd feed her to the Vargulf Alpha if she didn't stop stealing my hair pins.

Now he was standing over me with my mother's handprint still burning on my cheek, and I couldn't remember how to breathe right.

"She's rejected," he said, to the whole courtyard, not to me. "Which means she's unclaimed."

My stomach dropped somewhere past the floor.

"I'll take her."

The courtyard made a sound like it had been struck. I wasn't listening anymore. My legs were numb and my ears were ringing.

Oh fuck. 

I was screwed. 

"Alpha Drenthe." My father, pushing forward, and even through my fog I registered how careful his voice was, how his voice shook with fear. Fear that he would offend the Alpha. "This is — forgive me, but this isn't necessary. A rejection is a family matter. We'll handle it within the Serath—"

"You handled it fine so far." Malakar didn't even look at him. "Slapping her in front of three hundred witnesses. Very handled."

My father's mouth snapped shut and I shuddered at how easy it was to put him in his place. 

"Alpha, please." Elder Sen came over this time, stepping in with his hands raised like he was approaching something dangerous, which— I supposed, looking at Malakar's face— he was. "There's no need to concern yourself with this. The girl comes from an unremarkable line. Surely there are more suitable—"

"I didn't ask for a character reference."

"With respect—"

"You have none to spare, so save it."

A ripple went through the crowd, the kind of nervous laughter that comes out sideways when nobody's brave enough to actually laugh. Elder Sen's face went the color of old parchment paper and he stepped back into the crowd like it might swallow him whole and spare him further embarrassment.

My mother tried next, and her voice had none of my father's careful fear in it — just pure, indignant fury, like the audacity belonged to Malakar and not to her, moments ago, when her palm had connected with my face.

"You cannot simply claim someone else's daughter in the middle of a ceremony—"

"I can, actually." He finally turned, and I watched my mother's fury falter under the weight of his stare. "Ask your elders. Or don't, since apparently their advice isn't worth much to you tonight either."

Nobody spoke.

I realized, distantly, that I hadn't spoken either. That I was still sitting there on the ground where I'd fallen— when had I fallen? — with my face throbbing and my mind three steps behind everything happening around me. That the man everyone in three territories feared had just decided my entire future in the space of ten sentences, and nobody had once asked me what I wanted.

He looked down at me again. Up close, his eyes weren't what I expected. I'd expected something colder. What I found instead was something unreadable and assessing. It was sharp and searching, burning through me. 

"Can you stand?" he asked.

It was the first thing anyone had said to me since the rejection that wasn't cruel or performative. I found that, somehow, more disorienting than everything else.

"I— yes." I didn't move.

"Then stand."

I stood. My legs shook doing it, and I hated that they shook, hated that he could probably see it, hated that everyone watching could see it too.

Kael — I'd learn his name later, the beta who kept close to Malakar's shoulder with a face that showed obvious discomfort about the whole situation — leaned in and murmured something too low for me to catch. Whatever it was, Malakar didn't answer him. He just turned and started walking, and after a beat, when I hadn't moved, he glanced back.

"Well?"

I looked at my mother. Her jaw was tight, her eyes furious, but underneath the fury was something else, something that looked almost like fear. I didn't understand it and didn't have time to try. I looked at my father, who wouldn't meet my eyes at all. I looked at Veyla, near the back of the crowd, her face pale and unreadable in a way I'd never seen on her before.

Nobody said don't go. Nobody said stay.

So I walked. Because saying no to the man felt like I signed a death sentence. 

The crowd parted for us in a manner it hadn't parted for me an hour ago when I'd tried to leave on my own — No words were needed just wolves stepping back like proximity to the Vargulf Alpha might be contagious. I kept my eyes forward and my chin up because if I looked at any of their faces right now I thought I might finally break, and I'd promised myself, standing at that altar right after Ravion rejected me, that I wouldn't do that in front of them.

At the edge of the courtyard, just before the end of the center, I let myself look back. 

Everything I knew was standing in that courtyard, and none of it was coming with me.

Oh fuck, what was I doing? 

MALAKAR'S POV

Ravion caught up to us before we reached the gates, guards trailing him, his mouth already halfway open to say something he clearly hadn't finished thinking through. "You're not taking her out of the territory tonight."

"I am." I didn't slow down. "Unless you're planning to stop me."

He didn't have an answer for that. His guards didn't move either, which told me everything I needed to know about how far he was willing to take this.

"Father won't like it."

