The Betrayed Warrior Luna's Second Chance novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Nobody Claims Me

Rhiannon refuses Soren too, Cade's Alpha command fails on her, and his guards strip her of the Luna's pendant and bar her from her own home.

The prince's words sat in the air of the hall, and three hundred wolves leaned in to hear my answer.

I had been a wife for five years and a divorced woman for about a minute.

I looked up at Soren Hallowell, and he did not smile.

"No," I said.

His gold eyes did not change. "You haven't heard what I'm offering."

"I don't need to. Nobody claims me, Your Highness."

"I just took my name back, and I'm keeping it."

A ripple went down the tables.

Somebody near the back whispered that she had refused a Lycan prince.

Soren bowed his head to me, low enough that the elders saw it.

"Then I will wait for your word, Rhiannon," he said. "Not before."

He turned and walked back to the guest table.

He did not look at Cade once.

Cade did.

His face had gone dark red, and his jaw worked.

"Enough," he said. "Rhiannon. Sit down."

His voice dropped into the low, heavy register of the Alpha command.

Every wolf in that hall had felt it at one time or another, and they dropped their eyes when he used it.

A young warrior two tables over slid to his knees from habit.

I stood where I was.

The command rolled up against me and stopped, and nothing in me bent.

Cade saw it. I watched him see it.

"I said sit," he said, louder.

His voice cracked on the last word.

"Alpha?" the warrior on his knees asked softly, and looked up in confusion.

Cade swallowed.

"Too much wine on the road," he said to the room. "It's nothing."

Nobody answered him.

I picked up the ledger from the head table and held it against my chest.

"I'll move my things out tonight," I said.

"You will," said Cade. "And you'll leave the Luna's seal where it is."

"It's on my desk."

"Then it stays there."

Odette let go of his hand at last.

She walked around the head table, past the three elders, and stopped at the Luna's chair.

She ran her hand over the carved crescent and sat down in it.

"Odette," I said.

She turned her face up to me, so sweet and so sorry. "It's only for the feast, Rhi. Somebody has to sit there."

I looked at her hands on the arms of my chair.

I had paid for the cushion she was sitting on.

I did not argue with her.

I turned and walked down the long aisle with three hundred people watching, and nobody stopped me.

Halfway to the doors, a heavy hand closed on my shoulder from behind.

I wore the Luna's pendant at my throat, a silver crescent set with a moonstone, passed down from Luna to Luna.

It was one of Cade's guards, a man whose child I had fed through a hard winter.

He would not meet my eyes.

"The Alpha says the pendant belongs to the Luna," he said. "That's not you now."

"It was given to me."

"I'm sorry, Luna. I have my orders."

He unclasped it and took it from my neck.

I let him.

I did not have the strength to fight three guards in a hall full of wolves, and I did not want to give Cade the show.

Outside, the night was cold.

I walked up the path to the Alpha house to pack, and found my door locked.

My clothes were in a heap on the steps in two baskets, tied shut with rope.

On top lay my winter coat, and a second guard stood over it.

"Orders," he said, and put his boot on the coat.

I took the baskets.

I took them across the yard to the cottage where I kept the pack's accounts and slept when I worked late.

The cottage door had a new lock on it, and a third guard stood in front of it.

"The Alpha says everything inside is pack property," he said. "The books and the bed."

"The bed?" I said.

"I'm sorry."

I stood there with a basket in each arm and no coat, and the cold went straight through my dress.

There was one place left to go.

I crossed the yard to the pack infirmary, where Gwen kept a cot for emergencies and a kettle that never went cold.

The lamp was on, and I could see her shape in the window.

I got to the step.

Two more guards came around the corner and blocked the door.

"The Alpha's order, Luna," one of them said. "Nobody takes you in tonight. Not the healer, not anyone."

Behind him, through the glass, Gwen's face lifted.

She had heard him, and she was already reaching for the latch.

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