Rejected at Seventeen, Crowned by the Lycan King Chapter 01

Rejected at Seventeen, Crowned by the Lycan King Chapter 01 — The Girl They Cut From the Link
He rejected me in front of three hundred people.

Then my family forgot my name for a year.

Tonight, I forgot theirs back.

I rolled my bike down the gravel with the engine dead, past the gatehouse, past the cameras my brother installed and never once checked. At the end of the drive I stopped and looked back at the house I was born in.

Twenty-two windows. Every one of them lit.

Not one of them looking for me.

“Goodbye,” I whispered. “You won’t miss me. I’ll miss you anyway. That’s the part that makes me pathetic.”

Then I kicked the Ducati awake and let it scream.

My name is Wren Hale. Seventh child and only daughter of Alpha Marcus Hale and Luna Elowen Hale of the Ironvale pack. Three hundred years of bloodline, six older brothers, and a father who used to call me his last good thing.

Used to.

One year ago tonight, at my seventeenth birthday, my mother covered the pack hall in indigo and oxblood because I refuse to wear pink. Black candles. Dark plums. My grandmother’s silver. Four months of planning for a girl who hates parties, and she got every single detail right.

Then Kaine Drexel walked in.

Heir to the Drexel pack. My mate. I’d scented him at fifteen and spent two years counting down to the night he could claim me in front of the packs.

He stood under my mother’s black candles, looked at me in my green dress, and said it loud enough for three hundred wolves to hear.

“I, Kaine Drexel, reject Wren Hale as my mate.”

I felt the bond snap like a rib.

I went down on one knee on my own birthday floor, and the hall was so silent I could hear the candles burning.

Here’s the part I still can’t explain.

Nobody moved.

Not my six enormous brothers, who once broke a boy’s nose at a regatta for calling me flat-chested. Not my father, who has stared down cartels and councils and hurricanes. Not my mother.

Three hundred people watched an Alpha’s daughter get discarded, and my family stood there like a row of statues.

I woke the next morning and the house had stopped speaking to me.

Not cold. Cold would have been a relationship. I walked into the kitchen and my mother looked directly through my forehead like I was a window with a nice view.

“Morning, Mom.”

Nothing.

“Dad, do you need me at the nine o’clock?”

His office door closed.

And when I reached for the mind-link — the thing every wolf in this house is born into, the warm crowded hum of seven voices that had been in my skull since I could walk — I found a wall.

They’d cut me out of the pack link.

Do you understand what that is? It’s not silence. It’s being buried alive inside your own head while everyone you love talks over the top of your coffin.

I told myself it was a bad week.

Then it was a bad month. Then it was two hundred breakfasts alone at a table set for nine.

I broke a mug at my father’s feet once, on purpose, just to see if he’d look up.

He stepped over the pieces.

That was the night I stopped being their daughter and started being an observer in their house. And an observer sees everything. I know which stairwell has no camera. I know every patrol rotation on this land. I know exactly which minute the gate guard changes shift.

Which is how I’m crossing the county line right now at eighty-two miles an hour with everything I own strapped to my back.

I’m not running away.

I’m reporting for duty.

Eleven days ago, a black envelope arrived at a P.O. box my family doesn’t know exists. One card. A silver crown. Three lines.

And four nights ago, something happened that I still can’t explain — a voice woke me at 11:03 p.m., singing inside my skull.

“Happy birthday, Wren,” she said.

“You’re a week early,” I told her.

She laughed. “No, sweetheart. You were born a week late. They’ve been celebrating the wrong day your entire life.”

By sunrise, my family will have a house with an empty room in it.

It’ll take them seven more days to notice.