Rejected at Seventeen, Crowned by the Lycan King Chapter 13

Rejected at Seventeen, Crowned by the Lycan King Chapter 13 Item One

She wouldn’t let go of my hand in the ambulance.

I let her hold it. I want that on the record, because I’d sworn to myself I wouldn’t.

At the hospital my father came down the corridor at a dead run and stopped six feet short, like there was glass in the

air.

He looked at my mother. He looked at me.

“Go on,” I said. “She’s yours.”

He caught her and held on, and over her shoulder he looked at me with an expression I have never seen on Marcus

Hale’s face in my life.

“Wren. Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. Sign the King’s protection order and stop trying to manage my life.”

“Understood, Commander.”

Commander. From my father. Something in my sternum tilted.

Declan was awake by then, Hudson was out of surgery, and by two in the morning I was standing in a hospital room

with six brothers – four on their feet, two full of morphine – and none of us knowing how to start.

Colton started it. Colton is the second youngest and has never held anything in in his life.

“We made you a binder,” he blurted.

“What?”

He put his phone in my hand with fingers that were still shaking.

Photos. Dozens.

A wall in Asher’s office, floor to ceiling. Fabric swatches, indigo and oxblood, pinned in rows with dates. A seating

chart. A drawing of a stage in a clearing. A menu composed entirely of food I like – half of it dishes I’d cooked for the

packhouse kitchens myself, which meant somebody had been writing them down.

And in the center, a printed list, six feet long, a hundred and forty-one items, nearly all crossed off.

WREN – 18.

At the top, in my mother’s handwriting from eighteen years ago, faded and taped over three times:

Item 1. She will never doubt for one day that she was wanted.

Item one. Not crossed off.

I stood in a hospital corridor at two in the morning and looked at item one, and I broke.

Not gracefully. Not like a Commander. Like an eighteen-year-old girl who’d eaten breakfast alone two hundred times.

Asher caught me. Then Fletcher. Then all of them, even Declan reaching out of the bed, and I was in the middle of a

pile of enormous idiots who were all crying, and then my mother came in and made it worse.

“I have every list,” she said into my hair. “Every color you ever mentioned. Every song. Eighteen years of notebooks. They’re in my desk and I couldn’t open the drawer all year because I was so afraid of what I was doing to you.”

“Then why didn’t you open it,” I said. “Once. Just once, Mom.”

“Because I thought I’d have you afterward,” she whispered. “I thought I had a year to borrow. And you were gone

eleven days before I noticed, and I will carry that until I die.”

We’re not fixed. I want to be honest about that. You don’t unmake a year in a hospital corridor. There are things I’ll

flinch at forever – closed office doors, the phrase not now, the sound of a family texting at a dinner table.

But at four a.m. my mother took my hand and said, “Sunday. Just us. Terrible movies and the greasy diner.”

And I said, “I’m deployed Sunday.”

And she said, “Then the Sunday after.”

And I said, “Yes.”

Twelve times I asked her. She’s asked me once, and I said yes, and I’m not sorry.

Dorian Vance drove me back at dawn.

Neither of us spoke for forty minutes. Then he said, “You didn’t ask permission. Not the King. Not Halloway. You took

command of an operation involving your own mother.”

“Are you writing me up?”

“I’m asking you to have dinner with me.”

I watched the road for a while.

“There’s an oath.”

“There’s an exception in the oath,” he said. “For a lawful mating or engagement.”

“That’s a hell of a first date to propose.”

“I’m a planner.” He kept his eyes forward, but his ears had gone red, which I found deeply satisfying. “Also, you should know something before you answer, because you’ll find out at the next council anyway. I’m not just a Commander.”

“I know.”

He nearly put us in a ditch. “You know?”

“You’re the Royal Gamma’s son. You take your father’s post the day Rafe takes the throne. Your whole team is future Crown staff.” I shrugged. “You’ve all got the same posture and none of you has ever once complained about the food.”

“Nobody knows that. Nobody.”

“Dorian.” I leaned my head back and closed my eyes. “I can hear your heartbeat from the next building. It goes stupid every time I walk into a room. You’ve been the worst-kept secret in my life for six months.”

Silence.

Then: “…Is it doing it now?”

“It’s been doing it since the hospital.”

He pulled over on an empty road at sunrise and kissed me, and I let him, and Nyx had the manners to be extremely quiet for once.

We got back to campus at seven.

There was a black car outside our wing that didn’t belong to anyone at the Ravenguard.

And Fiona was standing on the steps with a sealed envelope and a look on her face I did not like at all.

“Commander. This came for you an hour ago. Hand delivered.”

Black wax.

The crest of the Sablewood pack.