His Luna? Never, He Rejected Me First novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Three Years

At the banquet Calista hugs her like a lost sister and Ronan crosses the hall to ask where she has been. The draw puts Ashfall against Blackpine in round one.

The banquet hall at Harrowgate had a ceiling so high the chandeliers looked like stars.

I stood just inside the doors in a black lace gown that Odessa had pulled out of a trunk, with my arms crossed and my back bare to the whole room.

"You look like a woman about to stab someone," Bram said at my shoulder.

"The Truce says I can't."

"The Truce says you can't draw blood. It says nothing about looking."

Two hundred wolves in evening clothes turned their heads, one table after another, as I walked in.

I heard my old name move through them.

Eira Wexley.

The runt.

The one who couldn't even answer him.

I kept walking.

I took a few steps before a pair of arms went around me from the side.

"Eira!"

It was Calista.

She smelled of lilies and warm honey, exactly as she always had, and she held me so tightly that the room could see it.

"Oh, you're alive," she cried into my hair. "We looked everywhere for you. I wrote to every camp in the high country. I cried for months."

She drew back, holding me by the shoulders, and her eyes were full of tears.

They were very good tears.

Three years ago I would have cried with her.

"Hello, Calista," I said.

"You look so different. So strong." She squeezed my arms. "I'm so glad you came to the Games. We can finally put everything behind us, can't we?"

A few tables away, a woman sighed at how sweet it was.

Calista's hands on my shoulders were perfectly steady.

They had been steady that night too.

I took a slow breath.

"I'm sure we can," I said, and stepped out of her hands.

She blinked, once, quickly.

Then the room changed.

I felt it before I saw it, a pull low in my belly.

My wolf rose all at once.

Across the hall, Ronan Strathmore had put down his glass.

He was crossing the floor toward me with his eyes fixed on my face, and the wolves between us slid out of his way without being asked.

He looked as if he had not slept in a week.

There were gray smudges under his eyes, and his black dress shirt was open at the throat, and his hands were not quite still at his sides.

He stopped an arm's length away.

The whole hall had gone silent.

"Eira," he said.

He said it the way you say a word you have been holding in your mouth for a long time.

"Alpha Strathmore," I said.

I saw that land.

He flinched.

"Three years," he said. His voice was low and rough. "I sent scouts to every border. I went up to the rogue camps myself. Where were you?"

"Not crying."

His jaw tightened.

"That isn't what I asked."

"It's what I'm telling you."

He drew in a breath, and I smelled him.

Cedar and cold rain and something warmer under it, something that went straight down my spine and made my knees go weak.

I hated that.

I hated that three years of stone and snow and training had not taken that from me.

His hand came up.

It rose toward my braid, slowly, and stopped an inch from my hair.

I watched the fingers shake.

Then he dropped the hand and put it behind his back.

"You smell different," he said, almost to himself. "Pine smoke. Rain. You never smelled like that before."

"That's what I smell like when I'm not hiding."

"Eira, I..."

"You said your piece in front of two hundred people," I said. "I'm not going to stand here and give you a chance to take it back in front of two hundred more."

I said it quietly.

It carried to every table anyway.

Ronan's face went very still.

Behind him, I could see Calista's hand come up to her locket, and her fingers closed on it.

She was no longer smiling.

A bell rang from the far end of the hall.

The Warden stood at the head table, holding a black iron urn the size of a bucket.

"The draw for Round One," she announced. "Each pack's token goes in. The first two drawn fight the opening trial together."

She reached into the urn and took out a carved wooden disk.

She held it up and read it in a flat voice.

"Ashfall."

Bram let out a low whistle.

The Warden drew a second disk and turned it to the light.

It had a silver pine tree burned into it.

"Blackpine," she said.

A murmur went up like a swarm of bees.

I turned my head and found Ronan still standing an arm's length from me, looking at the disk in her hand.

"Tomorrow, then," I said.

I walked past him.

His shoulder was so close to mine that I felt the heat of him through the lace, and my wolf nearly dragged me to a stop.

Then Calista stepped into my path, soft and smiling again, and put her mouth near my ear.

"Be careful, sweetheart," she whispered. "He isn't the man you remember."

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