After My Alpha Rejected Me, I Became Royalty

The rope hit my wrists before I finished saying my name.

Wolfsbane. I knew it the second the fibers touched my skin—that acid crawl, that oily heat that ate through the top layer of me like paper. My right hand, the hand three years of Isolde's training had turned into an instrument, jerked once and then went still. I made it go still.

"Alpha's been waiting." Gamma Rourke didn't look at me when he said it. He looked past my shoulder, at the dusk settling over the Ironveil gate like ash. "Hall's already full."

So Edison knew I was coming. He'd known for days.

The bond told me the rest before Rourke's men could drag me another step. It came through the frayed thread in my chest—cold first, the way a mark goes cold when the wolf behind it turns his face away. Then contempt, thick and settled, like he'd been rehearsing it. No hesitation. No grief. Nothing that felt like the boy who'd once, in some other life, stood at an altar and taken my hand.

Something deep inside me pressed against the walls of my own ribs. Not my wolf waking. My wolf listening. For the first time in twenty-two years, she pressed like she wanted out.

I walked the last hundred yards on my own feet. I would not be carried into that hall.

The pack hall was packed shoulder to shoulder. Three hundred wolves. I counted the doorways out of habit—two, three, the servants' arch behind the dais—then stopped counting because Edison was already standing.

He wore full ceremonial black. Silver at the collar. The Alpha's seal on his chest.

Meadow stood on his right in white.

She smiled at me the way you smile at a plate being carried to the table.

Edison's eyes found mine and held for exactly one second. I timed it. One second was all he gave the woman the Moon Goddess had bound to his soul.

"I, Edison Hayes, Alpha of Ironveil Pack," he said, and his voice carried the way it was trained to carry, "reject you, Giana Ashford, as my mate."

The bond snapped like a piano wire pulled through my sternum.

I heard it more than felt it—a high, thin sound behind my eyes. Then the felt part came. A door closing in an empty room. Cold. Empty. Cold again. My knees folded halfway and locked. I did not go down.

Somewhere under my skin my wolf screamed without sound.

"Kneel," Edison said. "Accept the rejection before the pack."

I did not kneel.

I stood in front of him bleeding from my wrists, my ribs hollow, my breath coming in short measured pulls, and I did not open my mouth and I did not bend my knees. I looked at him. That was all.

His face changed. I had never seen him look at me with fury before. Indifference, yes. Impatience. But now his jaw locked and something ugly moved under it, and he came down off the dais in three strides.

He took my right hand.

My right hand. The one Isolde had spent three years shaping like a violinist shapes fingers—nerve by nerve, callus by callus, until I could feel the shift of a silver grain against a nerve sheath through a millimeter of tissue. The hand that was going to save his life.

He slammed it flat against the silver-lined threshold of the dungeon door.

I heard my own scream before I felt the burn. It came out of me once, one long note, and every wolf in the hall flinched at the sound of it. Then the pain caught up. White. White under my palm, white up my forearm, the smell of my own skin cooking, bones going in three places at once with a wet crackle I felt in my teeth. Four seconds. Maybe less. Everything Isolde built in me—gone.

He let go. My arm dropped like a dead thing.

He turned back to Meadow and said, quietly, "It's done."

He did not look at me again.

I don't remember the antechamber. I remember waking on a wooden bench with a bandage wound too tight around a hand that wasn't a hand anymore, and the pack healer's back retreating through the door, and the taste of copper on the roof of my mouth.

I pressed the ruined thing to my chest and made myself think.

Nerve sensitivity: gone. Fine motor: gone. The extraction technique required a steadiness of grip I would never have again. The shard near his brain stem would stay. It would migrate. In eighteen months, maybe two years, it would sever something it couldn't be pulled back from.

He had killed himself in front of three hundred witnesses and put on a clean shirt to do it.

I would not tell him. I would not beg. I would survive whatever came next, and I would walk out of Ironveil on my own two feet.

Something in my blood pulsed once, enormous, and went still.

By morning he had me in front of him again with Meadow gone and Caden Voss standing at his left with his eyes on the floor.

"You will serve at the alliance banquet," Edison said. "The visiting Alphas will see that Ironveil tolerates no weakness."

I bowed my head one degree. It cost me nothing.

Caden's jaw tightened. He did not lift his eyes.

As I turned to leave, the corridor air shifted, and I caught it—Meadow's floral scent, warm with satisfaction, drifting from behind the servants' arch.

She was already pouring the next cup.