I smelled it before I even crossed the threshold.
Callan's office door was barely cracked open, and still it hit me like a wall—Mackenzie's perfume, that sickeningly sweet gardenia oil she always wore, twisted together with something rawer. Muskier. The unmistakable scent of my mate's sweat.
I stood in the hallway for exactly three seconds. Counted them. Then I pushed the door open and walked in, because I was the Luna of the Silver Moon Pack, and I would not stand in corridors like a ghost afraid of her own home.
"You summoned me," I said.
Callan stood behind his desk, already dressed in a fresh shirt—one button still undone at the collar, his dark hair not quite settled back into place. He didn't look up from the budget report in his hands. The fluorescent light above us buzzed faintly, the only sound in the room besides my own careful breathing.
Then I saw it. On the corner of his desk, half-hidden beneath a stack of papers. A small hoop earring. Gold. The kind Mackenzie wore in her left ear.
My stomach turned to stone.
"The Moon Goddess Festival is in three weeks," he said, still reading. "I need you to coordinate the ceremony arrangements with Elder Miriam. The usual." He set the report down and finally looked at me, his gray eyes flat and businesslike. "Is that a problem?"
I looked at the earring. I looked at him.
"Callan."
"Aria." His tone carried that familiar edge of warning. Not quite his Alpha Voice. Not yet. Just the cold reminder of who held power in this room.
"There's an earring on your desk," I said quietly. "It isn't mine."
He glanced at it the way someone glances at a piece of lint. Unbothered. Faintly annoyed to have his time wasted.
"Handle the festival arrangements," he said, and picked up the report again.
I walked out before I said something I couldn't take back.
---
Elder Miriam Stone kept her office in the pack archives, buried beneath three floors of stone and old wood and the smell of cedar. I told the Omega at the front desk I was researching festival prayer traditions. She didn't question the Luna.
Miriam was ninety-one years old and had outlived two Alphas. She looked at me over her reading glasses when I sat across from her, and I don't think I fooled her for a single moment.
"The Rite of Rejection," she said, before I even finished my question. Her voice was dry and steady as old paper. "For a fated bond."
"I want to understand my rights," I said carefully. "Under pack law."
She was quiet for a long moment. Outside, I could hear the distant sound of warriors training on the grounds, the thud of bodies hitting earth.
"If a mate bond remains uncompleted—unmarked—for a period of five years," she said slowly, "the rejected party retains the right to invoke the Rite. The law is old, but it stands." She folded her hands on the desk. "It will hurt you, child. More than you can prepare for. A fated bond doesn't release quietly."
"I know."
She studied me. "You've been counting those five years."
I didn't answer. I didn't need to.
"Then your window is now," she said softly. "But I'd advise you to have your affairs in order before you speak those words publicly. Once the Rite is invoked, there is no quiet resolution."
I thought of Kaizen. His pale hands. The soft sound of the healing springs.
"I know," I said again.
---
I waited until midnight to go to Callan's bedroom. Our bedroom, technically, though I'd been sleeping in the adjoining room for over a year.
He was still awake, sitting in the armchair by the window with a glass of whiskey, looking out at the dark tree line. He didn't seem surprised to see me.
"If you don't end it with her," I said, keeping my voice low and even, "I will leave."
The silence stretched. Then he set his glass down.
"No," he said. "You won't."
His eyes shifted—that subtle silver flash that meant his wolf was rising—and then his Voice came down on me like a physical weight, pressing against my shoulders, my spine, the backs of my knees.
*Kneel.*
I knelt. My body obeyed before my mind could fight it, the Alpha compulsion folding me down to the floor like paper. Humiliation burned up my throat.
"Your status as Luna," Callan said, his voice returning to something almost conversational, "is the only reason Kaizen is permitted access to the springs." He stood, walked to the window, kept his back to me. "Reject me. Leave. Say one word of this to the Elders. And I will have him removed from the infirmary by morning." He paused. "You know what that means for him."
I did know. Without the healing waters, Kaizen would be dead within days.
Callan didn't look at me again. He picked up his glass and walked to the door of his private bath, and just before he disappeared, he said, "Get some sleep, Aria. You look tired."
The door clicked shut.
I stayed on my knees on the cold floor for a long moment, alone in the dark.
Then I got up. Slowly. Deliberately.
And I began to think.
