He Rejected His Luna. She Was the Lycan Princess. novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: I Accept
An hour after she loses their baby, Willa is rejected in front of three hundred wolves, accepts it, and calls the number her mother left her. The man who answers says he has waited at her border for six days.
At midnight on the night of the autumn full moon, my husband rejected me in front of three hundred wolves.
An hour before that, I was lying on a cot in the pack clinic while our healer told me there was no heartbeat.
I was five months along.
I asked her to check again.
She checked again.
She has delivered half the pack, and she held my hand with both of hers and didn't say anything else.
"Where's Jasper?" I asked.
"At the gathering hall. Everyone is."
"Cora said he was hurt. She said the silver trap at the north gate caught him."
That was why I had run up the ridge trail at ten o'clock, in the dark, five months pregnant and wolfless, with her flashlight in my hand.
Cora is our Beta's sister.
She had been bringing me soup all winter.
She'd even pulled her own coat off her shoulders and put it around mine at the door.
"Go," she'd said. "I'll get the healer."
The healer, Imogen, frowned at the wall.
"The sentry at the north gate says nobody was hurt tonight. He carried you down himself, Willa. I only heard because he banged on my door."
"Then Cora heard it wrong," I said. "She was scared. She looked so scared."
I believed that.
I want to be clear that I believed it.
I called Jasper from the clinic phone.
It rang out.
I called again, and again, and a fourth time.
Through the window I could hear the band in the gathering hall, and a cheer when somebody lit the bonfire.
I put the phone down.
At five minutes to midnight, the mate mark on my neck began to burn.
Every she-wolf knows that burn, and it means one thing.
The mark had burned once before, on the night I met Jasper, hot and bright, and then it had gone quiet for two years.
Jasper always said his own mark stayed quiet too.
"That's how steady we are," he'd say, and kiss the spot.
Now mine burned until I could hardly breathe.
Imogen said, "Willa, don't."
I was already pulling the blood-stained gown straight and swinging my legs off the cot.
I walked to the gathering hall in clinic slippers.
Nobody stopped me.
The whole pack stood on the lawn in front of the hall steps, with the full moon sitting huge over the roof.
Jasper stood at the top of the steps in his good black jacket.
Cora stood one step below him, with her eyes red and her hands folded.
His mother stood on his other side.
Jasper saw me and his face tightened, but only for a moment.
He looked at his mother before he looked back at me, the way he always did before he made a choice.
I took it for a man gathering himself.
Then he lifted his chin and used the voice an Alpha uses when he wants the whole territory to hear.
"Willa Ferris. I reject you as my mate and as Luna of Cedar Hollow."
The burn on my neck went white-hot.
My knees nearly went.
Three hundred wolves went silent, and one woman near the back started to cry.
"A Luna who can't hold a pup can't hold a pack," his mother said, so everyone could hear her.
I looked at Jasper.
I'd always heard that the one who rejects a mate feels it too.
I had seen it once, when an Alpha from the next pack over rejected his wife and then bled from the nose on the spot.
Jasper didn't flinch.
He didn't blink or go pale.
He stood there, steady and dry-eyed, and the words seemed to have cost him nothing at all.
I thought that was the cruelest part.
I thought he was just that hard.
"Say it back," his mother told me.
"If you want to keep your dignity, say it back."
The pack waited.
Somewhere in my chest, something I had never felt before turned over and looked at me.
It had no voice, but it was awake.
"I accept," I said.
The mark on my neck cracked open, and I felt it split.
The pain dropped out of it all at once, and what was left was a cold, clean emptiness.
I twisted the ring off my left hand and set it on the bottom step.
Then I turned my back on all of them.
So I stepped out.
Cora called my name once, softly, behind me.
I kept walking.
I walked down the long drive in my slippers until the music faded, and then I stopped under the last streetlight and took out my own phone.
My mother had made me memorize one number when I was eight.
She'd made me say it back to her until I could do it asleep.
"Only if your mate ever lets you go," she'd said. "Not before. Promise me."
I dialed it with fingers that wouldn't stay still.
It rang once.
A man answered at once, in a deep, low voice.
I opened my mouth and nothing came out.
"Say it," he said gently.
"I'm the daughter of the woman who ran. She told me to call this number if my mate let me go."
There was a silence so long I checked the screen.
"Your Highness," he said, and his voice cracked on the second word.
"Stay where you are. Walk to the gate if you can."
"Who is this?"
"My name is Torin Vance. We've been waiting at your border for six days."
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