When My Rejection Revealed I Was Lycan Royalty

The cabin was two hours past the last Ironridge marker, tucked into a shoulder of pine where the wind smelled like nothing but sap and cold water. Maren shouldered the door open, dumped our bag on a table that had seen better decades, and started a fire without speaking. She knew. She always knew when I needed the quiet more than the words.

I sat on the edge of a stripped cot and finally let my body admit what it had been holding since the platform.

The pain wasn't a wound. It was an absence, a hole where a limb used to be, and my body kept reaching for a bond that no longer answered. My hands shook. My teeth wouldn't stop chattering even after Maren draped a wool blanket over my shoulders and pushed a tin cup of hot water into my palms.

But inside my head—inside was different.

Inside, for the first time in twenty years, something was awake.

*Breathe, little moon.*

I froze. The cup trembled. Maren's eyes cut to mine from across the fire, sharp, and I gave her the smallest shake of my head. Not out loud. Not yet.

*Who are you,* I asked, silent, into the dark space behind my ribs.

The answer arrived warm and unhurried, the way a hand settles on your back when you didn't know you were falling.

*Selene.*

I closed my eyes. My throat filled and would not empty.

*Selene.* I turned the name over the way you turn a stone in your palm to feel its weight. *You've been here the whole time.*

*Sleeping.* A pause. *Waiting for you to be safe enough to wake.*

*I wasn't safe tonight.*

*You were furious enough.* And I felt her, then—not a separate thing, but a second heartbeat threaded through my own, patient and old and mine. *Furious will do.*

Something shifted behind my eyes. Not a vision, exactly. A slip of memory, like a page turned in a book I didn't remember owning. High ceilings. Stone worn smooth by centuries of feet. A tall man in dark blue lifting me above his head and laughing—*there she is, my little moon*—and the smell of jasmine coming off the shoulder of his coat where my cheek pressed.

I opened my eyes. Firelight. Wool blanket. Maren watching me carefully across the flames.

"Jade?"

"I'm okay." My voice came out steadier than I'd expected. "I—someone used to call me something."

"Who?"

"I don't know yet." But it wasn't a dream. It was too solid, too specific—the exact scratch of that coat wool against my ear. *Truth,* Selene murmured, and settled again, patient. *You'll remember when you're ready.*

Maren didn't push. She just sat down cross-legged by the fire and rested her forehead briefly against my knee, the way she used to when we were girls and I was the one holding her together.

Hours later—I'd dozed against the wall—her head snapped up. Her eyes went distant, the mind-link pull unmistakable.

"Kira," she said when it broke. Kira, one of the young Deltas who'd always slipped Maren extra bread from the kitchens. "She's still inside. She's been listening."

I waited.

"Ashley's already in your rooms." Maren's mouth twisted. "Had them stripped and repainted overnight. Half the pack staff got new orders before breakfast. And she—" She stopped, jaw working. "She had me reassigned to border patrol. Effective yesterday. Which is cute, considering I'm not there."

"Let her," I said quietly.

"There's more." Maren wouldn't look at me. "The Quartermaster. He threw a—a party, Jade. In the Omega hall. Read out every duty roster he ever put your name on, out loud, like it was comedy. People laughed. Ashley stood in the doorway and clapped."

My hands went still around the cup.

I thought I'd feel a fresh cut. I didn't. Selene stirred instead, unhurried, almost amused. *Let them enjoy the ledger they wrote,* she said. *It reads both directions.*

I thought of the Quartermaster's little office. The stacked supply books he never let anyone touch. Three years of small deliveries that never quite matched what the pack was told. I had noticed. Of course I had noticed. Omegas notice everything. Nobody had ever asked me.

"Let him keep laughing," I said. "His books are open on his desk right now, I'd bet anything on it."

Maren's smile came back, slow and sharp. "There's my girl."

We sat with that a while. The fire cracked. Then, softer, she added, "Kira says something else. Lena."

My chest tightened, a different kind of hurt this time. "What about her."

"She's not well. Fever came up last night. Hands shaking so bad at breakfast she couldn't hold her spoon. She asked the healer where your tinctures had gone."

I closed my eyes.

Three years of standing over that stove at 4 a.m., grinding wolfsbane fine enough not to burn her, testing every batch on my own tongue first. Three years of leaving the little jars on her nightstand without a note because a note would have gotten them thrown out. Tripp had never noticed. Which had been the point.

"He won't believe her," I said. I already knew. I'd watched him not-see her for years. "He'll call it confusion. He'll walk out of the room."

"Yeah." Maren's voice was flat. "Kira says he already did."

I opened my hands in my lap and looked at the calluses there. Old, honest, mine.

*Little moon,* the memory whispered again, from very far away.

*I'm listening,* I told it. *Keep talking. I'm ready now.*