The Rejection at the Altar

The silver ribbon is still tied around my wrist when my mother-in-law-to-be drags me off the altar by my hair.

"Sera is carrying the Alpha's heir," she announces to two hundred wolves. "You are not needed here, wolfless girl."

My wolf died at thirteen. I have nothing. I have no pack, no wolf, no mate, no future. I stand in a white dress at the altar of Ashford Pack while my fiancé Marcus presses his forehead to my cousin Sera's belly and smiles at the pack like he just won a war.

He did. He won it against me.

I run. Three miles into the forest, barefoot, blood from the gravel cutting my soles, I collapse against an oak and the bark splits open under my hands.

It is not bark. It is a door.

A voice older than any living wolf speaks from inside the hollow.

"You were not born wolfless, child. You were born with the wolf they feared enough to seal away."

Gold light spills out of the wood and straight into my chest. My back arches off the ground. My teeth break against each other. And for the first time in nine years, something inside me howls.

It is not my wolf. It is older. It is angry. It knows Marcus's bloodline by name.

Marcus is going to wish he had never stood me up at that altar.

---

The altar smelled like pine smoke and lilies. The kind of lilies my mother used to grow in our backyard in Seattle before she drove off the I-90 bridge and left me to my aunt's house and to a pack that took me in because my blood was useful for one specific ceremony.

I have not thought about my mother in three years. I have not thought about the bridge in four. But this morning, while Ingrid Hale was combing out my hair and calling me daughter, I almost opened my mouth and asked her whether it had hurt.

I didn't.

I let her call me daughter. I let her tuck the silver ribbon around my wrist. I let her smile at me in the mirror like she meant it. I had been letting her smile at me for three years, ever since Marcus had crossed the training yard one day and stopped in front of me and said, "You. Tomorrow. Eight a.m. My office."

I had assumed he was going to demote me.

Instead he had asked me to marry him, in a voice that sounded like a man signing a contract, which of course he was. Ashford Pack did not do love matches. Ashford Pack did alliances. Marcus needed an omega the elders would not object to, and I was the only one in the pack with no wolf, no family pressure, no claim on anything except the wedding dress I would wear and the children I would not be able to give him.

I did not tell him I could not give him children.

I said yes.

I said yes because I was twenty-two and tired of being the girl the pack laughed at. Because Marcus was the future Alpha and being chosen by the future Alpha was the only way a wolfless girl in a hostile pack was going to survive the next ten years. Because when he had looked at me across the training yard, just for a second, his eyes had done something I had never seen them do before, which was go soft.

I built a whole life on that softness.

I built a whole life on it for three years.

---

I am thinking about all of this, lying in the dirt at the foot of an oak tree with blood running down the soles of my feet, and the gold light is still pulsing behind my eyes like a second heartbeat. The voice from the hollow has gone quiet. My chest hurts. My jaw hurts. My wolf does not hurt, because my wolf has been silent for nine years and I have stopped expecting her to speak.

But something behind her is awake. Something is breathing where my wolf used to be. Something is paying attention to the smell of the forest in a way my wolf never did.

I sit up. Slowly. The oak is cracked down its center, like someone took an axe to it three hundred years ago and the wound never healed. Inside the crack the wood is not wood. It is dark. And inside the dark, something is watching me.

"You are awake," I say. My voice sounds strange. Lower. Rougher at the edges. Like the thing behind my ribs is finishing my consonants.

A sound comes out of the hollow. Not words. A laugh. The kind of laugh that remembers being disappointed by every generation it has outlived.

"They name me Vael," it says. "Your great-grandmother knew the word. She prayed it over your cradle when the pack elders came to seal me. She thought if she said my name out loud, I would remember her."

I press my hand flat to the bark. It is warm under my fingers, the warmth of a living thing.

"My great-grandmother. Maren the Elder."

"You remember."

"I remember everything. I am the pack historian's daughter. I remember what they made me read."

"Then you remember what your pack did to me."

The word is old. The word is a wolf word I have only ever seen spelled out in the back of a leather book my aunt kept on the top shelf of her closet. Theumbra. The shadow-wolf. The thing that came before the packs.

