After My Alpha Rejected Me, I Became Their Queen

The bond broke at 9:47 on a Friday night, four seconds after they put the trophy in his hands.

I was sitting in the back rows, where the unranked sit. Third seat from the aisle, hard wood, no cushion. I had been in that section for five years, and I never minded, because I knew what was in the glass case up front. The Strongest Alpha of the Northeast award. Cole's name cut into the base.

My formulas. My border maps. My five years of nights bent over a burner with wolfsbane fumes stinging my eyes until I could taste metal for days after.

I pressed my thumb into the inside of my wrist and held it there. That's the thing I do when my chest gets too full. Tonight it was full to the top. He'd told me last week, mouth against my hair, *After the Summit, Kat. When I mark you, you'll be my Luna.*

Cole lifted the trophy. The hall roared. He looked good up there under the lights, dark suit, easy smile, that smooth Alpha voice sliding over four hundred wolves like warm oil.

"Ironridge didn't rise by luck," he said. "It rose because I never settled."

I smiled. I actually smiled.

Then he set the trophy down and turned—not to me. To the hall.

"Before we close," he said, "there is pack business the Northeast should witness."

Something in my stomach went cold before my brain caught up.

"I, Cole, Alpha of Ironridge," he said, clear as a bell struck in an empty church, "reject you, Katherine Griffin, as my mate."

The phantom mark on my neck—the one he never finished, the one that had ached warm for five years—went ice-cold. Not painful at first. Just cold, the way a hand goes cold when the blood leaves it.

Then it emptied.

That's the only word I have. Like a door shutting on a room that had nothing in it. Then the tearing started, low in my ribs, dragging up through my spine, and my legs quit. I hit the stone floor on my knees. Someone's chair scraped. Nobody touched me.

Cole didn't look at me. Not once. He put out his hand and a woman in silver stepped up beside him—Isabelle of Silvercrest, Alpha's daughter, poised, glowing, her hair swept off her throat like she'd planned it that way. Because she had.

He pulled her collar aside and bit down.

I heard it. Over four hundred wolves breathing, I heard the sound his teeth made.

"Your Luna," Cole said, blood on his lip. "Silvercrest and Ironridge, joined tonight."

The applause came in like a wave over my head.

I got one hand flat on the floor. Cole finally turned then, and his eyes found me down there on my knees, and his voice dropped into the Alpha tone, the one that goes into your bones and turns them to water.

"Stay down, Katherine."

And something in me said *no.*

Not my voice. Something under it. Something that had been asleep for twenty-six years while everyone in that hall called me wolfless, called me broken, called me the omega who couldn't run.

She woke up.

My shoulder blade snapped. My spine bowed and I heard my own scream turn into something with a throat behind it. Bone cracked and rebuilt, fast, wrong, agony pouring through me like boiling water. My dress tore off my back. My hands hit the stone and came down as paws the size of dinner plates.

When I opened my eyes I was looking down at the room.

Silver-white. Huge. And the thing that came off me wasn't a scent or a sound, it was a weight—it rolled out and every wolf in that hall folded. Four hundred of them, Alphas included, dropping into a crouch they didn't choose. Necks bared. Eyes down.

Cole hit his knees. His wolf buckled him at the joints and his face did something I'd never seen it do in five years. Isabelle staggered back into the trophy table and knocked it over.

The hall went absolutely silent.

*Hello, Katherine,* a voice said inside me, low and furious and warm. *I'm Nell. I'm sorry I'm late.*

I don't know how long I stood there. Long enough for four hundred wolves to understand exactly what they'd been watching kneel in the back rows for five years.

Then I shifted back. It hurt less the second time. Someone threw a coat at my feet and I put it on and buttoned it to the throat, over the cold spot where his mark should have been.

I didn't look at Cole. I didn't say one word to him. That was the part I gave myself.

I walked to the storage alcove by the side door where the unranked leave their bags. Mine was a canvas sack. Inside it was a leather journal, spine sewn twice with wolf-gut thread, my mother's handwriting on the first forty pages and mine on the next three hundred. Every formulation. Every countermeasure keeping Ironridge's warriors alive on the eastern line.

In five years, Cole never once opened it.

I tucked it under my arm and walked the length of that hall, past the kneeling Alphas, past Isabelle holding her bleeding neck, past the man with my life engraved on his trophy. Slow. I didn't hurry for anyone.

At the doors, from the dark of the upper gallery, a low voice said one word I couldn't hear—and then, to someone beside him, clearly:

"Get me her name before sunrise."