Rejected By the Stallion Prince (L’Alliance Royals #3)

PROLOGUE

NICOLO CELESTINI LEFT with the file still open on the table between them, and for a long moment, Alexei did not move.

The party continued around him. Laughter and champagne and the delicate chime of enchanted crystal that the Fae artisans had crafted specifically for tonight’s celebration.

Somewhere to his left, Ada was still apologizing to Nicolo’s stepmother about the shattered Bellecourt vase, her voice carrying across the courtyard in that uniquely breathless way of hers, as if every sentence was a small emergency she hadn’t quite figured out how to survive.

“I’m so sorry,” Ada was saying. “I was just trying to take a selfie with it because it’s literally the prettiest vase I’ve ever seen and I thought Maryah would want to see it up close since she’s still doing the baby thing, but then this waiter came by with those tiny quiche things, and I haven’t eaten since breakfast because I was so nervous about the party, and—”

“It’s perfectly fine, dear.” Maude patted her arm. “Accidents happen. Especially around you.”

None of it registered.

Alexei reached for the file and drew it closer.

He had already memorized every word inside it.

Every data point. Every metric. He could have recited the contents in his sleep, and the fact that he knew this about himself—that he had read this particular file enough times to have committed it to memory—was something he had chosen not to examine too closely.

Until tonight.

Tonight, he had handed the file to Nicolo and said, “I pick her.”

Three words. Spoken with the same flat calm he brought to treaty negotiations and trade disputes and the sort of geopolitical maneuvering that kept the preter world from descending into chaos every other Tuesday.

Three words that betrayed nothing.

Nicolo had opened the folder. Had studied the photograph, the background report, the compatibility scores.

And then his former Oxford classmate had turned to him with a frown and the two observations that the rest of the world would also make, in approximately that order, once the news became public.

“She’s been rejected.”

“Yes.”

“By her fated mate.”

“Yes.”

“This is going to cause a scandal.”

“I certainly hope so.”

Nicolo had given him a long look at that—the look of a man who wanted to ask more but knew better—and then he had left to check on Maryah and the baby, taking his perpetual glare with him and leaving the evening air noticeably more pleasant.

And now Alexei was alone with the file.

Again.

THE PHOTOGRAPH WAS a standard identification portrait, the kind taken for university records.

Unremarkable lighting. Plain background.

The subject had been instructed to face forward, and she had—obediently, it seemed, because everything about the girl in the photograph suggested a person who did as she was told and expected nothing in return.

Dark hair. Not black like his, but a deep warm brown that would catch the light in ways she probably never noticed. It fell past her shoulders, tucked behind one ear with the carelessness of someone who had more important things on her mind than how she appeared to the world.

Her eyes were what held him.

An unremarkable shade of brown by any conventional standard. Eyes that most people would glance at and forget. But there was something in them that the camera had caught without intending to—a quiet intelligence that coexisted with something softer. Something bruised.

She was smiling in the photograph, but only just. A smile offered by someone who wasn’t sure it would be welcome. As if she had learned, somewhere along the way, that expecting too much from other people was a luxury she could not afford.

Zia Morgan.

Twenty-two. Human. Fresh graduate of the University of Colorado with a degree in product development and a GPA that was respectable without being remarkable.

Her thesis had been on sustainable packaging for preter-human trade goods—a subject that had earned her a single mention in an industry newsletter and precisely zero job offers in her field.

She had taken a barista position at a coffeehouse near campus three days after graduation.

She had held that position for four months.

Alexei turned the page.

THE FINAL PAGE OF THE file was the one that had given Nicolo pause.

Prior bond history. One entry.

Billy Stein. Wolf shifter. Age twenty-four. Son of Marcus and Helena Stein, whose pack controlled a modest but profitable territory in the foothills west of Denver. Compatibility score with Zia Morgan: 91.3%.

Relationship duration: two years.

Conducted entirely in secret, at Billy’s insistence.

Terminated seven months ago.

The reason was clinical in its brevity. Family disapproval of human mate. Subject chose to comply with family ultimatum.

