Rejected at Seventeen, Crowned by the Lycan King Chapter 06

Rejected at Seventeen, Crowned by the Lycan King Chapter 06 – 1 Lack the Equipment

Sunday night, I asked Talia to cut my hair.

It came off just above the shoulders, all one length. Two wolves had grabbed it in training and put me on my back

with it, and I have exactly enough ego to hate losing.

When I walked into the common room, my unit whistled and thumped the table like animals.

“You look like a woman about to ruin a man’s month,” Nyx observed.

“That’s the idea.”

Monday morning, I put on the Commander’s uniform for the first time. Black, silver crown at the collar, the single bar

on the sleeve that means every Captain in this intake answers to me.

Orson handed me my coffee without looking up. “You know they all think you’re a man, right? The other Commanders. They’ve been calling you ‘him’ for a year.”

“Well,” I said. “Last time I checked, I still lack the equipment.”

“You’ve got the balls though, Commander,” Skylar said into her cereal.

I was still laughing when I ran up the steps of the main building nine minutes late.

Director Halloway was waiting outside the meeting room with the expression of a man watching a lit match get

carried into a fireworks factory.

“They’re all inside.”

“Wonderful.”

I opened the door.

Seven Commanders around a long table. The King at the head. A young man beside him with a jaw you could cut

yourself on. And near the window, arms folded, a tall man with gray eyes who looked up as the door opened and went

completely, comically still.

“My apologies for being late, Your Majesty,” I said. “One of my people had to remind me that I lack the necessary

equipment to qualify as a man, and I lost track of time.”

Somebody choked on their water.

Seven grown wolves rearranged their entire understanding of the last twelve months.

“I’m Commander Wren Hale.”

I crossed to the King and bowed, small and correct.

His face didn’t move at all. His eyes were absolutely dancing.

“Commander Hale. My congratulations to your unit on graduating three weeks early the first in forty years.”

Actual, audible gasps.

I’d put that in my bed by Friday, said a voice in my head.

I didn’t turn. I just marked the direction, the pitch, the shape of it, and filed it.

“Commander Hale,” the King said, “my son. Crown Prince Rafe.”

The one with the jaw shook my hand and said, deadpan, “How did your unit take the news that you’re not a man?”

“They pointed out I have the balls anyway, Your Highness.”

Someone at the table made a strangled noise.

“God,” I said. “I need to ask my team to help me look for my filter. It’s been missing since Tuesday.”

Rafe Thorne laughed out loud. The tall gray-eyed one bit the inside of his cheek so hard I could hear it.

“And this,” the King said, “is Commander Dorian Vance. Your neighbor for the past year, I believe.”

So THAT’S who’s been living on the other side of my wall, Vance was thinking. Twelve months. Twelve months of

calling her ‘he.’

“Commander,” I said.

“Commander,” he said. His voice did something inconvenient to my spine, which I chose to ignore, because I was

working.

“Would you excuse me one moment, Your Majesty? There’s something I have to do.”

I walked the length of the table.

Cade Fenrow was leaning back in his chair, smirking, opening his mouth to say something clever about my height.

I hit him once, with everything I had, right on the hinge of the jaw.

He went off the chair like a sack of laundry.

Nobody moved. The King did not move.

I crouched over him and made my voice very quiet and very pleasant.

“Captain Talia Ellis. Friday. Corridor outside the kitchens. You told her if she wasn’t naked in your room within the

hour, you’d file a fitness report and end her career.”

Fenrow’s face went gray.

“If you ever threaten a woman’s career to get her into your bed again, the King will be the least of your problems. Are

we clear?”

He tried to get up. I shifted my weight forward maybe two inches.

He stayed down.

“Wren,” the King said. Not Commander. “Explain.”

So I did. All of it. Then I asked the question that stopped every man in that room breathing.

“How many females have been washed out of the Ravenguard on a fitness report, Your Majesty? And how many of

those reports were filed by a Commander they said no to?”

The door opened. Two Royal Guards came in and lifted Fenrow off the floor. They took him out through the door that

doesn’t lead outside.

“After this meeting,” the King said into the silence, “I will speak with each of you Commanders. One at a time. If any of

you have ever used those tactics, consider carefully what you’d like your last honest sentence to be.”

Six men went pale.

Vance didn’t. Vance was looking at me like he’d just found something he’d stopped believing existed.

Then Halloway put his head back around the door.

“Your Majesty – the Drexel delegation has arrived early.”

And in walked the wolf who rejected me on my seventeenth birthday.