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Chapter 1 - THE NIGHT EVERYTHING SHATTERED

Seren's POV

The Lunar Festival feels like a thousand eyes watching you all at once.

Seren Ashwood stands at the edge of the gathering, her simple dress making her look like she wandered in from the servants' quarters. Around her, girls her age glow in festival finery, their wolves humming beneath their skin with anticipation. The full moon is rising. Tonight, unmated wolves find their fated mates.

Tonight, everything changes.

Or at least that's what everyone keeps saying.

She smooths down her dress again, a nervous habit she can't break. The fabric is plain. Gray. The kind of thing nobody remembers five minutes after seeing it. Just like her. Seren has spent twenty-two years being the girl people forget to notice.

Wolfless. That's what they call her when they think she can't hear.

Defective is the word her mother uses.

The rejection mark on her chest throbs dully even though she hasn't even been rejected yet. A phantom pain from all the rejections that came before this one. Every time she walked into a room and someone looked through her instead of at her. Every time a boy's eyes slid past her like she was furniture. Every time her mother flinched when introducing her at pack functions.

But something has been different for weeks now.

There's a pull in her chest, constant and electric. It started small, like noticing someone looking at you across a crowded room. Now it's bigger. Stronger. It's been tugging at her bones and making her heart race for no reason at all. Seren knows what that means because every girl in the pack is taught about the mate pull from childhood.

It means the Moon Goddess has someone picked out for her.

The thought makes her dizzy with hope.

She's not supposed to have hope. Her father died defending the border when she was twelve, and her mother remarried six months later to the Beta of a stronger family. That's when Seren learned that sentiment is a luxury weak people can't afford. Her mother spent years pretending her defective daughter didn't exist, afraid the connection would ruin her new status.

So Seren learned to be invisible too.

She kept her head down. Accepted every insult quietly. Wore her unworthiness like it was a uniform. If she was small enough and quiet enough and unremarkable enough, maybe nobody would bother hurting her. Maybe the pain would stop.

But that pull in her chest has been whispering a different story.

What if being unmated doesn't mean being unworthy? What if the Moon Goddess still has something planned for you?

What if you're not as broken as everyone says?

The music shifts. The crowd moves in a way that pulls her forward, and Seren's heart nearly stops.

He's walking through the gathered wolves like he owns the space. Like his feet touch ground that doesn't exist for regular people. Corbin Ashford. The Alpha's son. The one every girl in the pack has secretly wanted since he turned eighteen and started taking on pack duties alongside his father.

He's perfect in a way that makes Seren feel even smaller by comparison.

Dark hair. Sharp jaw. Eyes that see everything and decide what matters. He's the kind of beautiful that makes girls forget how to breathe. Seren has only spoken to him twice in her entire life, and both times she managed to stammer like an idiot.

He's walking toward her.

No. Not toward her. Just in her direction. He's probably heading somewhere else. He's definitely heading somewhere else.

But he keeps walking.

And he keeps looking.

Right at her.

Seren's breath catches in her throat. The pull in her chest becomes a roar, suddenly so intense that her knees go weak. This is it. This is what the pull has been leading to. This is why the Moon Goddess has been tugging at her for weeks.

Maybe she's not broken after all.

Maybe she was always meant to be his.

The crowd falls silent around them. Seren realizes people are staring. Watching to see what the Alpha's son wants with the wolfless girl from the servants' families. Some girls look jealous. Others look confused. Nobody looks like they expect anything good to happen.

Corbin stops in front of her.

He's close enough that she can see the tiny flecks of gold in his brown eyes. Close enough that she can smell him, something like pine and smoke and Alpha power that makes her wolf instincts scream at her to submit, to bend, to offer her throat.

His hand reaches out.

Seren's heart explodes in her chest.

