Chapter 2 Her Answer
Liza POV
His throat worked again. His jaw squared, and his gaze broke away from mine to sweep the hall, counting faces and gauging the room before a speech. When he looked back at me, the dismay was still there, but his expression had gone smooth.
Control.
“Liza.” He pitched his voice low, leaning closer. “Come with me. We should talk about this somewhere private.”
“No.”
The word came out flat and hard, and his head jerked back.
My hand was still in his. The bond was still humming between us, bright and alive and aching, and every instinct I had said to hold on, to follow him, to let him take me somewhere quiet where maybe the calculation in his eyes would dissolve and the hunger would come back.
I didn’t move.
“The whole pack just saw the recognition,” I said. “Whatever you’re going to say, you can say it here.”
His lips pressed together. I watched him look past me at the faces lining the walls, the gathered body of the East Valley Pack, and I watched him make a choice.
His fingers released mine. His hand dropped to his side.
He stepped back, putting a formal distance between us, and the loss of his touch left my palm cold and tingling.
Then he turned and climbed onto the platform.
The crowd opened between us, and I followed him to the foot of it.
His voice rose, and the ceremonial hall went completely still. Every conversation that had started to murmur back to life cut dead. “I, Everett Pryce, reject you, Liza Mallory, as my mate.”
The pain struck all at once.
It tore through the center of my chest like a fishhook ripped free, hot and bright and so sudden that my vision whited at the edges.
My lungs seized. My wolf, who had been silent since his eyes first tracked my scar, howled inside me, raw enough to shake my bones.
My knees wanted to buckle. My body wanted to fold.
I locked my knees and stayed standing.
Everett wasn’t done. He’d turned to address the room, his voice carrying the way it had during the oath, polished and projected, and I realized he’d prepared for this.
He might not have expected tonight or me, but he’d thought about what he would say if his fated mate turned out to be someone who didn’t fit the picture. He’d rehearsed.
“The Alpha’s mate represents this pack.” He spoke to them, not to me.
“She stands at my side in front of every pack we negotiate with. Every human we do business with. She is the first thing they see when they meet us.” He paused.
“An Alpha’s Luna cannot be a distraction.
She has to project what this pack is. Strength without question.
Authority without hesitation.” His eyes moved to me just long enough to make his meaning impossible to miss, and every wolf in the room followed his gaze to the scar cutting down my face and throat.
“I owe it to this pack to choose the right partner. Even when the Goddess has chosen differently.”
Distraction.
He called it a distraction.
The scar I got at seventeen, face down in the dirt of a pupping den with the third rogue’s claws raking my cheek, while six children screamed behind me and the enforcers were still minutes away.
The scar that marked where I’d held those wolves back with nothing but teeth and fury and the absolute certainty that those pups were not going to die that night.
The scar that said I bled for this pack and I survived.
A distraction.
The pain in my chest was still there, pulsing with every heartbeat, but anger was hardening underneath it.
I looked at the crowd.
They stared back. Dozens of faces I’d known my whole life. Wolves I’d patrolled beside, eaten with, run with under full moons. Some of them looked sick. Some of them looked away. A woman near the front had her hand over her mouth. A man I’d trained with on ski patrol stared at the floor.
Nobody spoke.
Nobody said wait. Nobody said that scar is there because she saved our children. Nobody said you ungrateful son of a bitch, she bled for us while you were busy learning how to knot your tie.
Their silence answered me.
I found Rosa.
She was standing where I’d last seen her, near the far wall, her graying red hair braided down the back of her dark dress. Her hands were clasped in front of her. Her lined face was turned slightly away, chin tucked, and she was looking at the floor.
Rosa, whose two children I had covered with my own body while claws tore my face open. Rosa, who had held my hand in the infirmary afterward while they stitched me shut. Rosa, who brought me soup every day for a week and never once cried in front of me because she knew I didn’t want pity.
Rosa wouldn’t look at me.
She’s ashamed for him, I told myself. She knows what he just did and she can’t stop it.
It didn’t matter. It felt the same.
I turned back to Everett.
Kurt stood at his right shoulder, exactly where he’d been during the oath.
The Beta’s pale eyes were fixed on me, and the expression on his weathered face was the closest thing to satisfaction I’d ever seen there.
His hands were still clasped behind his back.
His chin was still high. Everett had made precisely the choice Kurt wanted.
Maybe Kurt had given him the idea before tonight, told him a scarred patroller would be a liability, that the pack needed a Luna who photographed well and shook hands without making visitors flinch.
Or maybe Everett hadn’t needed the push.
Maybe the vanity I remembered from when he was twenty-one had just grown up and gotten better clothes.
