Rejected at Seventeen, Crowned by the Lycan King Chapter 14

Rejected at Seventeen, Crowned by the Lycan King Chapter 14- The Girl With No Army

I opened it in front of the King.

One sheet of heavy paper. A woman’s handwriting. Elegant. Unhurried.

Commander Hale,

My father is old, stupid, and now in a Crown cell, which is where sentimental men belong.

I have no interest in owning you. That was his century’s ambition, not mine.

You should know two things.

One: yours is not the only bloodline that was hunted. Ask your King what happened to the other one – the line that could feel a lie. Ask him why there is no living record of them. Ask him gently. He was there.

Two; there is a girl, nine years old, in a house in Geneva, who woke last spring able to do what you do. She is not a Hale. She has no six brothers, no gray-eyed boy, and no army.

She has eight years.

What will you do with them, Commander?

– S. Sablewood

I read it twice, then set it on the table.

The King had gone absolutely white.

“Your Majesty. Is there a second bloodline?”

He was quiet a long moment. “That,” he said, “is a conversation for a locked room.”

“Then lock one,” I said. “I’ll bring coffee.”

Here’s where I am now.

Nine days later I’m standing in the west clearing in a dress the color of a bruise, in front of two hundred wolves from

eleven packs.

They threw the party.

Eleven months of planning, thirteen months late, and my mother didn’t cut a single item. Not the indigo. Not the

oxblood. Not the ridiculous menu of every dish I ever cooked for our kitchens.

The King came as witness, exactly as they’d planned a year ago. He stood up in front of two hundred people and formally acknowledged Wren Eleanor Hale, daughter of Ironvale, Unit Commander of the Ravenguard – and made it clear, in the way only kings can, that anyone who touches me touches the Crown.

Cyrus Sablewood will never see the outside of a cell.

My six brothers each got up and told a story about me designed to make me want to die. Declan came on crutches to do the one about the phone I wasn’t allowed to answer and answered anyway. Two hundred wolves laughed. I threw a

bread roll at his bad leg.

Kaine Drexel came, because his father made him, because Ironvale is suddenly the pack everyone wants again.

He found me by the tables and said, “Wren. I want to formally petition to reinstate the bond.”

Two hundred people were watching. So I gave him what he gave me, and I gave it to him in public.

“I, Wren Hale, reject Kaine Drexel.” I picked up my drink. “There. Now we’re even, and now we’re finished. Enjoy the food. I picked it.”

Nyx sang for an hour.

Then my mother stood up with a shoebox.

Eighteen notebooks. One for each year. Every color I ever said I liked, every song, every dumb opinion, in her

handwriting, starting the year I was born.

“I kept a list,” she said, to a field of two hundred people who could all see her face. “A hundred and forty-one items. My

daughter has crossed off a hundred and forty of them herself, which is the most Wren thing that has ever happened.”

She looked at me.

“Item one,” she said. “She will never doubt for one day that she was wanted.”

Her voice went.

“I failed item one. I failed it for three hundred and sixty-five days, and I will spend the rest of my life doing it over. Wren

– you were wanted. You were wanted before you existed. Your brother asked for you the day before you arrived, and

the moon said yes.”

Nobody in that field had a dry face. Including me, and I’ve been shot at.

I’m not going to pretend I forgave them in that moment. I forgave them in pieces, over months, the way people

actually forgive – badly, and backward, and mostly on Sundays in a greasy diner where my mother orders a salads.