"Your father doesn't get a vote in who I claim, same as I didn't get one in whatever that was back there." I glanced past him toward the crowd still watching from the arch. "She's not yours. She's not yours tonight, not tomorrow. So we're done here."

He stepped back. That was the last of it — there was no further protest, just his voice trailing something bitter behind us that I didn't bother turning around for.

Her sister caught up next, her steps quick and purposeful through the thinning crowd, and I gave them the distance to talk while pretending I couldn't hear every word of it.

"You didn't have to just stand there," Axira whispered.

"There wasn't anything to say that would've fixed it," her sister answered, her voice low, urgent. "Listen. This isn't the ending it looks like. Trust me."

Axira didn't answer that. When she turned back to me, her eyes were red-rimmed and empty, and she didn't look back again as we passed through the gates.

We walked in silence for a while after that. Vargulf Valley was half a day's ride from Emberclaw and I hadn't brought a carriage, hadn't planned on company at all when I left home this morning, so it was just the two of us on foot toward where I'd left my horse, the noise of the ceremony fading behind us until all that was left was the wind and her breathing which was too fast, like she was still bracing for something.

And it was irritating. 

"You can stop that," I said eventually.

She startled like I'd shouted. "Stop what?"

"Whatever you're doing to your hands." I nodded at them without looking directly at her. She'd been wringing the fabric of her sleeve for the last ten minutes, like it was the only thing keeping her upright. "You're going to tear the seam."

She stopped immediately, flushing, and shoved her hands behind her back like a child caught misbehaving.

"I'm not going to hurt you," I said, because it seemed like the thing that needed saying, given the way she was holding herself — her shoulders in, chin down, every line of her body angled slightly away from me like she was minimizing the target.

"I know."

"You don't sound like you know." I turned to her slightly. 

She didn't answer that. I let the silence simmer for a minute, unbothered by it because I honestly preferred when no one was talking, and eventually she was the one who broke it.

"Are you going to ask my name formally?"

"I already know your name. Axira Serath. I did refer to you by your name tonight when I claimed you." I glanced at her. "Do you know mine?"

"Everyone knows your name."

There was something careful in how she said it. Like she was picking her words not to offend me. I wasn't stupid. I knew the tales around me. Never bothered to correct it too. 

"Say it, then."

She hesitated. "Malakar Drenthe."

"And what does everyone know about Malakar Drenthe?"

She went quiet again, longer this time, and I watched her decide whether honesty was safe here or not.

"That you're dangerous," she said finally, quiet. "That your own wolf isn't — that something's wrong with you. That people who cross you don't stay around long enough to talk about it."

"All true, more or less." I kept walking. "Anything else?"

"That I shouldn't be alone with you."

That sentence landed different than the rest — she was scared. Her voice shook as though she remembered that she was walking to her supposed death. 

I stopped walking. She stopped a beat later, a full step of distance between us that she didn't seem inclined to close.

"You're afraid of me."

"Wouldn't you be?"

Fair point so I didn't answer it.

"I'm not going to hurt you," I said again, slower this time, my voice gruff around the edges but a tinge of honesty bled through my words. 

I expected it to land somewhere soft. But it didn't get the chance to.

Because the second our eyes met properly — actually met this evening, not the sideways glances she'd been giving me since the courtyard — something in my chest did something I hadn't expected. 

There was a sharp pull. Like someone had planted a hook somewhere in my chest and yanked hard enough for my expression to falter slightly. 

She felt it too. I knew, because her whole body went rigid, and the color drained out of her face so fast I thought for a second she might actually faint.

"What," she breathed, stumbling half a step back, hand flying to her own chest like she could physically push whatever that was back out. "What was that?"

I didn't have an answer. I'd felt exactly one thing like that before in my life, decades ago, and it hadn't happened with a girl who wasn't my mate, standing in the dark an hour after being rejected by someone else entirely.

"Nothing," I said, because that answer was easier than the alternative, and because I needed time to think before I said something I couldn't take back. "Keep walking."

She didn't move.

"That wasn't nothing." Her voice had gone thin, frightened in a new way now, a way that had nothing to do with my reputation and everything to do with whatever had just happened between us. "I felt that. You felt that too, I saw your face—"

"I said keep walking, Axira." I gritted. 

She flinched at her own name in my mouth, and after a long moment, she walked.

But she kept glancing at me sideways the rest of the way to the horse. I kept not looking back at her, because I didn't have the first idea what to say about a pull that shouldn't exist, between a rejected girl and a man everyone had the sense to fear.

