Rejected at Seventeen, Crowned by the Lycan King Chapter 05

Rejected at Seventeen, Crowned by the Lycan King Chapter 05 – The Oath

Nobody applauded.

Thirty-four people sat very still while a five-foot-five eighteen-year-old walked to the front of a room to be handed

command of them.

“They’ll hate you by lunch,” Instructor Bram said, pressing a tablet into my hands. “Files. Scores, psych profiles,

bloodlines. Build your teams by morning.”

“They can hate me,” I said. “They just have to survive me.”

He almost smiled.

Our quarters are the east wing of a stone building we share with a unit that’s been operational ten years –

Commander Dorian Vance’s unit, which everyone here discusses the way people discuss weather and war.

I read files until three in the morning. Though I didn’t need psych profiles. A year of being invisible teaches you to

watch. I’d spent fourteen days learning who flinched, who lied, who covered for somebody else’s mistake, who ate

alone.

At 0800 I stood in front of them.

“Fiona, you’ve already picked your team,” I said. “Say it out loud and I’ll break you back down to junior.”

Fiona shut her mouth.

“You’re not choosing friends. You’re building something that keeps you breathing. Every one of you has a flaw. I built

your teams around the person who covers it.”

Nobody argued once they heard the reasoning. There’s nothing that shuts a wolf up faster than being seen accurately

for the first time in their life.

Fiona’s team got the ground floor – five light sleepers between our wing and whatever walks in at night.

“You put us on the door because you trust us?”

“I put you on the door because you’re the only ones who’d wake up.”

She stood a little straighter. Then, quietly: “We won’t disappoint you, Commander.”

I keep that sentence in my pocket on bad days.

The oath happened at noon, in the library, with eight instructors circling to catch anyone mouthing the words.

Do you swear your loyalty to the Lycan Crown?

“Yes, I do.”

Do you swear to serve the truth even when it costs your own pack?

“Yes, I do.”

Thirty-five voices, perfectly in sync until the last line.

“Do you swear to abstain from relationships within your unit and across units – excepting only a lawful mating or

engagement?”

Five voices didn’t answer.

I knew all five before Bram called the names, because I heard their heartbeats jump.

“It’s in there,” Bram said, “because two hundred years of history says a bad breakup between armed wolves ends with

a body.”

They swore it the second time.

That’s the day I heard my first stranger’s thought inside the Ravenguard.

A woman from Vance’s unit passed us in the courtyard and it landed in my skull like a coin dropped on a table: Let’s

see how fast I can get Commander Vance into my bed.

Then a male voice, sourly: Hope the new lot brought some willing girls.

Neither of them had spoken.

“Am I losing my mind?” I whispered.

“No,” said Nyx. “You’re finally hearing what people are actually saying.”

Six months went past like a thrown knife.

We trained. We studied. We ate on our own floor because I wanted my people bonded to each other. We graduated

three weeks early – the entire unit, together, which had never happened in forty years.

I told my people about my hearing. All of them. Secrets rot a unit from the inside.

They swore they’d never tell a soul, and Talia – Talia, who reads pack genealogies for fun – went pale and said, “Wren. There are only two bloodlines on record that ever produced that. And what wolves used to do to the females

who had it-”

“Don’t.”

“You need to know.”

“Not yet.”

I’d spent a year deciding my family didn’t love me. I wasn’t ready to consider that they’d been afraid of something.

Four days of leave before we went operational. We spent them cooking, arguing about films, and letting Talia plan her

wedding to Beck out loud, because Beck turned nineteen and proposed the second he was legally allowed to.

On the last afternoon I heard her coming up the stairs.

Talia doesn’t stomp. Talia doesn’t raise her voice. Talia is the calmest wolf in my unit.

She came through the door shaking so hard she dropped the takeaway box.

Beck was up in half a second. Between her breathing and her swearing I got the story in pieces.

Commander Cade Fenrow. Eight years in service. Blocked her in a corridor with two of his men behind him. Told her

exactly what he wanted, which position, which room, which hour.

And when she said no, he’d smiled and said: “Then I’ll file a fitness report on Monday, and your little girl commander

won’t be able to save you.”

The room went very, very quiet.

I set down my coffee and stood up.

“Monday,” I said. “Monday’s my first meeting with the King.”