After My Alpha Chose Another, I Cut the Bond

The ghost-mark on my neck started burning the moment I stepped into the banquet hall.

I told myself it was nothing. Just nerves. Just cold air on three years of pale, raised skin where Cassian's mark should have been and never was.

My name is Delilah Wilson. Daughter of a disgraced former Beta. Fated mate of Alpha Cassian Carter of Shadowridge Pack. Unmarked. Unacknowledged. Twenty-one years old, and tonight, under the full Moon Banquet, I had let myself believe, for one stupid hour while I zipped up my pale dress, that this might be the night he finally saw me.

The hall glowed. Candles, white roses, long stone tables draped in silver. Every ranked wolf in Shadowridge stood beneath the open skylight where the moon poured down like a blessing. I could smell pine smoke and wine. I could smell Aleyna's perfume from across the room. Heavy florals layered over something colder.

I found my place near the back. I always stood near the back.

Cassian stepped onto the ceremonial platform.

He looked beautiful the way a winter does. Sharp jaw, sharp shoulders, firelight caught in the dark of his hair. He did not look at me. He had not looked at me in months.

"I, Cassian Carter," he said, "Alpha of Shadowridge."

The hall hushed.

"Reject you, Delilah Wilson, as my fated mate."

The world cracked.

It was not pain like a wound. It was pain like being scooped hollow with a spoon. The bond, that thin suffocating tether I had carried for three years, went taut, then ripped. My knees folded under me before I knew they had. I hit the banquet floor hard. The ghost-mark on my neck flared so hot I thought my skin would split.

Through the white noise in my ears, I heard him keep speaking.

"I claim Aleyna Rose, of Crimsonpine Pack, as my chosen Luna."

The crowd cheered.

I stayed on the floor.

No one bent down. No one reached for me. A circle of skirts and polished shoes stood around me like a fence, and through it I could see Aleyna in her golden gown, her hand resting easy on Cassian's arm, her smile soft and pleased and serene.

She glanced down at me. Then, slowly, she descended the platform and crossed the floor. She crouched in front of me and extended one slim, manicured hand.

She did not want to help me up. She wanted the pack to see her offering.

I stared at her hand. I did not take it.

She withdrew it with a small, sad smile. "Poor thing," she murmured, just loud enough. "She really thought he'd choose her."

Behind her, Petra Voss laughed under her breath. The whole circle of ranked she-wolves laughed with her, soft and pretty, like wind chimes.

I put one hand flat on the cold stone. Then the other. I pushed myself up. My legs shook so hard I thought I'd fall again. I didn't. I walked out of that hall with my chin up and my hands curled into fists and my wolf silent inside me, the way she had been silent for three years.

I did not cry until I reached my quarters.

***

The notice came at dawn.

A knock. Marcus Webb, Cassian's Beta, standing in my doorway with an envelope flat against his palm. He did not meet my eyes. Marcus had always been kind, in the small ways a Beta can afford to be kind. The fact that he could not look at me now told me everything.

"Alpha's directive," he said quietly.

I opened it. I read it twice.

I was required, by Alpha's order, to attend the celebratory pack dinner at the Alpha's table that evening. Tradition, the notice said, required the presence of the former bond-holder during the Luna announcement period.

There was no such tradition. I had grown up in pack law. I knew every line of it. This was Aleyna's handwriting in Cassian's voice.

I set the notice on the table. I thanked Marcus. He left without speaking.

Then I went to my closet and started dressing.

***

The dinner was worse.

I sat at the far end of the Alpha's table. Close enough to see. Far enough to be on display. Cassian sat at the head. Aleyna at his right. She fed him a piece of fruit from her fingers and laughed when he caught her wrist with his teeth. Toasts rose around the table like smoke. Every ranked wolf in the pack lifted a glass to the new Luna.

I lifted nothing. I ate nothing. The smell of the roast turned my stomach. The bond-sickness hadn't faded since the banquet. My hands trembled around my water glass, and the ghost-mark on my neck pulsed in a slow, sick rhythm, like a second heart that didn't belong to me.

I waited until the second course. Then I set my napkin down and rose to leave.

"Sit down."

Cassian's Alpha tone hit me across the table like a hand to the throat.

Every muscle in my body locked. My knees folded back into the chair before I told them to. Heat climbed up my face. Every wolf at that table heard it. Every wolf at that table watched it.

Petra Voss leaned across her plate, her voice low and warm and poisonous.

"Delilah, sweetheart. Your ghost-mark is showing above your collar." Her eyes flicked to my neck and lingered. "Everyone can see it. It's embarrassing. For the pack."

I did not touch my collar. I did not flinch. I did not speak.

I sat in that chair for two more hours. I did not eat. I did not look at him. I counted the grain in the wood of the table and waited for it to end.

***

When it ended, I did not go back to my quarters.

I walked out the side door into the freezing rain and I ran.

No coat, no shoes worth the name, bond-sickness rolling through me in waves that made me stagger. The rain soaked through my dress in seconds. Cold went to bone. My wolf was still silent, but my body remembered how to run, and I ran until the pack lights faded behind me and the trees closed over my head and I came out, gasping, at the edge of the territory border.

A black SUV was parked on the road.

Even through the rain I could see the crest on its door. Silver moon and crossed blades. The Lycan royal house.

The driver's door opened.

A man stepped out into the rain like he had been waiting hours and didn't mind one more minute. Tall. Broad through the shoulders. Dark hair already plastered to his forehead. Just a long charcoal coat and an expression I could not read.

I knew him.

August Powell. Lycan Prince. My sparring partner from Silvercrest Academy, half a lifetime ago, when I had been a different girl with a wolf who still spoke.

He did not say my name. He did not ask what I was doing barefoot at the border at midnight in a pack-dinner dress.

He shrugged off his coat. He crossed the road in three strides. He wrapped the coat around my shoulders himself, careful not to touch my skin, and the warmth off the lining made me sob once before I caught it.

His scent hit me a second later.

Warm cedar. Honey. Something deeper underneath, like old wood and a banked fire.

Inside my chest, the wolf I had not heard in three years lifted her head.

*Mate,* she whimpered.

One word. Soft. Certain.

I closed my eyes and shoved her back down so hard my throat ached.

August did not speak. He guided me to the passenger seat with a hand that hovered an inch off my back, and he drove me through the dark to the edge of pack territory, and he stopped the car where I could slip in without being seen.

He did not ask a single question.

When I climbed out, he caught my wrist, gently, two fingertips, and said only, "Keep the coat."

Then he was gone.

I stood in the rain at the edge of Shadowridge land with his coat still warm around my shoulders and his scent still in my lungs, and for the first time in three years, the ghost-mark on my neck wasn't the loudest thing inside me.

Something else was.

And I was terrified of it.