There was no way. 

No way that this wide eyed girl from Serath was my mate. 

Impossible.

AXIRA 

I'd heard stories about Vargulf Valley my whole life. Everyone had. The kind of place parents mentioned to quiet unruly children, the kind of name that made older wolves lower their voices at gatherings like saying it too loud might summon something.

I never once imagined I'd actually see it. Certainly not like this — arriving in the dark on the back of the Alpha's horse, hours after being rejected in front of everyone I'd ever known, with a stranger's arm the only thing keeping me from sliding off during the last hour of riding.

The valley opened up ahead of us as we crossed the final ridge, and whatever I'd expected — something bleak, something dead, something that matched the horror stories — wasn't what I found. 

Torches lined a long stone path leading up to a fortress carved into the mountainside itself, dark and gloomy, but not lifeless.

It was beautiful in a way I hadn't braced myself for, and that unsettled me more than ugliness would have.

The horse slowed to a stop in a wide courtyard, and before I could figure out how to dismount without embarrassing myself further, a young woman hurried out from a side door, already reaching up to help me down.

"Not yet." Malakar's voice ordered, and the maid stopped mid-step, dropping into a small bow and retreating without a word.

He dismounted first, then reached up for me, and I hesitated only a second before letting him help me down — his hands steady at my waist, gone the instant my feet touched stone.

"Listen to me," he said, low enough that it wouldn't carry. "Before anyone else gets to you."

I nodded, throat too tight to answer properly.

"You don't apologize for existing here. Not to my elders, not to my pack, not to anyone. You didn't ask for what happened  tonight and you don't owe anyone an explanation for it." His eyes held mine steadily, none of the strange charge from the road in them now, just something flat and serious. "If someone speaks to you like you're beneath them, you don't shrink. You understand? I will not accept that."

"I don't know how to do anything else," I admitted, and hated how small it sounded even as it left my mouth.

"You'll learn."

Before I could ask what that meant, footsteps echoed across the courtyard — several sets, moving fast, and I turned to find a cluster of older wolves approaching, robed, unmistakably elders by the power and authority they carried in how they walked.

"Alpha." The one in front didn't bother with pleasantries. His eyes swept over me once, assessing, and whatever conclusion he reached showed plainly on his face. "A word."

"Say it here," Malakar waved a dismissive hand. "She's staying."

"Then she should hear it." The elder didn't hesitate. "This is Vargulf Valley. We are not some minor pack you can populate with whoever the rest of the territories discard. Do you understand what it means, bringing a rejected Omega into this pack? A girl no one else wanted?"

The words hit somewhere low in my stomach, familiar in a way that made my whole body go cold. Not this again. Not here too.

"She wasn't discarded," Malakar said. "She was mine to claim, and I claimed her."

"Claimed out of pity," another elder said, his voice sharper and filled with urgency, like he wanted to throw me out that moment, "which is worse. You've made us a laughingstock the moment word travels — the most feared pack in the territories, and its Alpha collects Emberclaw's leftovers."

I flinched at that word again. Leftovers. I was starting to understand it would follow me no matter where I went.

"She carries no strength worth mentioning," the first elder continued, and now he was looking directly at me, like I was a problem to be solved rather than a person standing three feet away who could hear every word. "No pack loyalty tested. No proven bloodline. What exactly does she bring to Vargulf, besides scandal?"

"That's enough." Malakar's voice didn't rise, but something underneath it did, and the elder actually took a half-step back.

"With respect, Alpha, someone has to say it. This pack has survived because we do not act on impulse. We do not gather strays out of some misplaced—"

"I said that's enough."

The silence that followed was absolute. I stood in the middle of it, face burning, eyes stinging in a way I refused to let turn into actual tears, not again, not twice in one night.

The elders didn't look convinced. They looked furious, restrained only by rank, and I understood with sudden clarity that whatever Malakar had just done by bringing me here, he hadn't just complicated his own reputation.

He'd made an enemy of his own council, on my behalf, before I'd even said a single word to any of them.

"Take her inside," Malakar said finally, to no one in particular, and it took me a second to realize he meant me. "She's had a long night."

I didn't move right away. I looked at the elders, still watching me like I was something that had crawled in uninvited, and then at Malakar, who wasn't looking at me at all anymore, already turning to face his council head-on, bracing for whatever came next.

I walked inside before I had to hear any more of it.