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

Chapter 2: What They Put in the Tea

I said yes.

I said it with blood still in my mouth, kneeling in front of a man I had never spoken to, while my sister screamed my name from the dais, and I have never once regretted a word of it.

What happened after is harder to describe. The bond didn't tear this time — it arrived. Warm, then hot, then something like sunlight going through frozen ground, and my wolf came up out of wherever she had been buried for twenty-three years and pressed herself against the inside of my chest, and she was awake, and she was furious.

I made a sound. Kaenar caught me before I hit the floor.

"Breathe," he said against my ear. "Slowly. She's been held under a long time and she's going to come up angry."

"Held under—"

"Not here." His arm was iron across my back. Over my head, to the hall, he said in a voice that expected nothing but obedience: "The Claiming is concluded. Clear the hall."

Nobody moved for a beat. Then the Ironhollow delegation bowed — actually bowed, to me — and after that the room emptied so fast it was almost comic.

Only four people stayed.

Kellan, white to the lips. Elira, in her snow-coloured dress, with her hand over her mouth. My father, standing very straight beside the family table, doing arithmetic in his face.

And the pack healer, old Bessa, who had gone the colour of ash and would not look at anyone.

* * *

Kaenar took me to the north tower, which had been shut since his own mate died, and made me sit on a stone bench while he lit the fire himself, because he had told the servants to get out.

"Show me the mark," he said.

I pulled my collar aside. The rejection mark on my left shoulder had gone dead grey, an ugly smear like an old burn.

He looked at it for a long moment. Then he lifted my right wrist and turned it to the firelight, and pressed his thumb along the vein there — and I felt something under the skin resist him, faint and sour, like a hand pushing back.

His jaw set.

"Wolfsbane," he said. "Distilled, not raw. Twenty years of it, near enough."

The word went through me and made no sense at all.

"That's — no. Wolfsbane is poison, I'd have been sick, I'd have—"

"Raw wolfsbane kills. Distilled, in small doses, over years, in something you drink every day?" He let go of my wrist. "It doesn't kill. It keeps the wolf under. It keeps a strong wolf so far under that everyone, including her, becomes certain she was born without one."

The fire popped. I sat with my hands in my lap and thought about a cup.

A cup of tea, the same cup, every night since I was three years old. Bitter, with honey to hide it. For your headaches, Mira. Set on the table by my bed by a woman with careful hands.

Bessa. Who could not look at anyone in that hall.

Who had been my stepmother's healer for twenty-four years.

"My father's second wife," I said. My voice came out perfectly flat. "Elira's mother."

"Yes."

"Why?"

Kaenar crouched in front of the fire, and for the first time he looked less like a legend and more like a tired man of forty-five who had walked forty miles in the dark.

"Because of what you are," he said. "And because your mother was the last Luna the moon ever answered directly, and this pack has spent a generation making sure nothing like her happened twice."

* * *

The four days he'd promised me lasted about eleven hours.

At dawn there was a delegation outside the tower door: my father, three of the senior warriors, and Kellan, who had not slept and looked it.

"There's a question of legitimacy," my father said. He said it to Kaenar. He did not say one word to me the entire time, and he never has since. "The girl was rejected in a public rite. A rejected mate is pack-less. A pack-less wolf can't be Luna. There's precedent — the Vane case, forty years back—"

"There's precedent," Kaenar agreed pleasantly, "and there's me. Which of the two would you like to argue with, Corin?"

One of the warriors put his hand on his knife.

I did not see Kaenar move. I saw the man on the floor, and Kaenar standing over him with the knife in his own hand, turning it slowly, examining it like a merchant checking a coin.

"Ironhollow steel," he said. "Interesting choice for a Blackthorn warrior."

The room went very still.

"You brought Ironhollow steel into my hall on Claiming Night," he said, to my father now, and all the pleasantness had gone out of his voice, "and the Ironhollow delegation happened to be standing at the back. They came to watch a rejection they knew was coming. Which means somebody sent them a message before the rite. Which means somebody has been trading in a mating alliance for at least a month."

Elira spoke from the doorway.

"It was for the pack," she said.

She had been crying. She had also changed into her Luna-grey, which she had no right to wear anymore, and she stood there with her chin up in a way that I recognised from every argument we'd had since we were children.

"Ironhollow has four hundred fighters and a river we need," she said. "Kellan needed a mate who could hold a Luna's rank at that table. Not one who couldn't shift and got tired going up the stairs." Her voice wobbled. "Mira. You were dying by inches. Mother said—"

"Say the rest of that sentence," Kaenar said softly.

Elira stopped.

And I watched my sister understand, in real time, in front of six people, exactly what her mother's evening tea had been for. It went across her face like a shadow crossing a field.

"Oh," she said.

Then she turned around and left, and I heard her running down the tower stairs.

* * *

They came for me that night.

Not with knives — with law. A pack tribunal, called under old rite while Kaenar was out on the ridge answering the Ironhollow envoy, timed exactly for the two hours he'd be gone.

Six elders in a cold room. My father presiding. Bessa in the corner with her hands wrapped in her apron.

"A Luna must shift before the pack within the first moon of her claiming," the eldest read out. "Or the claiming is void. It's very old law, girl. It isn't personal."

"You poisoned me for twenty years so that I couldn't," I said, "and now you'd like to void my claiming because I can't. That's quite personal."

"Prove it, then." My father's voice, cold and satisfied. "Shift."

And here is the thing they had all forgotten.

Wolfsbane, distilled, keeps the wolf under.

But someone had stopped putting it in my tea the day I was rejected — because after the rejection, why bother? A rejected wolf is finished anyway. Bessa had thrown the cup away that morning. I had watched her do it from the tower window and not understood what I was seeing.

Thirty-one hours, no dose.

And my mate — a mate who could call a wolf out of a body the way the moon calls water — had been holding his hand against my back all night without ever telling me why.

My spine moved first.

I heard the eldest say, "That's not—", and then somebody knocked over a chair, and then the pain took me and folded me down onto the stones, and for eleven seconds I thought it was killing me.

It wasn't.

I came up on four legs in a room full of screaming.

I turned my head and caught my reflection in the black window glass, and even I stopped.

I was white. Not grey, not silver. White, from muzzle to tail, and every hair of me was throwing back the lamplight like snow at noon.

Bessa slid down the wall with her hands over her face and started to pray.

Because there has been exactly one white wolf in the recorded history of this mountain, and she is carved into the memorial stone by the training ground, and she was Kaenar Blackthorn's first mate.