"STOP!"
The word ripped from my throat before I could think. Before I could breathe. Before I could do anything but stare at the platform beneath the sacred moon altar and understand — with a cold, crashing certainty — that something had gone terribly, irreversibly wrong.
Hundreds of wolf eyes turned toward me at once.
I didn't care.
My gaze was locked on him.
Alpha Kaelor stood at the ceremonial stone, tall and imposing even from across the grounds, his dark hair catching the pale moonlight. He wasn't looking at me. His head was lowered, his lips still pressed to the neck of the woman kneeling before him — a woman draped in white, her face hidden beneath a ceremonial veil, her head bowed in practiced submission.
Blood glistened on her neck.
Fresh, bright and real.
"The mating mark."
My knees nearly buckled.
No. No, no, no —
"That's not me!" The scream tore out of me raw and broken, and gasps exploded through the crowd like a wave. The veiled woman stilled. Then, slowly — deliberately — she turned.
She lifted the veil.
Selene.
The air left my lungs in one hollow rush. Selene Vire. Her black hair cascaded over her shoulders, her sharp eyes found mine across the crowd, and a small, almost imperceptible smile touched the corners of her lips.
Cold disbelief spread through my chest like ice water.
I forced my legs to move. Pushed through the crowd, shoulders and elbows catching me from every direction, voices rising around me in confusion.
"I'm the one he was supposed to mark!" My voice cracked on the last word, but I kept moving. "That is my ceremony — he was meant to mark me —"
A sound cut through the murmuring crowd. A heavy, awful sound.
A body hitting the ground.
I looked up just in time to see Kaelor stagger. His massive frame swayed once — his golden eyes found my face for one single, disoriented second — and then he crumpled onto the ceremony platform like a felled tree.
The Alpha had collapsed.
The grounds erupted. Gasps, shouts, the frantic shuffle of bodies pressing forward. But Selene didn't flinch. She didn't rush to him. She simply straightened, smoothed her ceremonial robes with both hands, and turned to face me with an expression of perfect, practiced calm.
"How strange," she said, loud enough for the nearest crowd to hear. "Why are you here, Lyanna?"
I blinked. "What?"
Her voice carried clearly across the stunned silence. "I was under the impression you had already accepted the Alpha's rejection." She tilted her head. "Earlier tonight."
The words hit me like a fist to the chest.
"That's a lie."
Before I could say another word, three figures stepped forward from the shadows beside the platform.
Kaelor's inner circle. His closest friends. The men who had laughed with him, bled with him, stood at his side since childhood.
"We were present," the tallest one said, his voice flat and certain. "The Alpha rejected her before the ceremony began. We witnessed it ourselves."
My chest caved.
"No." My voice came out smaller than I intended. "No — that never happened. None of that happened —"
"Enough."
The Head Council Elder raised his ceremonial staff and silence fell over the grounds like a hammer.
"The Alpha has marked his mate," he declared, his deep voice rolling across the crowd. "The sacred bond has been completed. The ceremony stands."
I stood there, mouth open, the words dissolving before they reached my lips.
"Should the rejected omega still seek a mate bond," the elder continued, his eyes passing over me with all the warmth of stone, "she may present herself at the next mating moon."
He paused.
"Five years."
Five years.
The word landed like a sentence, like a grave being sealed.
And then — as if the world hadn't just shattered around me — the music resumed. Cheers rose into the night air. Laughter. The clinking of goblets. The crowd folded back into celebration, bodies turning away from me as easily as pages in a book no one wanted to finish.
All of it, for her.
I stood frozen at the edge of the ceremony grounds, the music wrapping around me like something cruel, the firelight blurring through the tears I refused to let fall.
I had waited five years for this night.
Five years of patience, of loyalty, of believing.
And in the space of five minutes, everything had been taken from me.
I didn't know yet that this was only the beginning.
I didn't know that the night was full of secrets still buried — in the drugged goblet that had brought Kaelor to his knees, in the silence of the men who had lied without blinking, in the smile Selene had worn when she thought no one was watching.
I didn't know any of it yet.
All I knew, standing there alone in the ruins of the life I thought I was about to begin, was one thing:
Something about tonight was wrong.
Not just painful, not just unfair.
Wrong.
And somewhere, deep beneath the heartbreak, beneath the humiliation, beneath the tears I was choking back with everything I had and my wolf stirred.