Alexei did not need the file to tell him what that meant.

He had lived long enough to understand the mathematics of cowardice.

A boy who loved a girl but loved his inheritance more.

A girl who had given two years of her life to someone who kept her hidden like something to be ashamed of.

And when the moment came to choose—when it cost something real to stand beside her—the boy had decided that she wasn’t worth the price.

91.3% compatibility.

Two years.

And it still hadn’t been enough.

Alexei understood what that would have done to her.

Not just the heartbreak—heartbreak healed, eventually, even the worst of it.

But the conclusion she would have drawn from it.

The quiet, merciless logic of a girl who had been told by science itself that she and this boy were meant to be together, only to discover that even destiny had a price tag and she wasn’t worth meeting it.

In the preter world, where compatibility scores carried the weight of fate and fated bonds were treated as sacred, being rejected by one’s match was not merely a personal tragedy.

It was a public verdict.

It said: I was weighed against everything that science and faith and blood could promise, and I was found wanting.

For the one who was rejected, the message was crueler still.

Even destiny wasn’t enough to make someone stay.

ALEXEI KNEW WHAT THE world would say when it learned of his choice.

That the Prince of Atlantis had lost his mind.

That years of solitude had finally corroded his judgment beyond repair.

That choosing a rejected human mate was not merely a scandal—it was a repudiation of every standard of preter nobility, every expectation that came with a bloodline older than most civilizations.

The Blood Oval would have opinions. L’Alliance would have concerns. The tabloids—both human and preter—would have a field day that lasted approximately forever.

And Billy Stein, the boy who had thrown away a 91.3% match because his parents told him to, would wake up one morning and discover that the girl he’d discarded was now engaged to someone whose bloodline predated his entire species.

Alexei considered this.

He found it deeply, immensely satisfying.

But that wasn’t why he was doing this.

If it were only about politics, about scandal, about making a statement that the Prince of Atlantis answered to no one’s expectations but his own—any number of women would have served.

There were princesses and heiresses and daughters of Blood Oval members who would have accepted his proposal before he finished speaking it.

Women of impeccable supernatural lineage who would have brought alliances, territories, and political capital to a union with the last of the Atlantean stallion shifters.

Any of them would have been the rational choice.

None of them were Zia Morgan.

THE COURTYARD HAD EMPTIED.

The enchanted flowers in the oak trees had dimmed to a soft, sleepy glow, their colors settling into muted golds and lavenders as the magic wound itself down for the night.

Staff moved between tables, clearing crystal and linen.

Ada had finally been steered away from all remaining breakable objects and was sitting cross-legged on a stone bench at the far edge of the terrace, showing something on her phone to a bemused-looking Caro waiter who was clearly too polite to walk away and too fascinated to want to.

The night was quiet.

Alexei closed the file.

He did not need it anymore. He had not needed it for a long time. Every word, every number, every detail was already inside him, as fixed and permanent as the memories of Atlantis itself.

He thought of the photograph. The dark hair tucked behind one ear. The brown eyes that held intelligence and bruising in equal measure. The smile that asked for nothing and expected even less.

And he thought of what he was about to do to that smile.

Because Alexei was many things—patient, strategic, willing to play a long game that most people couldn’t even perceive—but he was not gentle.

He had never been gentle. Gentleness required a kind of recklessness with one’s own power that he could not afford, not when his power was the kind that could break things without meaning to.

He was going to enter this girl’s life. He was going to take the quiet existence she had built for herself in the aftermath of a boy’s cowardice, and he was going to dismantle it. Not out of cruelty. Out of certainty.

She was his.

She had been his since the moment a number appeared on a screen and every rational argument he had ever made for solitude lost its weight.

Whether she knew it yet or not.

Whether she wanted it or not.

Alexei Lykaios rose from the table and walked into the darkness of the Celestini estate’s gardens.

But if anyone had thought to look closely—truly closely, past the stillness and the aristocratic mask he wore like a second skin—they might have noticed something in his pale eyes that had not been there before.

Something that looked, against all reason and all probability, like hunger.

Not the predatory kind.

The kind that ached.