The Alpha Who Rejected His Queen novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Reject Me
Joran tells Ilse to reject herself in front of the pack, then rejects her and names Verity his Luna. Ilse hands back her token and walks out, and Joran collapses behind her.
"Reject me, Ilse," the Alpha said, in front of four hundred wolves.
The hall went silent.
Once a year our pack gathered here, and every wolf who had turned eighteen stood to hear who their mate was.
I had stood in that line for six years.
Tonight the scent finally came to me across the floor, pine smoke and cold rain.
It came from the Alpha on the dais.
Joran Wolcott, thirty years old, Alpha of the Iron Moon Pack.
My mate.
I had felt his heartbeat from across the hall before he said my name.
An hour earlier, Verity Marrow had pinned my hair up in the cloakroom.
She was the elder's daughter, and she was the only girl in the pack who ever sat with me at meals.
"Whatever he says out there, you walk out with your head high," she told me. "I'll be right behind you."
She squeezed my shoulders, and I believed her.
Now she stood in the front row in a green dress, with her hands folded.
"Say it, Ilse," Joran said. "Reject me yourself. It will be cleaner."
His golden eyes were flat.
My wolf threw herself against the inside of my ribs, begging me to stay quiet.
She had never spoken a word to me in twenty-four years, and still I knew what she wanted.
"No," I said.
My voice carried through the whole hall.
"If you want it done, you do it."
Joran's jaw tightened.
Then he spoke so everyone could hear.
"I, Joran Wolcott, Alpha of the Iron Moon Pack, reject you, Ilse Penhallow, as my mate."
Pain tore through my chest.
It was not a broken heart.
Something inside me had been cut loose, and it hurt in every bone.
I had waited for him my whole life, and he snapped the bond with one sentence.
I grabbed a chair back so I would not fall.
The whispers started at once.
"She was never going to be Luna."
"An orphan Luna? The Moon Goddess has a sense of humor."
"Nobody even knows whose daughter she is."
I knew what they were saying was true.
The pack found me at the border as a baby, with no name, no scent and no mother.
The old healer named me and raised me in the back rooms of the pack house.
I lowered my head so they could not see my eyes.
I would not give them my tears.
"Why?" I asked.
The word came out before I could stop it.
For one second, Joran's face changed.
His mouth opened and shut again, and his hand went to his chest.
Then his face went hard.
"A Luna has to stand beside me in a fight," he said. "You can't."
His eyes moved over me, from my hair to my shoes.
"You're weak, Ilse. You always have been."
Behind me, someone laughed.
Everyone in that hall knew I was weak.
I slept ten hours a night and woke up exhausted.
I lost my breath on the stairs.
I had never once managed to shift, not even on my eighteenth birthday, when every other wolf did.
Joran slept four hours and ran the border every night.
He had come back from a battle with rogues last month and walked into the hall the next day without a limp.
I had never thought about the two things together.
I looked at him now and saw only a man who had thrown me away in public.
Joran stepped down from the dais.
He stopped in front of Verity Marrow, and he took her hand.
"This is the woman I'm taking beside me," he said to the pack. "Verity will be my Luna, if she'll have me."
Verity gasped, and her eyes filled, and the hall cheered.
She had known.
She had known before she pinned my hair.
I looked at her, and she looked back at me over his shoulder.
She did not look sorry.
Her smile stayed where it was.
My chest burned, and I thought of every meal she had sat beside me.
Every secret I had told her.
Every night I had cried to her about this man.
She had carried every word of it to his bed.
Four hundred people were waiting for me to break.
I took the pack's silver token from around my neck, the one I had worn since I was a baby.
I walked to the dais and set it down on the edge.
"I accept your rejection, Alpha Wolcott," I said.
My voice shook, but it did not break.
"I will be gone from your territory by morning."
Joran stared at the token.
"Ilse," he started to say.
I turned my back on him.
I walked down the long aisle through the whole pack, and nobody stepped in front of me.
At the doors, I heard something heavy hit the floor behind me.
The room gasped.
I looked over my shoulder one time.
Joran Wolcott was on his knees on the dais, one hand gripping the edge of it.
A line of blood ran from his nose onto his white collar.
He was looking at me, and he looked afraid.
I walked out into the dark before anyone could stop me.
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