Chapter 1

I had spent four years preparing to become Chase Sterling's Luna, never once suspecting he had spent those same four years searching for my replacement.

I learned the name of my mate when I was eighteen. Chase Sterling. By twenty-two, I was supposed to become his Luna — or at least, that was what he had promised me, over and over, until I'd stopped thinking of it as a promise at all and started thinking of it as a fact.

My hands trembled as I fastened the silver clasp around my wrist, and when I turned toward the mirror, I made myself stay there a moment longer than I wanted to. The dress had been made specifically for me, cut to follow the curves of my body instead of apologizing for them — my soft arms, the rounded weight of my hips, the fullness at my waist that no amount of pack gossip had ever managed to talk away. I had never been the kind of wolf people called delicate. I was soft where the others ran lean, and I had spent years learning to hear the whispers that came with that — comments dressed up as jokes, comparisons nobody bothered to hide. Too soft. Too heavy. Not exactly Luna material. I had gotten good at pretending I didn't hear it, because Chase had never once made me feel like I should.

"You look beautiful, sweetheart." My mother's voice found me before I could sink any further into my own reflection.

"Do you think he'll like it?"

"That boy has known you're his mate since you were eighteen years old," she said, smiling the way mothers do when they think their daughters are being foolish and precious in the same breath. "He is going to be so proud to have you standing beside him tonight."

I wanted to believe her. I did — right up until tonight. For four years, whenever I asked Chase about our future, he'd given me the same answer, as if it were simply a fact of the world. You'll be my Luna. Sometimes he said it with that lazy half-smile of his. Other times he pulled me against his chest and said it into my hair like a secret meant only for us. I had built four years out of those words, through every whisper, every side-eyed comparison to some sharper, leaner she-wolf. You're mine. Two words, and I had let them be enough.

Until tonight.

The ceremonial grounds were already full when I arrived, torches ringing the old stone altar beneath a moon bright enough to touch. Alphas from the neighboring packs had come with their families, and among them stood the Alpha of the Blackridge Pack, his daughter at his side.

Kacie. Beautiful, tall, effortless in a way that made a room simply make space for her. I barely spared her a glance. Tonight had nothing to do with her.

I found Chase near the altar, dressed in black, and for one unguarded second our eyes met and I saw the boy I'd fallen for at eighteen. I let myself smile at him. He didn't smile back, and something cold slid through my chest that I immediately talked myself out of.

The elder called on the Moon Goddess, and the clearing fell silent. My wolf pressed toward the surface, reaching for the bond. Mate, she whispered. When I opened my eyes, Chase's expression had gone somewhere I couldn't follow.

"Tonight, we gather to witness the choosing of the Luna who will stand beside our Alpha."

When my name was called, I stepped forward into a ripple of soft murmurs — not surprise, just quiet confirmation. I looked at Chase. He started toward me, and hope moved through me so fast I nearly forgot to breathe.

Then he stopped. Not beside me. Across from me.

"Chase?"

He held my gaze for a long, unbearable moment before the elder gestured toward him, oblivious. "Alpha Chase, the pack awaits your Luna."

Chase turned to face the crowd instead of me. "I have chosen my Luna." He turned toward Kacie and held out his hand. "Kacie will be my Luna."

For several seconds I couldn't process what I'd heard. Someone gasped, and the silence broke into whispers that moved through the crowd like fire through dry grass. Kacie hesitated only a heartbeat before she set her hand in his, and something inside my chest cracked clean open.

"Chase—" It came out so small I barely heard it myself.

He looked at me then, and there was no apology in it, no regret — only a settled, rehearsed kind of determination, like a man relieved to finally have an ugly thing behind him.

"But you promised me," I whispered.

His jaw tightened. "Things changed, Belle."

"Changed? You've spent four years telling me I'd be your Luna."

"I said I would consider it."

The air went out of me like a hand had reached in and taken it. That wasn't true, and we both knew it — he'd said you'll be my Luna, in a hundred rooms, in a hundred kinds of light, and I had built a home out of those words without ever once checking the foundation.

"You lied to me."

Guilt flickered across his face, there and gone before it could take root. "I'm the Alpha, Belle. I can't make decisions based only on feelings."

I looked at Kacie, standing beside him like she'd always belonged there, and understanding landed all at once, cold and total. This had never been about love. Her father commanded one of the strongest packs in the region; a marriage between them would knit together territory and wealth in a way that loving me never could have. And underneath that, something uglier — Kacie looked like the Luna this pack had always pictured. I didn't. I was the plus-size girl they'd been whispering about for years, never quite what anyone had in mind.

"Is that why?" I asked. "Why you chose her. Because she's thinner? Because she looks like an Alpha's Luna and I don't?"

A muscle jumped in his jaw, and for one second I thought he might deny it. He didn't.

"You're not what I need standing beside me," he said instead, and the words went into me deeper than I'd braced for.

"Because of my body?"

His eyes moved over me, quick and involuntary, and that single glance told me everything his silence hadn't. "You've always been beautiful to me," he said, but the warmth was gone from his voice. "Being my mate and being my Luna were never going to be the same thing."

My throat closed around the shape of it. "So you think I'm too fat to be your Luna."

He didn't answer. He didn't have to.

Kacie's voice was quiet when it came, and worse for how gentle it was. "Being someone's mate doesn't automatically make them suitable to be Luna." Not cruelty in her face — something closer to pity, which cut deeper.

My wolf whimpered somewhere far inside me. "But we're mates," I said, the words tearing loose before I could stop them.

"I know." Two words, cold and final.

"Then why?"

He stepped closer, dropping his voice as if that might soften it. "Belle, don't make this harder than it needs to be."

I nearly laughed — a broken sound that never made it past my throat. I looked around at faces I'd grown up with, watching now with lowered eyes and pitying mouths, and felt the shame of it settle under my skin.

Then Chase said the thing that finished what the rest of the night had already started. "I reject you as my mate."

The world went silent around me. My wolf let out a cry I felt in my bones, and I staggered back as if he'd struck me.

"No."

He didn't move, didn't reach for me — he simply let the rejection settle over the clearing like frost.

"Chase, please." I hated myself the instant I said it, hated that some small, stubborn part of me was still begging him to stay.

"I've made my decision," he said, his eyes cold.

A tear slid down my cheek, and then another. Four years of believing his promises. Four years of loving a man who had apparently spent the whole time waiting to see if someone better would come along.

"Did you ever love me?"

His silence was the only answer he gave me.

Something in my chest didn't break loudly. It simply gave up, quietly, the way a candle gives up its flame when there's nothing left to burn.

I lowered my head and walked away, and behind me the pack's celebration was already turning toward its new Luna. I didn't look back. I knew exactly what I'd see, and I didn't think I would survive seeing it.

I had walked onto those grounds tonight believing I was about to become someone's Luna.

I walked off them understanding I had never been his first choice — not because I wasn't enough, but because he had decided my body made me unworthy of standing beside him.

Four years. And I had only ever been his backup plan.