Exiled Mate, Future Luna novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Nobody Remembered
On her eighteenth birthday Sierra's mate bond hits, Dalton Kippax rejects her at the oak before the whole pack, and the Alpha exiles her before moonrise. At the border road a second pull drags at her from the north.
Nobody in the pack house said happy birthday to me on the morning I turned eighteen.
I stood in the kitchen doorway in my school hoodie and waited for someone to look up.
Three days ago the whole backyard had been strung with fairy lights for my brother's twenty-first.
Today was a Tuesday, and everyone was busy with it.
Mom set my cup on the table, in the same place she had set it every morning since I was five.
"Tea," she said. "Drink it all, honey. You look pale."
I drank it all.
She watched me finish, took the empty cup, and rinsed it herself.
Tonight was the pack's awakening night, and tonight mattered more than any cake.
Every wolf in the Kippax pack wakes up at eighteen, in front of the Alpha, on the training yard.
I had waited my whole life for my wolf to say one word to me.
She never had.
At dusk the yard held a hundred people and a ring of torches.
Alpha Kippax stood on the porch steps with his son Dalton at his shoulder.
The other new eighteen that month was a boy from the hardware store.
The Alpha raised his head and called, and the boy dropped to his knees and shifted, bones cracking, to cheers.
"Sierra Ellsworth," the Alpha said. "Come answer."
I stepped into the torchlight.
He called again, louder.
Nothing in me moved.
Someone near the back said, "Hollow," and it went around the yard like a draft.
I wanted to be anywhere else.
Then Dalton came down the steps and walked past me, close enough that his sleeve brushed mine.
The world tipped.
My knees went soft, and for one second something deep in my chest lifted its head and howled, a sound only I could hear.
I knew what it was.
Every girl in the pack knows what it is.
"Mate," I said out loud.
Dalton stopped.
He didn't look glad.
He took my arm above the elbow and walked me across the yard, and the whole crowd followed.
He put me against the oak behind the training shed, hard enough that the bark caught my hair.
His body pinned mine, and every inch of it was too close and none of it was kind.
"You can't even shift," he said into my ear, low and quiet. "You think I'd take you in front of all these people?"
My skin burned where he touched it, and I hated that it did.
"I'm going to be Alpha one day," he said. "My Luna will have a wolf."
"Do it properly, son," his father said from behind him. "Hand and words."
Dalton took my right hand in both of his.
His thumb rested against the inside of my wrist.
"I, Dalton Kippax, refuse you, Sierra Ellsworth, as my mate."
The bond tore.
The pain was bad, but I had been braced for the pain.
What I wasn't ready for was his thumb moving once across my palm, and how good it felt, knowing it was the last time anyone would touch me like that.
Then he dropped my hand, and the space inside me where the howl had been went flat and quiet.
The Alpha stepped forward.
"A hollow girl who names the heir her mate has disturbed this pack. By my word she leaves Kippax land before moonrise."
I looked for my mother.
She stood at the edge of the torchlight with her steel thermos held against her chest.
She met the Alpha's eyes and gave one small nod.
My father studied his boots.
My brother Blake looked at his phone.
Nobody said my name.
I could have begged.
I could have stood there and let them watch me do it.
So I walked out of the ring of torches with my head up, before anyone could throw me out.
Upstairs I pulled my duffel from under the bed and found the library book I had hidden there in the spring.
Folded inside it was a letter I had never shown anyone, with a university crest on the top.
Bellmoor University.
Report by August twenty-eighth.
It was August twenty-sixth.
I packed it with two sweatshirts and the eight hundred dollars I had saved from three summers at the pack store.
Mom was waiting at the bottom of the stairs when I came down.
She hugged me, smelling of cold tea and lavender soap.
"It's all for the best," she said, and her voice was warm. "Take this. It keeps you steady."
She pushed a small tin into the side pocket of my bag and zipped it shut.
I let her.
I walked down the long gravel drive and past the last stone marker with the Kippax pack's name carved on it.
At the edge of the road, I stopped.
A second pull took hold of me, sharper than the one Dalton had given me and stronger than anything I had ever felt.
It came from the north, and it wasn't going to let go.
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