Every wolf in the hall was waiting. I could feel them leaning forward, some with pity, some with morbid curiosity, all of them expecting the same thing.
The rejected mate bows her head. The rejected mate says I accept your rejection.
The rejected mate walks out of the hall with her head down and cries in her truck and everyone agrees it’s sad but the Alpha knows best and by tomorrow the whole thing is just a story people tell in low voices.
Fuck that.
The bond was still alive. He’d spoken the formal words, but it would break only if I accepted his rejection.
Until then, the connection stayed open. He’d feel me.
My anger, my hurt, my contempt. Those emotions reached him far more strongly than his reached me.
As the wolf who had rejected first, he would slowly sicken.
Good.
My voice didn’t shake. I was proud of that. It came out clear and even and loud enough to reach the back wall, because I’d learned how to project on a mountainside in a blizzard and this room was nothing compared to that. “I, Liza Mallory, reject you, Everett Pryce, as my mate.”
The silence broke.
Gasps went up around me. I heard someone say oh God under their breath. I heard the shuffle of bodies as people pressed closer or pulled back, and I saw Everett’s face go blank with shock.
He hadn’t expected that.
He hadn’t imagined I would hand his own words back to him in front of the same witnesses.
My rejection hit him through the bond. His nostrils flared. Color left his face and came flooding back. His blue eyes widened, and for one raw second, his mouth opened and no words came.
“You can’t—” he started.
“I just did.”
My hands were shaking, but I shoved them into the pockets of my patrol jacket and he didn’t get to see that. The bond remained open, both rejections spoken and neither accepted. I caught only the faint edges of his shock.
Kurt took half a step forward, his hand rising toward Everett’s arm, and Everett shook him off without looking.
“Liza.” The Alpha voice. The one that was supposed to make wolves submit. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“I’ve made my choice.” I pulled my right hand out of my pocket and reached for the patch on the breast of my jacket. The East Valley insignia. Dark thread on red nylon, fastened above my heart. I’d earned it. I’d bled for it. I’d carried it through years of patrol shifts.
I tore it free.
The fastening ripped loose, and I held the patch in my fingers for one second, feeling the weight of it, the rough texture of the embroidered edges. Then I dropped it at his feet.
It landed on the polished wood of the platform, dark against the grain, and lay there.
The hall was so quiet I could hear the fire popping in the hearth.
“You rejected me because of a scar I got saving this pack’s pups,” I said.
I kept my eyes on Everett’s. “Two of Rosa Delvecchio’s children were in that den.
They’re standing in this room right now, grown and alive, because I kept three rogues away from them until your father’s enforcers arrived.
” I paused. “I didn’t get this scar doing something stupid.
I got it doing the hardest thing anyone in this pack was asked to do that night.
And you’re standing on that platform telling me it makes me unfit to be seen. ”
My eyes didn’t water. I’d spent seven years learning how to be looked at without flinching, and this was just another version of the same lesson.
“So keep your title,” I said. “Keep your stage. Keep your pack that can’t look me in the eye.” I stepped back from him. “But you don’t get to have me. Not tonight. Not ever.”
I turned and walked.
“Liza.” Everett’s voice snapped behind me. “I did not dismiss you. You will stay until I—”
I kept walking.
The crowd opened before me, bodies shifting and shoulders turning until a corridor of space led to the lodge doors. I didn’t look at their faces. I didn’t need to. I could feel them. The pity. The discomfort. The small, guilty relief of wolves who were glad it wasn’t them.
“Liza!” His voice was louder now, and the Alpha command pressed against my chest, trying to force me backward. My wolf recoiled through the pain, and for one heartbeat the pull to stop, to turn, to obey nearly locked my legs.
I pushed through it.
Old loyalty dragged at me, but my next boot came down anyway.
Everett had been Alpha for less than an hour, and in that time he’d accepted the pack’s oath, found his fated mate, and thrown her away because she didn’t match the picture in his head.
He didn’t get to cast me out and command me in the same breath.
I reached the doors. The heavy timber panels were propped open, and cold night air swept over my face, sharp with pine and new snow and the clean bite of a mountain winter.
The crescent moon I’d seen on the drive in was gone behind clouds now.
Snow fell thick and steady through the dark, catching the light from the lodge windows and disappearing into the ground.
I walked through the doors and out into the cold.
Behind me, the hall stayed silent. No one followed. No one called my name again.
The bond sat in my chest like a bruise, raw and ugly and alive. I could feel Everett at the other end of it, a dim ember of fury and wounded pride.
I didn’t turn around.
The snow landed on my face, on the bare line of my scar, and melted there. I walked to my truck with my hands in my pockets and my jaw set and the cold filling my lungs, and I did not look back at the warmth and light and the pack I’d just left standing at their new Alpha’s feet.