This is really happening. The Moon Goddess has finally noticed her. The bond is snapping into place right now, and soon everyone will have to acknowledge that she's worth something. That she's not defective. That she belongs to someone powerful and perfect and—

"I, Corbin Ashford, future Alpha of Silvercrest, reject you, Seren Ashwood, as my fated mate."

The words hit her like a physical blow.

No. No, that's not what happens. That's not how this is supposed to go. The pull is still screaming in her chest, still tugging at her like a fishhook through her ribs. The bond doesn't just vanish. It shatters. It breaks apart in her body like glass, each fragment cutting deeper than the last.

She gasps.

The sound comes out broken, and around them, the crowd starts to move again. Not with the excited energy of a successful bond. With something meaner.

"You're weak," Corbin continues, his voice loud enough for everyone to hear. Loud enough to make sure nobody misses a single word of what he's saying. "Wolfless. A stain on our bloodline. I will not tie myself to someone so fundamentally broken. The Moon Goddess made a mistake binding us, and I'm correcting it."

Laughter ripples through the crowd.

It's not kind laughter. It's the sound of predators recognizing prey.

A girl with ice-blonde hair appears at Corbin's side before Seren can fully process what's happening. Vivienne Frost. Of course it's Vivienne. The girl who spent three years making sure everyone in the pack knew that Seren was worthless.

Vivienne slides her hand into Corbin's, and she's smiling like she's just won something.

The message is clear.

I'm his mate now. And you were never even close.

Seren looks for her mother in the crowd. She shouldn't look. She knows what she'll find. But she looks anyway, hoping against everything that her mother will at least look sad about this. That she'll at least pretend to care.

Her mother is looking away.

Not even sad. Not even anything. Just absent. Just already gone. Just exactly like she's been since Seren was twelve years old.

The pain in her chest spreads. It's not the bond anymore. The bond is shattered, dead, replaced by something black and twisted that burns like acid. A rejection mark. That's what Alpha rejections leave behind. A scar that everyone can see. A mark that declares to the entire world that you were offered and found wanting.

The Alpha himself steps forward.

"Leave," he commands, and his voice carries the weight of pack authority. It makes Seren's knees buckle. "You have until dawn to be gone from our territory. Rejected wolves bring bad luck. We won't tolerate your presence."

Seren doesn't remember running.

She just knows that suddenly she's crashing through the forest with her lungs on fire, branches tearing at her clothes and skin. The rejection mark on her chest burns like an actual wound. The rest of the pack doesn't follow her into the darkness, but she can still hear them laughing.

She runs past the territorial markers. Past the safe places. Into the neutral lands between packs where rogues hunt and smart wolves don't go.

She runs until her legs give out.

Until she collapses in a ravine and the sobs come so hard she thinks she might break into pieces. All the years of being invisible. All the years of accepting that she was never good enough. All the years of that one stupid, fragile hope that the Moon Goddess had something better planned for her.

All of it was wrong.

She is broken exactly like everyone said.

The night stretches around her, dark and endless. Seren lies in the dirt at the bottom of the ravine and wonders how long it takes to die of a broken heart.

Then the moon moves.

Not across the sky. Not like normal. It moves down, closer, its light getting brighter and brighter until Seren has to squint against the brightness. The air pressure changes. The temperature drops. Every single hair on her arms stands straight up.

Something impossible is happening.

A figure forms in the moonlight, made of silver and starlight and terrible power. She's beautiful and ancient and so impossibly large that Seren's human mind struggles to process her actual size.

The Moon Goddess.

She's actually here.

"Child of my making," the Goddess says, and her voice sounds like silver bells and thunder crashing together. "Do you know why I refused you a normal fate?"

Seren can't speak. Can't breathe. Can't do anything but stare up at the divine being hovering above her in the ravine.

"Because normal fates are for normal wolves," the Goddess continues, and her eyes glow with power that makes the stars look dim. "And you, Seren Ashwood, were never meant to be normal."

The Goddess reaches down.

Her hand touches Seren's chest, right where the rejection mark burns.

And everything goes white.

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