UNWANTED WIFE, A LYCAN PRINCESS

I told myself the dress was not too white.

I was wrong about a lot of things that night.

The mirror was cracked. Had been cracked for two years. Right down the middle, a thin split that cut my reflection in half every time I looked into it.

I never fixed it.

I told myself it did not matter. A girl like me did not need a perfect mirror. A girl like me just needed to be ready.

"You look fine," I said to myself.

I did not sound convinced.

The dress was simple. Cotton, not silk. No beading, no lace. Just white fabric that fell straight to the floor and made me look younger than twenty-two. I had borrowed a ribbon from Rowan to tie at my waist. It was the nicest thing I owned that evening.

There was no one to zip the back for me.

I managed.

I always managed.

I sat on the edge of the bed and picked up the silver bracelet from the nightstand. It was the only thing I had that came from before. Before the woman who raised me died. Before the years of doing everything alone. It was thin and plain and had no markings on it. Just silver. Just mine.

I slipped it onto my wrist.

My wolf was quiet.

That was the thing I could not explain later. She was always there when something big was happening. Restless, pacing, pushing at the edges of me. But that night she was still. Completely still. Like she was holding her breath.

Like she already knew.

I should have listened to that.

I pressed my hand flat against my chest for a moment. Just one breath.

"Okay," I said to the empty room. "Okay."

Nobody answered. Nobody ever did.

I picked up my small bag, turned off the light, and walked out.

The path to the ceremony ground cut through the center of the Ashwood settlement. Stone-paved and narrow, lined on both sides by lanterns that had been lit since dusk. Every full moon ceremony used the same lanterns. Same stone. Same path.

I had walked it a hundred times.

Never like this.

The crowd had already gathered along the edges. Pack members in their good clothes. Children sitting on their fathers' shoulders. Elders at the front where they always stood.

I kept my eyes forward.

I heard it start before I reached the first lantern.

Just a whisper. Two women standing close.

"That's her"

"She has no family here."

"Not one person."

I did not slow down.

"She grew up alone in that old worker's house."

"Kael could have anyone. Why did fate choose her"

I kept my chin level.

That was the thing I had learned early. Keep your chin level. If you tilt it down they think you are ashamed. If you tilt it up they think you are performing. Straight ahead. Just straight ahead.

One foot, then the other.

Keep walking.

I passed the last lantern and the crowd parted to let me through to the amphitheater entrance. The stone circle opened up ahead of me, wide and ancient, carved into the earth in an age before anyone alive could remember. The full moon sat directly above it. Huge and heavy and completely indifferent.

I stopped for just one second at the entrance.

One second. That was all I allowed myself.

Then I walked in.

He was already there.

Alpha Kael Blackthorn stood at the far end of the circle in all black. No ceremony colors. Just black, like he wore every other day, like this night was no different from any other night for him.

He was taller than I expected.

His scar caught the moonlight. The one that ran from his jaw down his neck, pale against his skin, earned in a war I had only heard about in stories.

I walked to my place on the opposite side of the circle and I looked at him.

He looked back at me.

I had thought about this moment. What it would feel like to see your fated mate for the first time. Rowan had described it like warmth. Like recognition. Like something clicking into place.

There was nothing like that in his eyes.

He looked at me the way you look at a door being shut.

Not cruel. Not angry. Just closed.

Final.

My wolf went even quieter. If that was possible. Like she pressed herself down flat inside me and waited.

I looked away from him.

That was when I saw the woman.

She stood at the crowd's edge, just outside the stone boundary. She wore gold, which was strange for a ceremony where guests wore silver or white. Everything about her was arranged. Her hair. Her posture. The angle of her chin.

She was not watching the Elder.

She was watching me.

Her eyes moved across me the way you inventory something. Not admiring. Calculating. Like she was adding up numbers and checking them twice.

I did not know her name yet.

I did not need to. I understood what she was in the space of three seconds.

She was the reason his eyes looked like a shut door.

I just did not know how yet.

The Elder raised his staff and the crowd fell quiet.

He was old. Older than anyone in the pack by at least two decades. His voice still carried.

"We gather under the full moon," he said, "as our ancestors gathered. To witness the sacred bond. To speak the claiming words. To honor what fate has joined."

I focused on breathing.

In through the nose.

Out slow.

"Alpha Kael Blackthorn," the Elder said. "Speak your claim."

The silence stretched.

One second.

Two.

I kept my eyes forward. Not on Kael. On the space between us. On the moonlit stone.

Three seconds of silence.

Something in the crowd shifted. I felt it before I heard it. A small ripple. A held breath becoming two held breaths becoming a hundred.

Then his voice came.

Cold. Clear. Final. Like a verdict being read out loud.

"I, Alpha Kael Blackthorn, reject Lyra of the Ashwood Pack as my mate."

The crowd erupted.

I heard everything and none of it.

It came in pieces. Gasps. Someone saying no out loud. A child asking their mother what happened. A woman laughing, high and sharp, cutting through everything else like glass.

I did not move.

I stood in the center of that stone circle and I felt it happen. The bond forming and snapping simultaneously, like a thread pulled taut and then cut. It did not hurt the way I expected. It was worse than pain. It was an absence. A hollow carved out of something I had not known was there.

My face did not change.

I would not give them that.

I lifted my chin. Exactly level. Not up, not down. Level.

And I turned to walk away.

One step.

Two.

The crowd was still shouting around me. Someone was crying. Not for me, I understood that. Just from the shock of it. I kept moving.

Five steps.

Ten.

The circle's edge was close. The lanterns beyond it. The path home. My cracked mirror and my quiet room and the silver bracelet on my wrist.

I almost made it.

Twelve steps from the stone boundary, fire exploded across my left wrist.

Not burning fire. Not pain. Something older than pain. Something that started under my skin and cracked through me like lightning finding a path. I gasped and looked down.

The silver bracelet was gone.

And where it had been, blazing so bright it threw shadows across the stone behind me, a mark was burning itself into my skin.

Silver. Pure and absolute. Shaped like something between a crescent and an open hand. Glowing the way the moon glows, steady and sourceless, from nowhere and everywhere at once.

I stared at it.

The crowd went completely silent.

Not quiet. Silent. Every voice. Every breath. The child who had been crying. The woman who had laughed.

Gone.

All of it gone.

The Elder's staff clattered to the ground.

And then the Elder himself was pushing through the frozen crowd, his old hands shaking, his pale grey eyes wide in a way I had never seen an Elder's eyes go wide before, and he grabbed my wrist with both hands, and he stared at the mark the way a man stares at something he has spent his whole life waiting to see and could not quite believe had finally arrived, and he said