"I remember," I say. "I remember your name was sealed inside a Holt child every third generation because your bloodline could not be allowed to breed true. I remember the pack elders who ordered the sealing were afraid of you. I remember the child they picked was my great-aunt. I remember the next child was my mother. I remember the third child—"

The voice from the hollow says it first.

"Was you."

I close my eyes.

"They said I was wolfless," I say. "They told my aunt I was broken. They told Marcus I would never give him strong pups. They told the whole pack I was the runt of every litter I never had. For nine years I have been the wolfless girl. For nine years I have been the joke."

"They lied, child. They lied because they were afraid. A Holt woman carrying Vael would have outranked every alpha in the territory. They could not afford that. So they sealed me and told you I did not exist."

I open my eyes. The gold light is fading. The crack in the oak is closing. I can still feel the thing behind my ribs, but it is quieter now, the way a tide pulls back before it comes in.

"Where are you going," I say.

"Nowhere. I am going nowhere. I am not a wolf you can outrun, child. I am the wolf they could not outrun. We are one thing now. You will need to come to terms with that."

A sound from far away. Dogs. I freeze. I know that bark. It is Ryder. Marcus's head beta. Ryder, who taught me how to hold a knife when I was fourteen and told me I might be wolfless but I was not useless.

Ryder, who is now running through the forest with Marcus's betas, tracking the girl the alpha rejected at the altar two hours ago.

I get to my feet. The blood on my soles has dried. My white dress is torn at the hem and stained brown from the forest floor. The silver ribbon is still tied around my wrist. I want to tear it off but I do not, because the thing behind my ribs tells me, very quietly, not yet.

"Ride back to them," I say to the voice. "I am not ready to be found."

"It is not them I want you to meet."

"Then who."

"The forest. The forest and the thing inside it that knows your name."

A branch breaks to my left. The sound of paws on dry leaves. Five wolves, maybe six, fanning out in a crescent. At the center, on two legs instead of four, a tall man in a black coat with dark hair and grey eyes that have not gone soft since the altar.

Marcus.

He stops thirty feet away. His betas flank him, half-shifted, ears back, hackles up. They are not looking at me. They are looking at my chest, where the gold light has been.

"Maren," he says.

I don't answer.

"Maren. You ran. You are not supposed to run. The forest is not safe. Ingrid will not forgive me if you are hurt. The pack will not forgive me. Come back with me and we will sort this out."

"Sort what out."

"What happened at the altar. Sera was not supposed to announce it. The timing was wrong. The heir was not supposed to—"

"So Sera is carrying your heir."

"Yes."

"And you knew."

"I knew."

"And the ceremony was still going to happen this morning."

"I was going to tell you last night. There was not time."

"There was not time to tell me you had a child with my cousin before you stood me up at an altar in front of the entire pack."

"Maren—"

"Do not say my name like that. You lost the right to say my name like that approximately two hours and fifteen minutes ago, when your mother dragged me off the altar by my hair in a white dress I picked out for you."

His jaw tightens.

His betas are still staring at my chest.

"Maren," he says again, more slowly, "what is wrong with your ribs."

"Forget my ribs. Forget my ribs, Marcus. You are not going to ask me about my ribs. You came here to drag me back to the pack and explain to Ingrid that her son had an heir on the way with the wrong woman and the pack survived it. That is what you came here for. Tell me I am wrong."

He doesn't.

"Of course I am not wrong. You came here to fix the political problem. The wolfless girl running into the forest on the morning of her wedding is a political problem. The wolfless girl being hurt in the forest on the morning of her wedding is a political problem. So tell Ryder to put his hackles down and tell your betas to put their ears forward and tell me what you actually want from me, Marcus Hale, because the man I thought I was marrying would have come after me."

Something flickers in his face.

Just for a second.

Just long enough that I see it.

Then it is gone.

"I want you to come back with me," he says.

"No."

"Maren—"

"I said no."

I step back. My bare heel hits a root. I do not fall. I do not stumble. The thing behind my ribs steadies me, low and steady, like a hand under my elbow.

"If you come into this forest after me again, Marcus," I say, "I will make you regret it. And so will the thing that woke up inside me when your mother pulled me off that altar."

His betas take a step back.

Marcus does not.

His eyes have finally gone soft.

They have finally gone soft at the wrong time.

---