"I, Alpha Rhys Blackthorn, reject you, Mira Vale, as my mate and Luna of this pack."

The words landed in my chest like a blade going in slow.

Three hundred wolves filled the great hall, and not one of them looked at me. They looked at the stone floor. At the rafters. At the man on the dais who had just thrown me away in front of all of them.

Anywhere but at the girl he'd ruined.

I stood under the chandelier in the white ceremony dress they'd sewn for me, the dress meant for a Luna, and I felt the bond between us tear like wet paper.

It didn't break clean. Nothing about it was clean.

It screamed.

The mate bond is supposed to be the most beautiful thing a wolf can feel. Right then it was a fishhook buried in my ribs, dragging me toward the man who'd sentenced me to exile, begging me to crawl, to apologize, to fix whatever I had done wrong.

I had done nothing wrong.

"Rhys." His name came out cracked. I hated that. "Look at me when you do it."

For one breath, he did.

And the worst part — the part I would replay for three years — was that his eyes weren't cruel. They were tired. Like rejecting me was a duty he wished someone else had handed him.

"The bloodline tests don't lie, Mira." His voice was flat, controlled, an Alpha's voice. "You carry tainted blood. A Luna's children carry the future of this pack. I can't gamble that future on you."

"Tainted." I laughed. It came out wrong, too high. "You don't even know who my parents were. Nobody does. That's the whole point of an orphan, Rhys, you don't get a pedigree."

Beside him, she shifted.

Vanessa.

She stood half a step behind his shoulder in deep red, every hair in place, her bloodline going back nine generations of pure Alpha stock and documented to the day. She didn't gloat. She was far too smart to gloat.

She just lowered her eyes like this was painful for her too. Like she grieved for me.

I wanted to put my hands around her throat.

"The pack needs certainty," an elder said from the side, the old one, Brennan, with his papers and his ink-stained fingers. "The records are clear. Her blood is a risk we cannot carry."

Records he had produced. Records no one but the elders had ever seen.

"Show me," I said. "Show all of them. Read the test out loud, right here, and let three hundred wolves decide if my blood is tainted."

Brennan's jaw tightened. "The findings are sealed by pack law."

Of course they were.

I turned back to Rhys. The bond was still howling between us, and I could feel that he felt it too. The set of his shoulders. The muscle ticking in his jaw. He was fighting it the same way I was.

But he was choosing to fight it.

"You feel this," I said quietly, just for him. "Don't pretend you don't. The Goddess put it there. You're standing in front of your whole pack telling them the Goddess made a mistake."

Something moved behind his eyes.

For half a second I thought I had him. For half a second I thought he would step down off that dais and end this.

Then Vanessa's hand brushed his arm. Light as a feather. A reminder.

And he looked away.

"Take her to the border," Rhys said.

The hall exhaled.

Two enforcers I'd healed with my own hands last winter stepped toward me. Garrick, whose shoulder I'd set when it came out of the socket. Pell, whose fever I'd broken at three in the morning while his mate cried in the doorway.

They wouldn't meet my eyes either.

"Don't touch me," I said.

They stopped.

I gathered the white skirt in both fists so it wouldn't drag, and I walked down the center of that hall myself, past every wolf who had eaten food I'd helped grow and taken medicine I'd ground by hand, and not one of them said a word.

At the great doors I stopped. I don't know why. Maybe I wanted to give them one last chance to be people.

I turned around.

"You're going to look for me," I said. My voice carried now, clear, no shake left in it. "Every one of you. One day something is going to go wrong in this pack, and you're going to wish you'd had a healer who actually loved you. And you'll think of the girl you watched walk out that door."

My eyes found Rhys on the dais.

"And you," I said. "You're going to look for me in every face in every room for the rest of your life. And I will never be in one of them again."

I didn't wait for an answer.

I pushed the doors open and walked out into the snow.

It was already coming down hard, fat flakes swallowing the torchlight, the cold biting straight through the thin white dress. They didn't give me a coat. They didn't give me boots. They gave me the dress they'd made for my crowning and they put me out in it like that was its own kind of message.

I walked.

The pack lands fell away behind me, the warm lit windows getting smaller, and the dark trees swallowed the path. I walked until I couldn't feel my feet, and then I walked on the feet I couldn't feel.

I told myself I would not die out here. I had a reason now. A reason no one in that hall knew about.

My hand drifted to my stomach, flat under the wet fabric, where something the size of a heartbeat was holding on.

Two of them, though I didn't know that yet.

The cold finally won somewhere past the second ridge. My knees hit the snow. The world tilted and went soft at the edges, and the last warm thing in me was that secret, curled up safe where Rhys Blackthorn would never find it.

Then a hand closed around my arm.

Strong. Sure. Pulling me up out of the snow before I even understood someone was there.

A man's voice, low and rough, close to my ear.

"Easy. I've got you."

I tried to focus. All I could make out was the shape of him against the falling white, and silver eyes that did not belong to any wolf from Blackthorn.

"You're not who they think you are," he said. "Are you, healer?"

And the dark took me.