Rejected at Seventeen, Crowned by the Lycan King Chapter 04

Rejected at Seventeen, Crowned by the Lycan King Chapter 04 – W. Hale Is a Woman

Sixty-three missed calls in eleven minutes.

MOM. DAD ASHER. DECLAN. MOM MOM. MOM.

Three hundred and seventy-two days of silence, and now the burner phone I bought in Ohio wouldn’t stop shaking in

my hand. I sat on my bike two miles from the Ravenguard gate and watched it light up like a slot machine.

“You could answer,” Nyx said. “You could hear what she has to say.”

“She had a year,” I said, and turned it face-down in my jacket. “She can have a year back.”

Here’s the thing about the number sixty-three. It isn’t love. It’s panic. Love shows up on day two. Panic shows up when somebody realizes there’s going to be a headline.

I rode the last two miles and stopped at a wrought-iron gate with a silver crown worked into it.

The guard came out of the booth, took one look at me, and physically laughed.

“Deliveries at the south gate, sweetheart.”

I took off my helmet.

I’m five foot five with black hair to my waist and a face that gets me carded buying energy drinks. I’ve made peace with it. Mostly.

I handed him the black envelope without a word.

He read it. Read it twice. Read it a third time. Then he keyed his radio, in a completely different voice:

“Director Halloway. W. Hale is at the north gate. W. Hale is a woman.”

Behind me, three trucks of new recruits went dead silent.

“Enjoy this,” Nyx purred. “You’ll be hearing that sentence for the rest of your life.”

The Ravenguard campus is a hundred and sixty acres of stone and glass owned by the Thorne Crown. Fifty of us in the intake year. By the end of the trial fortnight there will be thirty-five, and the fifteen who fail are escorted off the property and blacklisted from every pack on the continent. Forever.

Director Halloway met me on the front steps holding my file like a man handed a live grenade with a bow on it.

“Miss Hale. You’ll be skipping the trial fortnight.”

Fifty heads turned.

“Sir?”

“Your assessment scores are the highest recorded in this organization’s history. Not this year. Ever.” He said it loudly. On purpose, I think. “It would waste everyone’s time to make you sit through it. You’ll spend two weeks with Instructor

Bram instead.”

Forty-nine people looked at me like I’d killed something they loved.

Instructor Bram is sixty, built like a retaining wall, and in fourteen days he never once told me I did well.

He tested my recall. He tested pack law – three centuries of treaties, arbitration precedent, blood-debt statutes. He

gave me impossible scenarios. Two packs, one dead heir, four hours to stop a war, go.

On day nine he stopped mid-question, stared at me, and said, “Who taught you this?”

“My father,” I said. “By accident.”

Because that’s the joke, isn’t it. Every hour I sat quiet in Marcus Hale’s office as a kid, filing papers, fetching coffee,

listening to him negotiate with monsters – he thought he was babysitting me.

He was training his own replacement.

The other recruits ate together, so I ate with them. It took four days to want to drown all of them.

The worst was Soren Ashby-second son of the Ashby pack, jaw like a shovel, opinions like a landfill. His shadow was Perrin Kestrel, who informed a room of fifty people that “the little one” only got a pass because someone at the

top wanted her in his bed.

“May I bite her?” Nyx asked.

“Behave.”

On the last morning they packed us into the auditorium.

Halloway walked onto the stage. Behind him, without ceremony, came a man in a charcoal suit who owns the loyalty of every wolf on this continent, and the room made a sound like all the air had left it.

Augustus Thorne. The Lycan King.

“Today you learn whether you belong to the Ravenguard,” Halloway said. “Fifteen of you go home within the hour. I’ll

announce seven Team Captains. Then His Majesty will name this year’s Unit Commander.”

Beside me, Soren Ashby stretched out his legs and smirked at the ceiling.

Halloway read the Captains. “Fiona. Beck. Wyatt. Talia. Enzo. Orson.” A pause. “Hale.”

Then the cuts. Fourteen names. Faces going white one row at a time.

Soren was still smirking when Halloway said the fifteenth.

“Ashby.”

Perrin’s name came right after, and she screamed an actual unhinged shriek – and Soren hauled her out with

murder in his eyes and his hand over her mouth.

I should have watched him leave more carefully.

I didn’t, because the King had stepped forward.

“Unit Commander outranks every Captain in this intake,” he said. “It is the highest post in the Ravenguard that isn’t mine. I’ve watched all of you for fourteen days.”

His eyes found me in the back row and stopped.

“This year’s Unit Commander is Wren Hale.”

And in the ringing, disbelieving silence, I heard a thought that did not belong to me, drifting from a man three rows

over who was staring at the back of my head:

Hale? The Hales reported their daughter missing this morning.