After He Left Me to Freeze, I Rejected Him as My Mate novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Freezer Door
Willa is dragged out of a freezer on a livestream, sees the list, drops the Luna crest and rejects her Alpha before the whole pack. He laughs and tells her to be on time tomorrow.
The freezer door opened, and the first thing I saw was two phones with their red lights on.
The best man held one. The maid of honor held the other.
"She's still awake," the maid of honor told her screen. "Say hi to everyone, Luna."
I was on my knees on the ice. I didn't remember getting there.
My fingertips had gone blue-black, and I couldn't feel the floor under my hands.
They had kept the door shut for half an hour.
"If you want to be our Luna, kneel and beg Odette," the best man said. "Go on. Nobody here has all night."
"And promise that once you take the mate bond, you'll never come between her and the Alpha," the maid of honor added.
Comments climbed the side of her screen. Laughing faces. Hundreds of them.
My head wouldn't lift. Cold agglutinin disease does this. The cold turns my own blood against me, and my lips go dark before the pain starts.
Kellan Ashgrove walked in past the phones.
He is the Alpha of Westridge. For twelve years I had been his mate, and tomorrow I was supposed to be marked as his Luna.
He didn't look at me.
He took off his coat and put it around Odette's shoulders.
"She said it was freezing in here," he said.
"I'm okay, Kel," Odette said softly. "Please don't be hard on her."
Odette Fenn is his secretary and his oldest friend. She had stood in the kitchen doorway for the whole half hour, and her cheeks were pink.
Kellan finally turned to me.
"You know how soft her heart is. Is that why you're doing this? So she'll feel sorry for you?"
He had the tablet in his hand. The list was open on it.
He thought I had never seen it.
Two weeks ago he left that tablet charging on our kitchen counter, and I read every line standing up.
Hide Willa's emergency medication in an ice bucket. Cut the radiant heat in the house. Stage a kidnapping by rogues. Let her fall through the river ice.
Each one had a check mark.
After the ice bucket, he held my hand in the medical wing and said, "I misjudged how far to take it. It won't happen again."
I had believed him, because I wanted to.
The freezer was number eleven. Odette's idea, in Odette's handwriting.
Number twelve was still unchecked. Stage the Alpha's death at the marking ceremony, and see whether the Luna stays loyal.
So every time I woke up in the medical wing, it had only been the end of one game.
Kellan lifted my chin with the toe of his shoe.
"Be at the ceremony on time tomorrow," he said. "Then I'll think about keeping tonight's video private."
The best man laughed. The phones tilted down to catch my face.
I put one hand on the freezer wall and stood up.
My legs held. I don't know how.
I unpinned the silver wolf that marks the Luna of Westridge and dropped it at Odette's feet. It rang once on the tile.
"I'm done playing," I said.
Nobody laughed that time.
"Wait," Kellan said.
"I, Willa Rook, reject you, Kellan Ashgrove, as my mate," I said, loud enough for both phones. "Here, in front of your pack. You can tell everyone I died in that freezer, because I did."
Something tore under my ribs.
It was the bond. Twelve years of it, gone in one pull, and the warm smell of him left the room.
Kellan's face went blank for one breath.
Then he laughed.
"Ten o'clock," he said. "Don't be late, Willa."
I walked out through the pack hall with the phones following me.
The Alpha's portrait hung over the long table. Under it was the brass plaque that has been there since I was eighteen.
Odette Fenn, who brought Westridge its Alpha back.
I have never once looked at it. I didn't look at it then.
I pulled my sleeve down over the small round scar inside my left forearm, the one Kellan had never asked about.
The pack doctor met me at the hall doors with an oxygen mask.
I took out my phone with fingers I couldn't feel and typed to my father.
Dad. Come now. I'm done.
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