Humiliated & Rejected Me for an Omega Joke's on Him Now I'm Mated to the Lycan Prince novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Hall Goes Quiet
In front of the whole pack Dane says he would rather bond with a rogue than with Linnea. She speaks the rejection back, puts her ring in Sydney's hand and leaves; a silver mark burns on her wrist.
On my twentieth birthday, my whole pack stood in the great hall and watched Dane Callender say he'd rather bond with a rogue than with me.
Two hundred wolves heard it.
My father heard it from the head table, with his hand flat on the wood.
It started with a toast.
A kitchen girl had zipped me into my dress that afternoon, because the zipper stuck and my hands were shaking.
She was the only person on the kitchen staff who ever asked how I was, and her name was Sydney Tibbetts.
"You look like the Moon wrote you herself," she said.
She pinned my hair up and stuck a daisy behind my ear.
"Dane's nervous too," she said. "He's practiced his speech all week."
That was a kindness, and I took it as one.
Dane was my mate. I had known it since I was eighteen, from the first time he touched my hand and my whole arm lit up.
We had waited two years for tonight, when the council would let us make it official.
Before the toast, he pulled me behind a pillar and kissed my forehead.
"Whatever I say up there, trust me," Dane said. "Okay, Lin? It's all going to work out."
I thought that was sweet.
At the full moon, the pack shifts together before the feast. Dane stayed in his dress shirt and said his wolf was sulking.
His eyes looked flat and grey, but I thought he was only tired.
Then Dane climbed onto the dais and tapped his glass.
"Thank you all for coming," Dane said. "Tonight I'm going to be honest."
He looked at the room and did not look at me.
"The council wants me to bond with Linnea Lindstrom. Pure blood. Perfect match. Everyone says so."
Somebody near the door clapped, and then stopped.
"I won't," Dane said.
My father's hand came up off the table.
"I'd rather bond with a rogue than spend my life with her," Dane said. "I'm done pretending."
I couldn't hear anything but the blood in my ears.
Dane held out his other hand.
Sydney walked up from the back of the hall, still in her kitchen apron, and took it.
She looked at the floor. She did not look surprised.
"This is who I choose," Dane said. "An Omega. A real one. Not a name on a list."
He smiled at the room, waiting for it to smile back.
A few people did.
Two hundred faces turned toward me, to see what the Alpha's daughter would do.
I knew what they wanted. They wanted me to cry, or beg, or run out screaming so they could talk about it for ten years.
I walked down the middle of the hall instead.
My heels were loud on the boards.
I stopped at the foot of the dais and looked up at the man I had been promised to since I was eighteen.
The mate bond hurt, an actual tearing behind my ribs, but I kept my face still.
The law says a rejection is only finished when the rejected answers it, so I said the words.
"I, Linnea Lindstrom, hear your rejection. I accept it. I release you, and I ask the Moon to witness."
Nobody in the hall breathed.
Dane's smile slipped. He had expected a fight.
I took the betrothal ring off my finger, the one his mother had worn.
I climbed two steps, took Sydney's hand and put the ring in her palm.
"It's yours," I said. "You earned it."
Sydney's fingers closed around it slowly.
"Linnea," my father said, but I was already walking to the doors.
Nobody stopped me.
In the cold outside I made it as far as the pine ridge before my knees gave out.
I cried for an hour with my face in the needles, until I had nothing left to cry with.
Then I stood up.
My phone said it was past midnight, and the cheapest flight to Lyon, where my mother's sister still lived, left at six.
So I packed a bag and bought the ticket.
At the airport, my wrist started to burn.
I pulled back my sleeve under the terminal lights.
A silver crescent, no wider than a thumbnail, had appeared on the skin of my left wrist, glowing faintly.
It hadn't been there that morning.
The mate bond had been torn out of me twelve hours ago, and this mark was warm, and it was pulling me toward the departure gate.
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