When My Mate Rejected Me, the Lycan Prince Claimed Me

I woke to the smell of rust.

Not metal—blood dried into metal, over and over, until the two smells became one thing. My cheek was pressed to a concrete floor that had been cold for so long it felt wet. Above me, a bare bulb swung in a slow arc, throwing shadows that crawled across bars.

Bars.

I didn't move. I made myself lie there and take inventory before I gave anything away.

Wrists: zip-tied, plastic biting into skin already raw. Ankles: free. Left side of my ribs: bruised, probably from being dropped. Mouth: dry, coppery, the taste of a heavy wolfsbane dose still coating my tongue like film. Vision: doubling at the edges. Hearing: intact. Somewhere down a corridor, a man was coughing. Somewhere else, water was dripping into a metal bucket at intervals of roughly four seconds.

I catalogued the drip first because it was the easiest thing.

Then I opened my eyes properly.

The cage was maybe four feet by six, one of a row cut into the far wall of a concrete bunker. Fluorescent tubes buzzed overhead. The ceiling was low, unfinished, roots pushing through in places—I was underground, then, and whatever forest sat on top of me was old growth by the size of those roots. Appalachian, most likely. I remembered pine and diesel through the truck floor. I remembered a voice saying *pretty thing*.

I pressed my forehead to the concrete and breathed through my nose the way I'd taught panicking patients to breathe. Four in. Six out.

Grief was a luxury. So was fury. Neither of them would get me out of this cage.

I began to count.

A guard passed the row at what I would later confirm was the top of every hour, boots heavy, keys on his left hip. Another came at the half-hour, lighter, with a rifle instead of keys. There was a shift change I couldn't see but could hear in the volume of voices at the far end of the corridor—somewhere around what my body told me was midnight, though there were no windows to check.

On the second day they walked me out to a spigot to wash. I kept my head down and my eyes moving. Infirmary tent, olive canvas, eastern edge of the compound, close enough to the perimeter fence that I could see the wire from where I stood. A man in a stained white coat leaned in its doorway drinking something from a tin cup, and the way he swayed on his feet told me it wasn't coffee. A supply cabinet behind him. Padlock hanging open on its hasp.

I filed all of it.

My wolf pulsed once inside my ribs on the walk back—a faint, furious knock against a wall I could feel now for what it was. Not absence. A wall. Something on the other side, awake, listening.

I pressed my fingers to the cold thing on my neck where a mark used to live.

*Not yet,* I whispered inside my own chest, quieter than breath. *Wait.*

She went still. But she did not go away.

---

On the fourth day they came for me with rope instead of hands.

Two of them dragged me down a corridor I hadn't seen yet, up a set of concrete stairs, into a larger bunker where maybe thirty rogues had gathered in a loose ring around a dirt-packed floor. Folding chairs. Cigarette smoke. The kind of laughter men use when they're waiting to see something break.

They put me on my knees in the center.

A man stepped forward that I recognized by voice before face—Viktor Crane, taller than I'd pictured, gray at the temples, a smile that never reached anywhere near his eyes. He walked a slow circle around me the way a buyer walks around livestock.

"Gentlemen." His voice was warm, almost avuncular. "What you're looking at is a former Luna of the Ironveil Pack. Bond-severed. Wolfless. Delivered"—he paused for the punchline—"by her own brother. For a Beta title."

The room laughed. It went on longer than it needed to.

I stayed on my knees with my zip-tied hands in my lap and let them look. Wolfsbane was still fogging the corners of my vision. My split cheekbone throbbed where someone had knocked me into a doorframe on the way up. I could feel blood crusted at my hairline.

Viktor stopped in front of me. Crouched. Took my chin between his thumb and forefinger and tilted my face up like he was inspecting fruit.

"Anything to say, Luna?"

I looked at him.

I thought about the drip of water in the bucket. Four seconds. The guard rotation at the top of the hour. The medic's tin cup. The padlock hanging open.

I made my voice the one I used to use for taking histories from injured pack members—quiet, precise, absent of anything he could grab and use.

"You should know," I said, "I memorized the layout of this compound in the first six hours. I know which guards rotate at midnight. I know which medic leaves the east infirmary unlocked on Tuesdays." I held his eyes. My voice did not shake. "I'll be gone before you find a buyer."

The laughter died.

It didn't fade—it stopped, all at once, the way a radio cuts out. Thirty faces looking at Viktor. Viktor looking at me.

His hand moved so fast I didn't see it, only felt it—the crack of his knuckles across my mouth, the wet split of my lip against my teeth, my head snapping to the side hard enough that the room tilted.

When I could see again I was still upright. I hadn't fallen. I turned my face back to him and spat blood into the dirt between his boots.

"Cage her." His voice was flat now, all the warmth gone. "Double her rations."

They hauled me up under the arms.

As they dragged me toward the stairs I looked back once, and I saw what I had come to see. Viktor Crane was standing very still, watching me go, and his jaw had gone tight in a way that had nothing to do with anger.

He was afraid.

I filed it.

Inside my chest, on the other side of the wall, she knocked again.

*Soon,* I told her this time. *Soon.*