After My Mate Rejected Our Lycan Heir

The mark went cold at 7:42, right as Conner opened his mouth to end me.

I felt it first as a drop in temperature under my scarf, like ice pressed flat against my pulse. Then it went numb, then empty—a door swinging shut in a house nobody lived in anymore. I stood on the platform in front of three hundred pack members, one hand braced under the curve of my belly, and I understood before he finished speaking that seven years of hoping had led me here.

"I, Conner Blackwood, Alpha of the Nightshade Pack," he said, voice pitched loud enough to carry to the back rows, "reject you, Amiyah West, as my mate and Luna."

The words hit lower than the mark did. My knees buckled and I went down hard onto the stone, both arms wrapping around my stomach on instinct. Somewhere behind my ribs something snarled, wordless, furious, clawing at bars it didn't have the strength to break. My wolf. Still asleep. Still useless.

"This pup isn't mine." Conner's voice dropped the practiced sorrow and turned to iron. "She's been unfaithful. Under pack law, I claim Ironwood as restitution."

"Kneel," he added, and the Alpha tone rolled over the crowd, over me, pressing down on my spine like a hand. I felt my knees start to fold further—and then I planted my palms on the cold stone and pushed myself back up instead, chin lifted, refusing him that too. Remy stepped up beside him, sliding her hand into the crook of his arm, chin tilted like a queen already crowned.

Omegas hauled me out by the elbows before I could speak. I didn't try. I let my body go loose and heavy in their grip until we reached the corridor, where they dropped me against the wall like something already discarded.

That's where I heard them.

The side door hung open a few inches. Remy's voice slid through it, syrupy with triumph. "Aris did his job perfectly. Wolfsbane in every batch, right on schedule. That pup was never going to carry Conner's scent."

"Seven years," Conner laughed, low and ugly, nothing like the grieving Alpha he performed for the pack. "Seven years of everyone pitying me for my barren little wife. And now Ironwood's finally ours."

I pressed my fist against my mouth and held the sound in my chest until it stopped trying to climb out. Every failed treatment. Every needle. Every time Aris had patted my hand and told me to be patient. Engineered. All of it.

I got up on my own.

I moved through the pack house under the noise of drums still pounding from the ceremony, straight to my chambers. Under the loose floorboard behind my wardrobe, I pulled out the pouch I'd built in silence for months—Conner's ledgers showing Ironwood funds bleeding into Nightshade accounts, territory maps marked in my father's hand, a sealed letter from old Elder Whitfield swearing to what he'd watched Conner do to my father's land. I shoved in a change of clothes, wrapped my scarf tighter over the dead mark, and slipped out the servants' door while the pack still howled for their new Luna.

No one stopped me at the boundary line. No one was watching the wolfless wife walk into the dark on human legs.

I made it maybe three miles before my body gave out beside a stream, my knees hitting wet stone, my breath tearing out of me in ragged pulls. The rejection kept coming in aftershocks, deep in the bond-scar, worse each time I thought it had passed.

Then a voice moved through my mind that wasn't mine.

*Get up. We're not safe here.*

Small. Clear. Steady in a way I wasn't.

I froze, one hand pressed to my stomach. "Who—"

*The sample they swapped wasn't from some stranger,* the voice said, before I could finish. *It was Prince Landon's. Landon Silvercrest.*

The forest went silent around that name.

*I'm Lycan blood, Mama. Royal blood. Conner can't touch us there. We have to go north. To the Silvercrest compound. It's the only place strong enough to keep us alive.*

My hands were shaking, but I gripped the strap of the pouch until my knuckles ached and pushed myself upright off the stones. Behind me, far off through the trees, a howl rose from Nightshade land—long, searching, already hunting.

I turned my back on it and started walking north.