After His Mistress Became Luna, I Discovered My Royal Blood

The blade caught the candlelight at 7:42 in the evening, and I remember thinking it looked colder than it should.

Nicholas held it above my collarbone. Two hundred pairs of eyes watched from the pews of the Ironvale ceremony hall. Three years I had waited for this ritual. Three years of unmarked skin, of sleeping in a bed he never touched, of watching Regina Cox drape herself across his arm at every pack function while I stood behind him like furniture.

His hand did not move.

I lifted my eyes to his. He was already looking at me. Not at the blade. Not at my throat. At me.

"Nicholas," I said. Quiet. Careful. The way I had learned to say his name so it would not annoy him.

He pulled in a slow breath. The candles on the altar guttered.

"I, Nicholas, Alpha of Ironvale—"

My stomach dropped before my mind caught up. I knew this cadence. Every wolf in the hall knew this cadence.

"—reject you, Savannah Ward, as my mate."

The Alpha tone landed on the last word like a hammer on glass.

Something inside my chest gave a wet, tearing sound that only I could hear. It was not metaphor. It was a physical filament snapping between my ribs, and then a second one, and then a hundred more, all at once—silver wire pulled through the meat of me and out. The place where the bond had lived went cold first. Then it went empty. Like a door closing on a room that had never had furniture in it.

My knees hit the altar stone. I did not feel them hit.

Somewhere far above me, air rushed out of two hundred lungs at once. A collective flinch. Then a murmur. Then, impossibly, applause.

I blinked and Regina was already at the altar.

She must have been waiting in the wings. Her ceremony dress was white. Whiter than mine. She stepped over the hem of my skirt like it was a puddle and tilted her chin up for him, and I watched, from the floor, as Nicholas lowered his mouth to the smooth curve of her neck and bit.

Gold light bloomed under his teeth. The pack howled.

"Regina Cox," Nicholas said, his voice thick with her blood, "Luna of Ironvale."

More howling. Feet stamping. Someone laughing.

I could not breathe. The bond-break was still tearing pieces off me in slow, methodical shreds, and every shred took a memory with it—his hand on the small of my back at his father's birthday dinner, the one time he had called me sweetheart in passing, the morning I brought him coffee and he almost smiled. Gone. Gone. Gone. Not erased—worse. Reframed. Marked as things that had never really belonged to me.

From the infirmary doorway at the far end of the hall, a healer in green scrubs sprinted across the marble. She grabbed the sleeve of Beta Marcus and rose on her toes to whisper.

I watched Marcus's face go still.

I watched him look at Nicholas.

I watched Nicholas glance over, catch the words, and turn his head back to Regina without breaking the mark.

My mother.

I knew before Marcus's mouth shaped the syllables. Our bloodline hummed in me like a plucked string, and the string had just gone slack. The bond-shock had traveled down it from my chest into hers, and hers—weak, tired, hooked to three different machines in the room below us—hers had stopped.

My mother was dead on an infirmary cot because Nicholas Elliott had wanted a prettier Luna.

And he did not pause the ceremony.

Inside me, something I had almost forgotten I had slammed against the walls of my ribs.

My wolf.

I had spent three years believing she wasn't there. Three years of wolfsbane in weak tea, of starving her quiet, of shrinking myself small enough that Regina would not notice me. And now, at the worst possible moment, she woke up and threw herself against my bones with a howl I felt in my teeth—wordless, furious, grieving. A single sound. Then silence again, so complete it felt like a hand over a mouth.

But she was there. She was there.

I did not let the howl out.

I got up.

My legs did not want to hold me. I made them. I stepped off the altar stone, past Regina's white hem, past Nicholas's shoulder—he did not turn—and walked the long aisle to the registrar's table set against the east wall. Ada, the pack scribe, was already staring at me with her mouth open.

"Severance pact," I said.

My voice did not shake. That surprised me.

Ada fumbled for the parchment. I picked up the ceremonial blade from the small tray beside her—Nicholas's blade, the one that was supposed to have marked me—and drew it across the pad of my left thumb. Blood welled up dark and immediate.

I pressed my thumb to the line at the bottom of the pact.

Savannah Ward. Written in me.

The hall had gone very quiet. Even the howling had stopped. Two hundred wolves watching an Omega-ranked reject sign herself out of a pack in her own blood, and no one—not one of them—moved.

I set the blade down beside the pact. Precisely. Handle facing Ada.

"Witnessed," I said.

Ada's stamp came down like a gunshot.

I turned. My ceremony shoes had come off somewhere between the altar and the table; I did not look for them. Barefoot, the hem of my dress dragging a smear of my own blood across the marble, I walked down the aisle toward the double doors at the back of the hall.

Nicholas's voice cracked behind me. "Savannah—"

I did not turn around.

I stepped past the boundary stones of Ironvale as the first grey came into the sky. The pack mind-link snapped off in my head with an audible pop—two hundred voices, gone. The silence after was so total it rang.

Behind me, somewhere in the dark still-warm hall, I could hear Regina laughing.