The Grumpy Alpha’s Sunshine Rival (Grumpy Alphas and Sunshine Mates #2)

Chapter One

Sana

The Council hall smelled of pine smoke and ambition, and I had never hated a room more in my life.

I stood at the center of it in my mother's white ceremonial dress, smiling at a line of Alphas who looked at me the way wolves look at a wounded deer.

Twelve of them had come to petition for my hand.

Twelve Alphas, twelve packs, twelve men who saw Clawfore's lands and Clawfore's wolves and a pretty Luna attached to both like a ribbon on a gift.

Pathetic.

"You're grinding your teeth," Rose whispered behind me. She was my healer and my best friend, and she had a gift for saying exactly the wrong thing at exactly the right time. "Smile wider. The big one from the eastern range is staring at you like you're a roast."

"I am smiling," I said.

"You're baring your teeth," she said. "There's a difference. I've seen you do both and one of them ends with somebody bleeding."

I made myself laugh, because that was what I did. I laughed and I glowed and I made every wolf in every room feel like the sun had come out just for them.

My father used to say I could charm the winter into leaving early.

He had been dead for eight months, my brother for seven, and the Council had given me until the Blood Moon to find an Alpha and mate him, or Clawfore would be dissolved and my wolves scattered to packs that had spent three generations hating us.

A pack cannot stand without an Alpha. That was the law, older than the Council itself, and no amount of charm was going to bend it.

"Luna Clawfore." Alpha Alric of the Council rose from the high seat, and his voice rolled through the hall the way thunder rolls when it wants everyone to know it could rain if it felt like it.

"Clawfore stands without an Alpha. You have petitioned to lead your father's pack and the Council has heard you.

But the law is the law. You have until the Blood Moon.

Three months. Present a mated Alpha at your side, or Clawfore's territory will be divided among its neighbors. "

"I understand, Alpha Alric," I said, and I bowed my head, and I kept the smile on like armor. "Thank you for the generous timeline."

Somebody snorted. I knew who it was before I looked, because only one wolf in the region snorted at Council formalities like they were a joke told badly.

Alpha Zaden Nightsteel of Nightsteel sat apart from the petitioners, dressed in black, arms crossed, looking at the proceedings the way a man looks at weather he has decided to outlast. He had not come to court me. He had come to watch my pack die.

Nightsteel bordered Clawfore along the Springline, the strip of disputed land our packs had bled over for three generations, and everyone in the hall knew that if Clawfore dissolved, the Springline and the moonstone spring inside it would fall into his lap like ripe fruit.

He was also, infuriatingly, the most beautiful man I had ever seen, which felt like a personal insult from the Moon itself.

"Something funny, Alpha Nightsteel?" I asked. My voice came out bright and sweet, the tone I saved for people I wanted to strangle.

"Generous," he said. His voice was low and rough, like gravel deciding to be a voice. "Three months to auction yourself off. The Council's all heart."

The hall went still. Rose made a small sound behind me that might have been a prayer.

"I'm not auctioning anything," I said, still sweet, still smiling. "I'm saving my pack. I wouldn't expect you to recognize the concept. Nightsteel wolves save themselves and let the rest of the world freeze."

"Nightsteel wolves survive," he said. "It's a habit. You should try it."

"Oh, I intend to," I said. "Watch me."

Alric cleared his throat with the weight of a man who had spent forty years clearing his throat at people. "The petitioners will greet the Luna formally. Alpha Nightsteel, you are on the rolls as a witness for the bordering territories. You will greet her as well. Protocol is protocol."

I watched something cross Zaden Nightsteel's face, and on anyone else I would have called it dread. Then it was gone and he was standing, unfolding from the chair with that unhurried arrogance that made my wolf bristle and pace under my skin.

The petitioners greeted me one by one, hands clasped briefly over mine, murmured formalities, eyes doing math on my borders.

I smiled through all twelve.

Then he was in front of me.

Up close he was worse. Gray eyes like the sky before snow, a jaw that looked like it had been carved by somebody angry, and a scar through one eyebrow that I absolutely did not find interesting.

He looked at my offered hand like it might be a trap.

"Protocol," I reminded him, sweetly.

"I know what protocol is," he said.

"Then by all means," I said, "demonstrate."

His hand closed over mine.

The world caught fire.

It started in my palm and went up my arm like lightning that had decided to take its time, and my wolf surged to the front of my mind howling one word, over and over, in a voice older than my own.

Mate. Mate. Mate.

The scent of him crashed over me, cedar and cold stone and something underneath that was just mine, made for me, fitted to me before either of us was born.

The hall, the Council, the twelve petitioners, all of it dissolved into noise. There was only his hand around mine and his eyes gone wide with the same shock tearing through me, and the bond snapping into place between us like a rope pulled tight across sixty years of war.

Fated mates.

The Moon had reached down into the oldest feud in the mountains and tied its two bleeding ends together.

"No," Zaden Nightsteel said.

He said it quietly. He said it to me, looking right at me, his hand still wrapped around mine, the bond still singing between us like struck crystal.

Then he said it loudly, to the hall.

"I reject it." He pulled his hand back as if my skin burned him. "Whatever this is, whatever you all just felt, I reject it. I am not her mate. I will never be her mate. The bond is refused."

The words hit me somewhere below the ribs, in the place where my wolf lived, and she screamed.

I felt my knees try to go and I locked them.

I felt my face try to crumble and I held it.

Sixty years of feud and eight months of grief and three months of deadline, and the Moon had finally sent me my mate, and he had thrown me away in front of every Alpha in the region before I had even said his name.

The hall erupted. Alric was shouting for order. Rose had her hand on my back, and I could feel her shaking, or maybe that was me.

Zaden Nightsteel walked out of the Council hall without looking back, and I stood in my mother's white dress in the wreckage of my future, and I did the only thing I knew how to do.

I smiled.

"Well," I said, to no one and everyone, my voice carrying clear and bright over the chaos. "I suppose that's one petitioner off the list."

Somebody laughed. The tension cracked. And nobody except Rose saw that my hands were shaking so hard I had to fold them into my skirts to hide it.