Sienna's POV
I'd stopped eating around day five.
Not on purpose. Food just tasted like ash. Everything tasted like ash. I'd lie in bed with my stomach growling and my body weak and I still couldn't make myself care enough to go downstairs and find something to eat. What was the point? My parents barely looked at me when I was in the room anyway. At least if I stayed up here, I didn't have to see the disappointment in their eyes.
Three weeks had passed since the gathering. Three weeks of lying in my room while the mate bond ate me alive from the inside out.
The elders said rejected bonds faded. They said after a few weeks, the connection would go numb and quiet and eventually disappear completely. They said rejected mates moved on to other territories, other packs, other lives. They said it was natural. It was normal. It happened all the time.
But my bond wasn't fading.
Every morning I woke up gasping like I'd been drowning. Every night I felt the pull getting stronger, hotter, more desperate. It was like a leash around my chest that kept tightening, kept cutting off my air, kept reminding me that I belonged to someone who hated me.
The pain had turned into something physical. My stomach hurt. My head hurt. My entire body felt like it was being slowly torn apart from the inside. I'd thrown up this morning before my mom could bring me breakfast. I'd thrown up yesterday too. And the day before that.
I could hear my parents talking downstairs. Their voices were getting louder, which meant they were getting angrier. At me, probably. Everything was always at me.
"She needs to leave," my dad said. His voice was hard and cold. "She's bringing shame on this entire family. No one will do business with me. No one will talk to me at the market. Everyone knows she's the rejected mate of the Alpha. Everyone's talking about our bloodline like it's cursed."
My mom's voice came next, sharper and meaner. "I told you her father's side had weak blood. I warned you we shouldn't have children together. But no, you insisted. And now look at her. Pathetic. Weak. Completely useless."
The words landed like stones. They'd landed a thousand times over the past three weeks, and they still hurt just as much as the first time.
"Send her to the southern territories," my dad continued. "Tell her she has a week to pack. She can go live with her aunt or find another pack. I don't care anymore. I just want her out of this house."
I lay in my bed and stared at the ceiling. A week. They were giving me a week to disappear from their lives like I'd never existed in the first place.
Maybe they were right. Maybe I should just leave. The bond would follow me no matter where I went, but at least my parents could have their lives back. At least they could stop pretending to care about a daughter who was nothing but a disappointment.
My stomach twisted again. Not from hunger this time. From something else. Something dark and heavy that had been growing inside me for three weeks. Something that felt like it was made of poison and pain and all the rejection I'd swallowed without letting anyone see me break.
I rolled out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom. My reflection in the mirror made me stop. I barely recognized myself. My skin was pale and almost gray. Dark circles hung under my eyes like I hadn't slept in weeks, which was probably true. My hair was matted and greasy. My body looked like it was disappearing, like I was fading away piece by piece.
I looked like I was dying.
Maybe I was. Maybe this was what happened to rejected mates. Maybe the bond didn't just hurt. Maybe it actually killed you if you weren't strong enough to survive it.
I threw up again. Nothing came up but bile and water. My body was eating itself from the inside. The mate bond was draining everything from me and I couldn't stop it. Couldn't control it. Couldn't make it stop pulling me toward someone who'd made it very clear he never wanted to see me again.
When I came back downstairs that afternoon, my mom was in the kitchen with some of her friends. They stopped talking the moment they saw me, which meant they'd been talking about me. Of course they had.
"Sienna," my mom said, her voice sharp. "You look terrible. Are you sick?"
"The bond," I said quietly. "It's not breaking like it should. It's getting worse."
My mom exchanged a look with her friends that made my stomach turn. It wasn't sympathy. It was something closer to fear mixed with disgust.
"That's not normal," one of her friends said. Her name was Patricia and she'd always disliked me. "When's the last time you heard of a rejection bond getting stronger instead of fading?"
"Never," another friend answered. "Never in my life. It's unnatural."
My mom's face had gone pale. "Sienna, has anything else changed? Anything weird happening with your body?"
I almost told her about the darkness I could feel waking up inside me. I almost told her about the way I could feel every living thing around me like a heartbeat in my own chest. I almost told her that sometimes when I closed my eyes, I could sense the servants moving through the halls like they were part of me somehow.
But something told me not to. Something told me that if I said those things out loud, the fear in my mom's eyes would turn into something worse.
"No," I lied. "Nothing weird. Just the bond pain."
My mom nodded slowly, but she didn't look like she believed me. She looked like she was trying to figure out what I was becoming and whether she needed to be afraid of it.
That night, I heard my parents arguing again. This time they weren't talking about sending me away. They were talking about my bloodline. About my grandmother on my mom's side. About things that had been hidden for generations.
"If the bond's not breaking, something's wrong with her blood," my dad said. "Something's activating that shouldn't be."
"Don't be ridiculous," my mom snapped. "That's impossible. We made sure it would never activate. We did everything we could to suppress it."
My hands went numb. What did that mean? What was being suppressed in my blood?
I wanted to go downstairs and ask them, but I knew they wouldn't tell me the truth. They'd only started talking about it because they thought I was asleep. They'd go back to lying if they knew I was listening.
So I stayed in my room and felt the darkness growing.
It was like frost spreading through my veins, moving slower each day but always moving. It wasn't painful anymore. Pain was actually fading, being replaced by something else. Something colder. Something that felt like power waiting to be unleashed.
The mate bond was still pulling me toward Kael, but underneath that pull, something new was waking up. Something that didn't care about rejection. Something that didn't care what he thought of me.
Something that was about to change everything.
Around midnight, I got up and looked in the mirror again. In the darkness of my room, with only moonlight coming through the window, I could almost see it. The shadow of something moving underneath my skin. Something ancient and patient and completely out of my control.
I pressed my hand against the glass and thought about Kael. Thought about the way he'd looked at me in that gathering. Thought about how badly he'd wanted me to know that I didn't matter.
He was right about one thing. I wasn't mate material as I was now.
But I was becoming something else.
And when this transformation finished, when the darkness inside me finished waking up, I had a feeling that Kael Storm was going to wish he'd just let me disappear quietly.