Chapter 1 · REJECTED

"Say that again," I tell him. Not because I didn't hear. Because I want the room to hear him say it twice.

He does. Doesn't even blink. "I reject you as my mate, Gia Holt. Before this pack and this river, I name Naomi Cross as my Luna instead."

Someone behind me laughs. Not loud. Just enough.

Naomi steps up onto the dais in white, like she planned this, like she's been fitted for it for weeks, and maybe she has. She doesn't look at me. She looks at the crowd, chin up, already practicing the face she'll wear on the money.

I'm the clerk. I keep the bond record. That's my job, has been for six years — I sit at the little table at the foot of the dais with the ledger and the stamp pad, and when a claim goes through, I mark it BONDED, and when it doesn't, I mark it something else. I never thought I'd be marking my own page.

Rhys holds his hand out. Waiting. He wants me to do it myself. That's the cruelty in it — he could've had anyone stamp this. He wants my hand on the ink.

"Gia." His voice drops so only the front rows catch it. "Don't make this ugly."

"You made it ugly the second you opened your mouth."

I pick up the stamp. My fingers know the weight of it better than they know his. I press it down on the red pad, and then on the page, hard enough that the sound cracks through the speakers.

REJECTED.

The ink's still wet when the room goes sideways.

"She's not yours to leave standing there."

That's not Rhys's voice. It's lower, rougher, coming from the side entrance where the dock crews stand — and every head in the room turns at once, because that voice belongs to a man who isn't supposed to be inside this building at all.

Vale Keene. Ruined him myself, on paper, last winter — froze half his fleet's registration over a debt dispute nobody's forgiven me for. He's not pack. He's the Alpha from downriver Rhys spent a year trying to bury.

He's walking toward the dais like he owns the floor, and nobody stops him, because nobody wants to be the one who touches Vale Keene first.

"This is a closed rite," Rhys says, and for the first time tonight his voice isn't steady.

"Then you shouldn't have done it with the doors open." Vale doesn't look at Rhys. He's looking at me. At the stamp still in my hand, the ink on my fingers. "Mine," he says.

One word. Same as Rhys's. Same weight, opposite direction.

The room actually gasps — I've heard that sound before at other people's rites, never aimed at me.

"You don't get to claim leftover," Naomi says, sharp, delighted, like this is the best entertainment she's had all year.

"She's not leftover." Vale's still looking at me. "She's the only one in this room who kept a record straight through six years of you people lying in it."

He reaches the table. His hand closes around my wrist — not rough, but final, like a door shutting. Warm. Too warm for how cold the rest of me's gone.

"Let go of me," I say, and I mean it, and my pulse is doing something that says the opposite.

"Not here." He's already pulling me off the dais, past the front row, past Rhys's security who look at each other and don't move because nobody trained them for this. "Not while he's still got an audience to watch you cry."

"I'm not crying."

"I know. That's the part he can't stand."

We hit the service corridor at a near-run, my stamp still in my fist, ink smearing my palm. There's one elevator back here that still works — the old freight one, steel walls, a light that flickers on a two-second delay. He shoves the button, and it groans open like it's been waiting for exactly this.

"Get in," he says.

"I'm not going anywhere with you."

"You want to go back out there and watch her stand where you stood?"

I get in.

The doors close on the sound of the room still arguing without us, and then it's just the two of us and the flickering light and the smell of him — river water and diesel and something underneath that, warmer, that my body recognizes before my brain does anything with it.

He hits the button. Nothing happens. Hits it again.

"It's slow," he says. Doesn't sound sorry.

"Slow like it's not moving at all?"

"Slow like we've got time."

He steps in. Not toward the panel. Toward me. The steel wall's cold through the back of my dress, and he's not — he's so close the space between us stops being a measurement and starts being a decision, his forearm braced by my head, his other hand still holding my wrist like he never let go, like he's not planning to.

"You didn't have to do that," I say. My voice comes out smaller than I want it to.

"I know."

"Then why—"

"Because I watched him make you stamp your own rejection in front of three hundred people, and I've been waiting a year for a reason to walk back into that building." His thumb drags once along the inside of my wrist, right over the pulse, right where he can feel exactly what it's doing. "You're a good reason, Gia."

His mouth is close enough that I can feel the words land on my skin instead of just my ears. Silk of Naomi's discarded ribbon is still looped around my other wrist where someone tied it as a joke before the rite, and his fingers catch it, tug it loose, drop it on the elevator floor like it's trash.

"Vale—"

"Don't say his name in here."

"I wasn't going to."

"Say mine instead."

I don't. I can't — my throat's locked, my whole body's leaning into the hand at my wrist like it's the only steady thing left in the building, and his head dips, jaw brushing my temple, breath hot against my ear, and the elevator groans again, stutters, doesn't move.

"Vale." It comes out anyway. Wrecked.

"There she is."

His mouth doesn't reach mine. Not yet. It stops a half-inch short, hovering, waiting for me to close the last of it myself — and behind him the control panel flashes red, floor numbers scrambling, the whole car lurching to a dead stop between floors.

The only door in this box is sealed shut behind his shoulder, and there's no panel override, no second exit, nowhere for me to go that isn't through him.