Rejected by the Alpha Who Owes Me Everything

POV: Wren · Day 301

I turned nineteen at seven minutes past nine, and for two seconds I was the happiest woman in the north.

I know it was two. I counted. Counting is the only thing my mother left me that I still use.

I was carrying a tray when it happened. Three hundred and fifty-two wolves in the Iron Hall — three hundred and twelve of ours and forty of the Vances’, and yes, I had counted — wax and wine and wet fur, and the girl with no scent was where the girl with no scent always was — at the back, near the door, with her arms full of somebody else’s cups.

Then something opened in my throat.

Not pain. The opposite. Like a window going up in a room I hadn’t known was shut. Heat came down my neck and into my chest and kept going, and I felt the mark rise under my jaw the way frost rises on glass. All at once. From the inside.

The tray hit the floor.

Every head in the hall turned.

And I looked the whole length of the Iron Hall, past the tables and the smoke, at the man on the dais with his hand halfway to his own throat.

Alpha Ronan Kane. Twenty-seven. Six years my Alpha. Six years the reason this pack still had a roof.

My mate.

Second one, I thought: oh.

Second two, I thought: so that’s what it’s supposed to feel like.

Then Councilman Verrick said, “That’s not possible,” and the second second ended.

They came down off the dais like water finding a crack.

Verrick first, then old Ashby, then Marra Kane in grey silk with her hands folded, which is how she stands when she has already decided something and is waiting for the room to catch up.

“Smell her,” Verrick said.

Nobody could.

They tried. That’s the part people forget when they tell this story back to me — they tried. Ashby leaned in close enough that I could count the broken veins on his nose. Verrick took my wrist and put it under his face like a dog with a bone.

Nothing. There has never been anything. Six days old when Nell found me on the mine road, and no scent then either.

“The bond took,” Ashby said. He sounded almost frightened. “I can see it. It’s there.”

“On what?” Marra said.

She said it gently. That’s what people never believe. She never raises her voice.

“A pack bonds through scent,” she went on, to the room, not to me. “Every wolf here is tied to every other wolf by a smell they learned as pups. That is what a Luna is. She is the smell a pack comes home to.” She let that sit. “This one smells of nothing. You may as well hang a coat on a draught.”

Somebody at the back said, “The empty one,” and somebody else laughed, and then nobody laughed, because Alpha Ronan Kane had come down off the dais.

And behind him, standing exactly where she had been standing all evening in a gown the colour of a good harvest, was Sera Vance.

I had been so busy being happy that I hadn’t understood what the feast was for.

Forty of Corwin Vance’s men in the courtyard. Vance colours on the high table. Sera brought north in a covered carriage three days ago and everybody in the low quarters gossiping about why.

The betrothal was going to be announced tonight.

The bond had simply been rude enough to speak first.

Sera found my eyes across ten feet of floor. She had defended me once, when we were eleven, with a rock in her fist and blood on her chin.

She mouthed: I’m sorry.

I have thought about those two words more than any other two words in my life. Not because I believed them.

Because she said them before he did.

“It has to be severed,” Verrick said. “Tonight. In front of the pack, or the pack will say the Alpha kept a second—”

“I know what has to happen,” Ronan said.

First time he’d spoken. His voice does a thing where it takes up all the room in a sentence and leaves none for anyone else.

He looked at me. Really looked, the way you look at a sum that won’t come out.

“Do you know the words?” he asked.

Everyone waited for me to weep, or beg, or ask him why.

Here is the thing nobody understood about that night, and nobody has understood since: I had three hundred and fifty-two wolves in front of me and three hundred and one days left, and the only thing I owned in the world was the order in which things happened.

So I took it.

“I, Wren of no house,” I said, “accept the Alpha’s severance.”

I said it first.

The hall made a sound. Not a gasp. Lower than that. The sound a crowd makes when it has been robbed of something it came to watch.

Marra Kane’s chin came up half an inch.

Ronan didn’t move for four seconds. I counted those too.

Then he said, “Bring the silver.”

There’s no scent to cut, so they cut the flesh.

They keep an iron for it, a thin one, no thicker than a pen, and they keep it in the fire through the whole feast on Naming night in case the year gives them something they don’t want. Six years I’d carried wood to that fire and never once asked what the iron was for.

Ashby brought it wrapped in wet cloth, glowing at the tip.

“Hold her,” Verrick said.

“No,” Ronan said.

He took the iron himself. Bare hand on the cold end. He wrapped his other hand around the back of my neck to hold my head still, and his palm was warm, and it stayed there a moment longer than the job required, and I will be dead a long time before I stop noticing that.

“Look at the ceiling,” he said. Quietly. Only for me.

So I looked at the ceiling.

There were nine beams.

The silver went in.

Most wolves fall. Everyone will tell you that. The mate-mark is the second-oldest thing in a wolf’s body and when it goes, the body goes with it — down on the knees, hands to the throat, screaming loud enough to be heard on the road.

I counted the beams.

One, two, three, four.

The smell of it reached me before the pain did, and the smell was pork.

Five, six.

Somewhere very far away Sera Vance made a small noise and turned her face into a Vance shoulder.

Seven, eight.

Nine.

Then he took his hand off my neck, and the whole hall was quiet, and I was still standing.

They put the iron back in the fire, because you don’t waste good silver.

Ronan stepped away from me and said, “It’s done,” in his Alpha voice, and the Iron Hall began, uncertainly, to breathe again.

Somebody called for the cups. Somebody laughed too loudly at nothing. Marra Kane started walking toward Sera with her arms already open.

I stood in the middle of it with my throat cooking and my hands perfectly steady, and I looked at the man who had just burned me, and I thought about my mother’s rule.

Seven years. Not a word. Not even when it burns.

Three hundred and one days.

POV: Wren · Day 300

They moved my things at dawn, which was generous of them, because I only had three.

A comb. A tin cup. And Nell.

“Low quarters,” the steward said, not unkindly. He wouldn’t look at my throat. “Alpha’s orders.”

“Whose orders?”

“Alpha’s orders,” he said again, in the voice men use when they’ve been given a sentence to repeat.

I walked down myself. Nobody had to drag me. There is a difference between being thrown out and leaving, and the difference is about four feet of floor and it is the only currency a person like me has ever had.

The low quarters are nine beds, one lamp and a wall that sweats in winter. Nell was in the fourth bed with her knees up, the way she sleeps when her chest is bad.

She had been coughing since the third bell. I could hear it from the stairs.

“Well,” she said, when she saw the bandage. “That’s a face.”

“It’s a throat.”

“It’s a face, girl. I’ve known t