My Mate Rejected Me Before Crowning His Luna

Four sets of hands pin me to the cellar wall at half past six, an hour before the ceremony that is supposed to erase me.

The stone bites into my spine. Someone's forearm crushes my collarbone. I know the wolf gripping my left wrist — Dane, one of Aurelia's imports from Silvercrest, all teeth and no history with me, which is exactly why they chose him.

"Alpha wants the dead weight gone before the stone is set," he says, not to me. To the others. Like I'm furniture being moved out of a room.

The first hit lands under my ribs. I don't scream. I learned years ago that screaming only feeds them. The second hit is a fist across my cheekbone, and the world tips sideways, and I taste copper.

I open the mind-link anyway. Not to beg. I've never once begged Cayden Voss for anything, and I won't start while my blood is on his cellar floor. I just — send it. Rawly, without words. My location. The weight of a knee grinding into my chest. The sound of my own skull meeting stone.

For half a second, the link is open both ways, and I feel him. Not concern. Irritation, thin and sharp, the way you feel about a fly you haven't gotten around to swatting.

Then his voice, flat and final: *Stop fabricating attacks for sympathy.*

The link closes like a hand shutting a door. I feel the exact moment my scream — the one that finally does come, torn out of me by the next blow — turns into a sound with nowhere to go.

I find something to fight with anyway. My free hand claws sideways, nails dragging four long grooves into the stone as I twist against Dane's grip, and I catch his wrist with my teeth hard enough to taste his blood along with mine. He curses, jerks back half a step. It buys me nothing. It buys me a second where I am not just a body being hit. Roland stands in the cellar doorway the entire time, arms folded, and says nothing at all — not to them, not to me. I memorize his face in the low light. I will not forget it.

The beating continues until the room goes soft and grey and finally black.

*

Two hours later, I stand at the edge of my own pack's Luna Ceremony with bruises blooming under a borrowed dress, because I would rather stand broken than be found broken on a cellar floor by someone with a camera.

The hall smells of pine and candle wax and, underneath it, wrong — a floral note laid over Cayden's skin that has never belonged to him. Aurelia's scent, layered on him like a second coat he's stopped bothering to take off. I catalog it the way I catalog everything now. Evidence. A door I'm memorizing the shape of before it closes.

Cayden climbs the platform without looking at me. He never looks at me anymore; he's gotten good at that. Aurelia stands beside the Luna stone in white, radiant, already rehearsing the smile she'll give the pack in about ninety seconds.

"I, Cayden Voss, Alpha of Ironveil," he says, and his voice drops into the register that makes every wolf in the hall go still, "reject you, Eliana Ashford, as my mate and Luna."

The mark on my neck goes cold first. Not painful — cold, the way metal is cold, a temperature with no feeling attached to it. Then it goes empty, like a door closing on a room no one lives in anymore. My knees hit the stone floor before I decide to kneel. Somewhere beneath my ribs, in the place that has been silent for six years, something opens its mouth and howls — no sound, no fur, nothing anyone else can hear — and the force of it goes through my bones like a wave breaking against rock.

I do not look away from him. Even on my knees, even with the floor tilting, I hold his eyes for one more second than he wants me to.

He steps over me. His boot passes so close to my hand I feel the air move.

He takes Aurelia's hand and presses it flat against the Luna stone, and the hall erupts into applause — warm, easy, relieved applause, like something rotten has finally been cleared from the house.

I stay on the floor until the crowd thins to nothing, until the candles burn low, until I can hear, from somewhere near the platform, Aurelia's voice, bright and satisfied, already giving an order.

"Someone get the omegas to clean the cellar before morning," she says. "I don't want anyone asking questions about the walls."