Rejected By The Alpha CEO

Chapter 1: The Silent Wolf

Selene's POV

"Selene Blackwood. Step into the circle and call your wolf home."

The Moon Priestess's voice cracked across the clearing like a whip, and my bare feet went numb in the frost before I'd even taken the first step. Eighteen years I'd waited for this. I told myself the cold didn't matter. I told myself a lot of things that night that turned out to be lies.

I walked into the circle. Torchlight everywhere, thirty faces I'd known my whole life watching me the way you watch a firework you're sure is about to go off. My father stood near the front, arms crossed, jaw set in that proud, tight way he always got right before something good happened to me.

I wish I'd known it was the last time he'd ever look at me like that.

"Close your eyes," the Priestess said. "Reach inward. Call it."

I closed my eyes. Come home, I thought, the way my mother taught me before she died. Come home, come home, come home.

Nothing answered.

"Again," the Priestess said, sharper now.

I reached until my whole body shook with it. Somewhere behind me, someone shifted their weight, and the sound was suddenly the loudest thing in the world.

Still nothing.

"Selene." My father's voice. I opened my eyes, desperate, sure he'd say something to fix this. "What's wrong with her?"

That's what he said. Not are you okay. What's wrong with her. Like I was a car that wouldn't start.

"There must be a mistake," he said to the Priestess. "Test her again."

"I have tested her three times, Beta Blackwood."

"Then a fourth." His voice cracked on the word fourth, and for one stupid, hopeful second I thought it was cracking because he loved me. It wasn't. It was cracking because the whole pack was watching his daughter fail in front of him.

"There is no fourth test," the Priestess said, and for the first time all night, she looked at me like I was a person instead of a spectacle. "A wolf that doesn't rise by eighteen won't rise at all. You know the law."

"Please." My voice came out smaller than I wanted. "Give me time. I can still there has to be a way"

"There is no way." He wouldn't look at me anymore. He was talking to the crowd now, not to me. "A hollow wolf cannot protect this pack. Cannot fight for it. Cannot be trusted with its secrets, its land, its children." He turned, finally, and the eyes that found mine belonged to a stranger. "I raised a daughter. I did not raise an omega."

Omega. Not the rare, honored kind other packs whispered about here in Blackthorn it was the word for broken. For lesser. For not pack at all.

"Dad"

"You are no daughter of mine." He said it like a verdict he'd rehearsed in his head a hundred times already. "I reject you. As my blood. As my pack. Take nothing that isn't yours, and don't come back."

No one moved. That's the part I still can't get past, two years later, thirty people who'd known me since I was small, watching my own father throw me into the dark, and not one of them lifted a hand.

The Alpha's eyes caught mine for half a second as everyone turned to leave. Regret, maybe. Or just cowardice wearing regret's face. Then he turned too, and the torches started going out one by one until I was kneeling alone in a clearing that used to be my whole world.

I didn't cry. I want that on record. I knelt in the frozen grass until the last torch died, and I did not cry, because crying was for a version of me that still believed this pack owed her something.

By the time the sun came up, I'd crossed the property line on foot with nothing but the clothes on my back and a fury I didn't have a name for yet.

"You can't just leave," said a voice behind me. Kael. He'd followed me half a mile before I even noticed him.

"Watch me."

"Selene. Where are you even going to go?"

"Anywhere that isn't here." I didn't stop walking. "You should go back before someone sees you talking to me."

"I don't care if someone sees."

"I do." I finally turned around. "You still have a pack, Kael. Don't lose it over me."

He didn't have an answer for that. Nobody ever did, when I said things like that true things, ugly things, the kind that end conversations instead of starting them.

"At least take this," he said, and pressed something into my hand. A little cash, folded soft from being carried too long in a pocket. "It's not much."

"I can't"

"Take it. Please." His voice cracked in a way my father's never had. "I can't stop you leaving. Let me at least do this."

I took it. I think that was the last kind thing anyone from Blackthorn did for me for two years.

"Where will you even sleep tonight?" he asked.

"I don't know yet."

"Selene"

"I'll figure it out." I said it like I believed it. "I always figure it out."

He hugged me, quick and fierce, the way you hug someone at a funeral when you don't know what else your arms are for. Then he let go, because he had to, because staying meant losing everything he had left.

I walked until Blackthorn was a smell I couldn't find anymore. By nightfall I had a bus ticket bought with Kael's folded bills. By the end of the week I had a new name, a fake social security number bought off a stranger who didn't ask questions, and a silence in my chest where a wolf was supposed to live.

Selene Blackwood died in that clearing. I decided, somewhere around hour six of that walk, that whoever climbed off the bus in the city could be someone else entirely.

Elle Ross had no pack. No father. No wolf.

Elle Ross had nothing left to lose, and I intended to make that count for something.