Chapter 1 The Rejection

FREYA

The chains were the first thing I felt when I woke. Cold and heavy against my wrists. It took me a moment to realize the burning underneath them wasn’t just pain. it was silver, worked right into the metal, eating into my skin the way it only could to something like me. 

The pack Guards had come for me while I slept, pulled me out of bed before I even opened my eyes properly, and by the time I understood what was happening, I was already being dragged through the packhouse halls.

Now I knelt in the center of the pack circle. Everyone was watching. Every face I’d ever called family stood in that clearing, and Aleron stood over me like a stranger wearing my husband’s skin.

“We are gathered here today,” he said, his voice carrying easily over the crowd, “to punish a traitor for colluding with a vampire.”

A gasp moved through the clearing, and it moved through my chest too. Vampire. It wasn’t just a word to us. It was a wound our whole kind carried, centuries of war stitched into the way people flinched at the sound of it.

Aleron said the name of the Vampire, and everything in me went still.

Xavier.

I’d known him since I was seventeen. He used to find me by the river on nights I couldn’t sleep, back when being married into a bloodline I hadn’t chosen felt like too much for someone my age to carry. I trusted him with the small, unremarkable parts of myself. I believed he was human. Ordinary. Safe.

It had never once occurred to me that he might be the exact thing I was raised from birth to fear.

“Your friend,” Aleron said, and his voice dragged me back into the clearing, “isn’t human, Freya. He is a vampire and you’ve been feeding him our secrets.”

The clearing broke into noise, Whispers tangled into snarls, Someone even spat near my feet but I couldn’t care more or less. My mind was fixated on Xavier. How could he betray me? No it’s not possible, I refuse to believe it.

“That’s not true.” My voice shook as badly as the chains. “I didn’t know, Aleron. I swear to you, I had no idea what he was.”

“SILENCE.”

The word cut through everything and my mouth shut on its own. He looked down at me the way you look at something you’re embarrassed to admit you once loved.

“I can’t believe,” he said, quieter now, almost to himself, “that I have a dimwit like you as a mate.”

Six years of marriage, and that was the word he chose. I scoffed, he never loved me. I've always known deep down but I just refused to believe it.

The silence that followed felt endless. I already knew what was coming before he opened his mouth again. My body was bracing for it before the sentence even started.

“I, Aleron Ashclaw, reject Freya Moonfang as my Fated Mate.”

The pain hit instantly, and it wasn’t the silver, and it wasn’t the chains. It was something older, something that had been stitched into me since the night our bond first formed, tearing itself loose all at once. I screamed before I could stop myself. 

My spine bowed, my vision went white at the edges. Across the clearing, I heard him grunt too, saw him double over slightly, and some small, ugly part of me was glad the bond hadn’t spared him either.

He recovered first.

“You are hereby banished from the Nightbane Clan,” he said, flat, already finished with me. “Never to return here.” His eyes moved past me to the guards. “Take her away.”

They hauled me up by the arms. My legs barely held my weight. As they turned me toward the treeline, I looked back at him one last time, and I spat. It landed against his cheek. The silence that followed was a different kind of silence, it felt like everyone was too stunned to speak.

He wiped it away slowly, and for just a moment I watched something feral rise behind his eyes, his wolf pressing right up against the surface of him.

“Get her away from me,” he snarled. “Now.”

They dragged me through the trees after that, past the wards Out into rogue territory. They let go of me at the treeline and left without another word. I stood there for a long moment, swaying, blood and silver-burn and betrayal all tangled together into one ache that didn’t seem to have an edge.

“I won’t cry,” I whispered, to no one. “Never. I’ll survive. I’ll make him pay for what he did to me today.”

Each step into the dark cost more than the last. Branches caught at my arms, my legs gave out somewhere past the second mile, and I hit the ground hard, dirt and blood mixing under my palms. 

I don’t know how long I layed there but it was long enough that the cold stopped feeling like cold, long enough that the world started tilting sideways in a way I couldn’t fight anymore.

That was when I saw him. A figure stood ahead of me in the dark, where nothing had been a moment before. His eyes were red. Not wolf-red. Not anything I had a name for.

He tilted his head, studying me the way you study something you’ve been searching for a long time.

“My mate,” he said.