After My Alpha Rejected Me, I Awakened as Royalty

The bond broke at 10:14 on a Tuesday morning.

I know because I was staring at the clock tower when Blake's warriors dragged me into the ceremonial clearing. My leg brace scraped stone with every forced step. The entire pack was already assembled—rows of wolves in their formal clothes, faces turned toward the altar like this was a wedding instead of an execution.

Giselle stood at the center in white. A faint glow pulsed on her throat where a bond-mark shouldn't be.

My stomach dropped.

Blake stood beside her. He didn't look at me as the warriors shoved me to the edge of the crowd. He looked past me, through me, like I was already gone.

"Let go," I said quietly to the warrior gripping my arm.

He didn't.

Blake raised his hand. The crowd went silent. He turned then—not toward Giselle, but toward me. His eyes were flat. Empty.

"I, Blake Henderson, Alpha of Ironvale," he said, his voice carrying across the clearing with that Alpha resonance that used to make my wolf stir, "reject you, Eliza Voss, as my mate and Luna."

The mark on my neck went ice-cold.

Then it cracked.

I felt it split open like frozen glass under pressure, the bond tearing through tissue and nerve in a way that had nothing to do with skin. My knees buckled. The warrior let go and I hit stone, palms first, the brace on my leg twisting wrong. Pain radiated up my spine but it was nothing compared to the cold spreading from my throat.

Seren—

I reached inward for my wolf and found silence. Not sleep. Not stillness. Absence. The space where she had been for twenty-three years was just—empty.

I tried to breathe and couldn't.

The ceremony continued over my crumpled body. Blake turned back to Giselle. Someone said words I didn't hear. Giselle's bond-mark flared brighter. The crowd murmured approval.

No one moved to help me.

I pressed my hand to my neck and it came away wet. The bond-wound was bleeding, slow and cold. I looked up and met Mary's eyes across the clearing. She was standing at the edge of the servant section, her face pale, her hands clenched at her sides.

She couldn't reach me. Not here. Not now.

I looked back at Blake. He was kissing Giselle. The crowd cheered.

I memorized every face that cheered.

---

A healer came eventually. Not because anyone cared—because a dead former Luna creates legal complications, and Blake's Beta was practical about paperwork.

The healer knelt beside me on the stone and wrapped gauze around my neck without meeting my eyes. Her hands were efficient. Cold.

"This will stop the convulsions," she said, and pressed a syringe to my arm.

I didn't ask what was in it. The sedative hit my bloodstream and the world blurred at the edges. The pain in my neck dulled to a throb. The absence where Seren had been stayed sharp.

"You'll be moved to the lower wing before morning," the healer said quietly. "Pack your own things. No one's going to do it for you."

She left.

I lay on the cold stone and stared at the sky. It was still morning. The ceremony had taken less than twenty minutes.

Five years. Five years of serving this pack, of enduring their mockery, of limping through halls while they whispered sub-Omega behind my back. Five years of Blake's resentment curdling into cruelty.

Gone in twenty minutes.

I reached inward one more time, just to be sure.

Nothing.

I was alone in my own body for the first time in my life.

I filed that fact away and started counting the stones in the clearing floor. Anything to keep my mind working. Anything to keep from surrendering to the cold.

---

I woke in a bare room in the servants' wing. The walls were unpainted. The window was narrow. The bed was a cot with a thin blanket that smelled like mildew.

Mary was already there.

She sat on the edge of the cot, pressing a cool cloth to my neck-wound. The gauze the healer had wrapped was soaked through.

"Drink," Mary said, and held a cup of weak tea to my lips.

I drank. It tasted like nothing.

The rejection pain radiated through my body in waves—not sharp, just deep and wrong, like my bones were misaligned. I tried to sit up and my vision swam. Mary's hand steadied my shoulder.

"Don't," she said.

I gripped the wall and pulled myself upright anyway. My leg brace dug into my calf. Everything hurt.

Mary didn't tell me it would be okay. She didn't offer comfort. Instead, she set the tea on the floor and started talking in that low, practical voice she used when she was teaching me which herbs grew best in shade.

"Third floorboard from the door creaks. Avoid it. The corridor guard takes a long break at midnight—goes to the kitchens for food the cook leaves out. The pantry door doesn't lock properly if you lift while you pull."

I looked at her.

She looked back, steady.

"You're giving me a map," I said.

Mary nodded once. "Drink your tea."

I drank. And I started memorizing.

---

Giselle came that evening.

She didn't knock. She opened the door with two of Blake's warriors flanking her, their faces blank and professional. She wore a soft blue dress that made her look gentle. The bond-mark on her throat pulsed faintly.

She smiled at me.

"The Luna quarters have been redecorated," she said pleasantly. "I thought you'd want to know."

I said nothing.

She set a covered tray on the floor—not the table, the floor—and straightened. "Meals will be delivered once daily. As long as you remain cooperative."

The word cooperative landed like a threat.

I looked at the tray. Steam rose from beneath the cover, carrying a faint herbal bitterness I knew too well. Wolfsbane. The same tincture I'd been consuming for years without knowing.

Now she wasn't even hiding it.

Giselle turned to leave, then paused at the door. "Oh, and Eliza?" She glanced back, her smile widening. "Blake asked me to tell you—don't make this harder than it needs to be."

She left. The door clicked shut.

I stared at the tray for a long moment. Then I picked it up, walked to the chamber pot in the corner, and upended the entire meal into it. Soup, bread, everything.

I set the empty tray by the door.

Then I sat on the floor, my back against the wall, and started listing every border patrol rotation I'd memorized during five years as Luna. Every shift change. Every weak point in Ironvale's perimeter.

Blake thought I was broken.

He was wrong.

I wasn't broken.

I was taking inventory.