The Alpha Rejected Me. His Father Claimed Me. · Rhea Wolfe

Chapter 1: Ten Seconds

There are six hundred wolves in the Blackthorn hall on Claiming Night, and every one of them heard him say it.

"I, Kellan Blackthorn, Alpha of Blackthorn Ridge, reject you as my mate."

The bond broke the way a bone breaks. Not a snap — a grinding, a tearing, something deep in my chest coming apart along a line I hadn't known was there. I went down on one knee on the stone floor and heard myself make a sound I had never made before.

Somebody laughed. Near the back, where the young warriors stood. A short, embarrassed laugh, cut off fast.

"Get up," Kellan said.

I couldn't. My wolf was screaming inside my ribs and there was blood in my mouth where I'd bitten through my cheek.

"Mira." He crouched in front of me, and for one insane second I thought he was going to help me. Instead he lowered his voice so only the first three rows could hear. "You knew. Don't look at me like I've stolen something from you. You've known since we were sixteen what this pack needs, and it isn't a mate who can't shift."

Twenty-three years old. Never once shifted. The only wolf in four generations of Blackthorn born without a wolf that would come when called — that's what they said in the kitchens, what they'd said at my mother's funeral, what the healers had written in their book beside my name with a small neat question mark.

"You could have told me in a room," I said. "Alone. Any room."

"The pack needed to see it done."

He straightened. Held out his hand. And my sister came out of the crowd in a dress the colour of new snow, because of course she had known, because the dress had been made, because you don't get a dress like that in an afternoon.

"Elira Thorne," Kellan said, and his voice filled the hall now, warm and certain, the Alpha voice. "I accept you as my mate and my Luna."

She looked at me once, on the way past.

I'll be fair — there were tears in her eyes. Elira has always been able to feel bad about a thing and do it anyway. She leaned down and put her hand on my shoulder and whispered, "Don't make this ugly, Mira. Please. Not tonight."

Then she took his hand, and six hundred wolves roared, and the sound went through the floor and into my knees, and somewhere under it I could hear my own wolf trying to claw out of me and dying.

* * *

Our father did not come to help me up.

He stood at the family table with his hands behind his back and his chin high, and when I finally got to my feet — and I did get to my feet, on my own, holding the edge of a bench — he said, quietly enough to be deniable:

"You'll leave at first light. Take the north road. Don't take anything with the crest on it."

"Father—"

"Twenty-three years I've had a daughter who couldn't shift," he said. "Tonight I have a daughter who was rejected in front of every allied pack on this mountain. Do you understand what that costs me? The Ironhollow delegation is standing right there."

"She's my sister."

"She's your Luna."

I want to say I did something magnificent. I want to say I turned and made a speech and the hall went quiet.

What I did was walk. Down the long aisle, past the Ironhollow wolves who looked at their boots, past the healers who had known me since I was born, past a boy of maybe seven who tugged his mother's sleeve and asked, loudly, "Mama, why is she grey?"

Because that's what rejection does. It takes the colour out of you. I could feel it happening — my scent going flat, my skin going cold, the mate-bond mark on my shoulder fading from silver to ash while I walked.

Twenty steps to the doors. Fifteen. Ten.

I was three steps from the gate when the doors opened.

* * *

The cold came in first. Then the smell — pine and iron and snow off the high ridge — and every wolf in that hall dropped their eyes at once, the whole room folding like grass under wind.

I didn't. I was too empty to be afraid.

He came up the aisle the way weather comes up a valley. Tall, silver at the temples, a long grey coat still wet at the shoulders, and a face I had seen only once before, carved into the memorial stone by the training ground.

Kaenar Blackthorn. The old Alpha King. The wolf who had held four territories at twenty-nine, who had lost his mate and — everyone said it, everyone had always said it — lost his wolf with her, and gone into the mountains twenty years ago to die quietly.

He was not dead. He did not look remotely like a man who was going to be.

"Father." Kellan's voice cracked in the middle of the word. "You— we sent word to the ridge, we never expected—"

Kaenar did not look at him.

He stopped in the middle of the aisle, one pace from me, and he breathed in.

And something in the hall changed. I felt it before I understood it: warmth, all at once, running up my spine and into my broken chest, into the place where the bond had torn — like a hand closing over a wound.

My wolf lifted her head.

For the first time in twenty-three years, I felt her lift her head.

"Say your name," he said. Low. Just for me.

"Mira." It came out as a whisper. "Mira Thorne."

"Look at me, Mira Thorne."

I looked up.

His eyes had gone gold from edge to edge, and they were not calm, and behind me six hundred wolves had stopped breathing.

"Twenty years," Kaenar said, and now his voice went out across the whole hall like a bell, "I have had no mate, no wolf, and no reason to come down off that mountain. Tonight the moon woke me at moonrise and walked me forty miles in the dark." He turned his head slightly, toward the dais, toward his son and my sister standing there hand in hand. "And I arrive to find my son throwing away the reason."

"Father." Kellan had gone the colour of milk. "She can't shift. She has no wolf. The pack—"

"She has a wolf." Kaenar's mouth moved, not quite a smile. "She has had a wolf since the day she was born, boy. Yours was simply never strong enough to call it."

Then he turned back to me, and he did the thing that split my life into before and after.

He went down on one knee. The Alpha King of the Blackthorn line, in front of six hundred wolves and three allied delegations, on the stone floor where I had knelt bleeding four minutes earlier.

"Mira Thorne," he said. "I claim you as my mate. Before this pack, before the moon, and before every wolf who watched what was done to you tonight."

The hall did not roar this time.

Somewhere behind me, a woman started to sob. My father's cup hit the floor. And Elira — I heard her, over all of it — said, very clearly, in a voice with a crack running through it:

"No. No, that's not— she's nothing."

Kaenar's head came up.

"She is the Luna of this valley from this moment," he said, "and the next wolf who says otherwise says it to me."

And then, quieter, so that only I could hear it, still on one knee, with his gold eyes locked on mine:

"Say yes quickly, Mira. Because the moment you do, we have four days before they try to kill you — and I'd like to be standing when they come."