Rejected at the Banquet: My Mate Chose the Servant Over Me

I finished the inventory at four in the morning, sitting cross-legged on my cottage floor with Barnaby's head heavy on my knee. The list had grown longer than I expected. Three vials of scent oil. A pair of moonstone earrings I hadn't worn since I was nineteen. A silver hairpin shaped like a crescent that had belonged to my grandmother.

And the bracelet.

I stopped typing when I got to it. My thumb hovered over the screen, and for a moment I just sat there, staring at the words I'd written. Crescent-moon charm bracelet, gifted to A.S., year two of mentorship.

I remembered the day I gave it to her. She'd been sitting on the split-rail fence behind the training yard, sixteen years old and furious at the world, scrubbing tears off her face with the back of her hand because Gamma Reyes had told her Omega-born wolves didn't make good fighters. I'd sat down next to her and said nothing for a long time. Then I'd taken the bracelet out of my pocket—the one I'd sketched myself, had a silversmith in the next town cast without ever telling her what it cost—and I'd pressed it into her palm.

"The moon isn't always full," I'd told her. "But it's always becoming something. That's not a flaw. That's the whole point of it."

She'd cried harder. I'd thought it was gratitude.

Now I understood it was something closer to calculation. She'd worn that bracelet on stage tonight like a birthright, like proof carved into silver that the Moon Goddess herself had marked her as royal. Every stolen vial of oil, every lifted stone—those were theft. Ugly, but simple. The bracelet was something else. She had taken the one thing I'd made with my own hands, out of my own kindness, and turned it into a weapon aimed straight at my chest.

Barnaby lifted his head and whined low in his throat, sensing something in me shift.

"I'm fine," I told him, which was a lie he didn't believe for a second.

I closed the document. I didn't cry. I'd done enough of that walking home from the banquet, in the dark, where no one could see. What I felt now was colder and steadier, and it had a shape to it, like a plan assembling itself piece by piece whether I willed it or not.

The lake house came to me almost immediately. It sat on the quiet edge of the Silverpeak estate, technically mine, though I hadn't stayed there in over a year. Brody knew it well—we'd spent whole weekends there in the early days, before I'd understood what those weekends were costing me. He knew the code to the boathouse. He knew which window latch stuck. He knew, better than almost anyone outside my family, exactly how private that property was.

If he and Adrianna needed somewhere to disappear together, somewhere far from Thornfield eyes and close enough to Silverpeak's supply of stolen finery, that house was the obvious choice.

I drove out the next afternoon with a box of security equipment ordered overnight and delivered to a P.O. box under a name that wasn't mine. I installed the cameras myself—one in the den, tucked into the crown molding above the bookshelf, one in the hallway mirror frame, one angled through the kitchen transom. My hands were steady the whole time. I told myself it was strategy. I didn't examine too closely why installing cameras in my own bedroom felt like performing surgery on my own heart.

Then I set the feeds to record continuously, and I waited.

It took three days.

I was in my cottage kitchen when the alert came through, notifying me that motion had triggered the den camera. I opened the feed with my tea going cold beside me, and there they were.

Brody and Adrianna, sprawled across my bed, my stolen jewelry scattered across the nightstand like party favors. She was wearing my robe. He had his hand at her throat, right where the moonstone collar usually sat, tracing the place where his mark would go.

I almost closed the laptop. I almost couldn't watch.

Then Brody spoke, and his voice—casual, unbothered, the voice of a man discussing dinner plans—stopped my hand cold.

"We need her compliant. Not conscious enough to fight it, not out enough to miss the moment."

Adrianna laughed, soft and pleased with herself. "Wolfsbane in the champagne. Enough to knock her wolf flat for an hour. That's all we need."

"And the pictures?"

"Insurance," she said. "If she ever opens her mouth about where I came from, we remind her what the whole pack saw her doing on her knees."

I sat very still in my kitchen, tea gone cold, and listened to the two of them plan exactly how they intended to destroy me at the next banquet—already certain, already so sure, that I would never see it coming.