Reborn to Get the Alpha She Rejected novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Moon Rite

The moon names Calla and Ronan mates in front of both packs and Calla accepts, the opposite of what Lyra remembers.

The Moon Rite was held on the beach below the Merrow lodge.

The pack called the place the Cove, a half-circle of black rock.

Four hundred wolves stood on the sand, Merrow on the left and Kestrel on the right.

I stood in the middle with nowhere to put my hands.

The last time I had stood on this exact spot, I had said something I could not take back.

I did not say it to myself again. I kept my eyes on the water.

The moon came up over the headland, huge and white, and the whole beach got quieter.

Every wolf in the Cove was thinking the same thing, and it hurt my head how loud it was.

Who. Who tonight. Please let it be me.

An old woman in a gray shawl walked out onto the sand with a staff.

She was the oldest wolf in either pack. She had named every mated pair on this coast for fifty years.

"The moon will touch whom it will," she said. "Stand still and let it."

I stood still.

Dorian was on my left, two paces away, with Lyra's arm through his.

They had come to watch, because they were already promised.

Ronan stood on my right, two paces away, with his hands loose and his eyes on the moon.

He had not said a word to me since we left the ridge.

The light slid down the cliff, across the rocks, over the waiting rows.

It touched a young couple near the water. They gasped and laughed, and silver spilled around their shoulders.

It touched an older pair who had been married thirty years and wept anyway.

Then it came to me.

Warmth poured over my head.

I turned my face up and the light went through me.

Something unlocked in my chest that I had spent one entire life keeping shut.

Beside me, Ronan went rigid.

The silver ran across the sand and wrapped around him too.

It glittered on his shoulders and his jaw, and it tied the two of us together.

The Cove gasped.

I heard it in my head and in my ears, four hundred minds all at once.

The Alpha's mated. The Merrow girl. The treaty bride. The moon picked her.

The old woman lifted her staff.

"Fated," she said, in a voice that carried to the cliffs. "Calla Merrow and Ronan Kestrel. The moon has chosen."

"Each of you may accept the bond or refuse it, before your packs and before the sky."

She turned to me first.

I did not look at Lyra.

I heard her anyway, and her thought was high and thin with shock.

This is where she says it. This is where she throws him away. Say it, Calla. Say it.

I looked at Dorian.

For one second the pleasant mask slipped and I heard the thing underneath.

The bond. She'll be harder to move. Start sooner on the Alpha.

I turned my head and looked at Ronan.

He was waiting.

He stood perfectly still with his jaw tight, and both hands closed into fists at his sides.

I could not hear him.

I could see everything. The scar on his eyebrow, the pulse beating in his neck, the way his chest had stopped moving.

He was afraid.

I had thought a silent mind meant an empty one. I had been wrong about that in two lives.

"I accept," I said.

My voice carried across the sand and out over the water.

"I, Calla Merrow, accept Ronan Kestrel as my mate."

There was a roar from the Kestrel side, and a long confused sound from the Merrows.

Lyra made a small noise and sat down on the sand.

Ronan didn't move.

Then he took one deep, shaking breath.

"I accept," he said, low, so that only the first rows heard. "Calla Merrow, I accept you."

The silver flared and settled into my skin.

Heat followed it, from my collarbones to the backs of my knees.

He did not touch me.

He didn't reach for my hand or turn me toward him.

He stood there with his fists clenched and let the moon say it.

Wynn was crying openly across the sand, thinking, Oh. Oh, you idiot, you beautiful idiot.

The old woman tapped her staff once.

"So it is."

Dorian clapped, slowly, smiling. The sound carried.

"Congratulations, brother," he called. "A real fated bond. What a surprise."

I heard what was under it.

Soon.

The crowd began to move.

Pack cousins pressed in on every side, hands on my arms and voices in my ears.

Under all of it ran four hundred thoughts.

I could not hear the one I wanted.

We walked up the beach to the trucks with a wide ring of wolves around us.

Halfway up the path my knees went strange.

Heat rolled through me, thick and slow, and I stumbled over a root.

A big hand caught my elbow and let go at once.

"The bond," Ronan said, rough. "It's early. It'll be worse by tonight."

His fingers had only touched me for a second, through my sleeve.

I could feel every one of them still.

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