The pack gathered at sundown because tradition
said the moon had to witness it.
I stood on the wooden dais in the center of Shadow Creek’s square, wearing my mother’s dress. It was blue, patched at the elbows, and too big in the chest. She died when I was six. I’d kept it because I thought if I wore it on my eighteenth birthday, my mate would look at me and see her. He would see good. He would see home.
Five hundred wolves watched me. Some pitied. Most waited.
Rejection was a show. The crowd was the point.
Alpha Jax stepped onto the dais. He was twenty, already Alpha for two years since his father died in the border wars. He had his father’s height and his mother’s cold mouth. The girls at the Academy called him beautiful. I called him Jax, because we’d grown up three cabins apart. He used to share his deer jerky with me when my dad’s hunting was bad.
He would not meet my eyes now.
Elder Marrow banged her staff once. The crowd went silent. You could hear the creek behind the square and the wind in the pines.
“On the night of her eighteenth year, we present Aria Vale,” Elder Marrow said. Her voice carried without shouting. “Unranked. Daughter of Thomas Vale, hunter. Mother deceased. Wolf status: dormant.”
Dormant was a kind word for wolfless. It meant maybe someday. Everyone knew someday wasn’t coming for me.
“Alpha Jax of Shadow Creek,” Elder Marrow said. “Step forward and speak the moon’s will.”
Jax climbed the last step. He was close enough that I smelled pine and leather and the soap the Omegas made. He was close enough that I saw the sweat at his temple.
He looked at the crowd, not me.
“Tradition says an Alpha takes a Luna at eighteen,” he said. His voice was trained for orders. It filled the square. “Tradition says the moon pairs us for strength. For the pack.”
He finally looked down at me. His eyes were brown. Human brown. Not a flicker of Alpha red. Not a flicker of gold.
“I smell nothing,” he said.
The crowd rippled. Someone gasped. Someone else laughed and cut it short.
Jax’s jaw worked. He was angry, but not at me. At the moon. At the embarrassment.
“A Luna must be strong,” he said, louder. “She must carry my heir and stand at my side in war. She must be wolf.”
He turned his shoulder to me, speaking to the pack now.
“I, Jax of Shadow Creek, reject Aria Vale as mate and Luna. The moon made a mistake.”
The words were ritual. Old. They were meant to sever a bond. We didn’t have a bond to sever. That was the insult. He said it anyway, because the law said he had to say it out loud.
The air went out of me. Not from pain. From relief. I had spent eighteen years bracing for this moment. When it came, it felt like stepping off a roof and finding the ground was only two inches down.
I should have cried. I should have begged. Wolfless girls who got rejected usually did. They fell to their knees and pleaded for a place in the pack as Omega. They took whatever scrap he gave.
I would not.
I curtsied. The dress was too big and I almost tripped, but I got the motion right. My mother taught me before she died. She said a lady curtsies when a man dismisses her, so he knows she is leaving by choice.
“Then I’m free,” I said.
My voice didn’t shake. That was the only victory I had, and I took it.
The square went so quiet I heard a jay scream in the trees.
Jax blinked. He wasn’t expecting words. He was expecting tears. He opened his mouth.
Elder Marrow banged her staff again, twice. “The rejection is witnessed. The law is satisfied.”
She looked at me then, and her eyes were not unkind. “Aria Vale, you have until sunset to leave Shadow Creek territory. Any wolf who aids you after that time will be marked rogue.”
Sunset was one hour away.
I nodded. I stepped off the dais on the side away from Jax. My knees didn’t buckle. My hands didn’t tremble. I walked through the crowd. It parted for me like water around a stone.
No one touched me. Touching a rejected girl was bad luck. Touching a wolfless rejected girl was stupid.
I made it ten steps before Lydia Hart blocked me. She was Jax’s age, daughter of the Head Warrior, and she’d been telling people she would be Luna since we were twelve.
“Aw,” Lydia said. “Poor little human. Did you really think he’d pick you?”
Her friends tittered.
I wanted to tell her that I never thought he’d pick me. I wanted to tell her that I prayed he wouldn’t. That I’d spent the last year hoping the moon would skip me, because being Luna to a man who only saw my lack would be a slower death than rejection.
I said nothing. My mother also taught me that you don’t waste words on people who are already fed.
Lydia stepped closer. “Maybe you can be Omega. You can scrub my floors. My mate won’t mind if you—”