The walk from the kitchens took less than a minute, but Raven fought her own body for every step of it.
Alpha Blackthorn led.
The twins flanked him, Celeste hurried behind with her wrist held out like evidence, and the three nobles trailed after them, already whispering behind their glasses.
Raven walked in the middle of it all with two guards at her back and the hooks in her chest pulling her, step after step, toward the two men who had just told her she was a mistake.
She still had the rescued pages clutched in one hand.
They were damp, and they smelled of greasy dishwater, but she could not make herself let go of them.
The doors of the banquet hall swung open.
Music and laughter washed out over them, strings playing under the noise of a hundred conversations, somebody near the high table halfway through a toast.
Then the guests nearest the doors turned, and stopped talking.
On any other night, the Alpha walking in with his heirs would have raised a cheer.
But he came in grim and unannounced, and behind Alaric and Kieran walked a maid in a stained uniform, loose white hair falling around a cheek that still carried the fading print of a hand, a fistful of wet paper clutched against her chest.
The quiet spread table by table as heads kept turning, until the musicians realized nobody was listening anymore and the strings trailed off one at a time, the last one dragging out an unfinished note.
Into that silence came the first whispers.
Luna Blackthorn came sweeping through the guests, her smile still fixed from whatever conversation she’d abandoned.
“Husband?
The guests — why is the banquet—” Alpha Blackthorn bent and spoke quietly against her ear.
Raven watched the Luna’s face change.
The smile held for a moment out of pure habit, then something moved underneath it, and her eyes snapped to Raven.
Not to the slap mark or the stained uniform.
To her hair.
The Luna stared at the white hair a beat too long, and her face tightened around whatever she was looking at before she smoothed it away and turned calmly toward her sons.
Disgusted, Raven thought.
She can’t even stand the sight of me.
Alpha Blackthorn stepped forward, and his voice rolled over the hall without effort.
“Honored guests.
Tonight was meant for celebration, but a matter has arisen that House Blackthorn will not resolve in shadows.” He paused.
“A mate bond has been discovered.
An unusual one.
This servant carries a true bond to both of my sons.” The hall broke like a wave on rock.
“Both?
A double bond—” “—one woman, two Alpha heirs, when has that ever—” “—but then the Luna seat, the succession—” “An unfortunate bond,” Alpha Blackthorn continued, raising a hand for quiet.
“Unsuitable, unsought, and no fault of my sons — who bear it with the discipline you’d expect of Vanguard-ranked wolves.” There it was.
Raven felt the story lock into place around her like a cell door.
The twins had known for two years and said nothing, but by the time the Alpha finished a single sentence, they were the victims, and she was the affliction.
That was what power was, she supposed.
Not claws.
The right to tell the story first.
“She cannot stand beside either of them.” Luna Blackthorn’s voice was measured, reasonable, pitched for the whole hall to hear.
“The girl holds no rank.
She cannot shift.
She has no training, no House, no family anyone would recognize.
She has spent her life in our kitchens — and that was already a kindness.” “A bond doesn’t erase what she is,” Alaric said.
He sounded bored.
Beside the Luna, Celeste had stopped cradling her wrist.
She was watching the family declare Raven worthless, one voice after another, and she wore the expression of a girl unwrapping a gift.
The debate went on over Raven’s head.
“Can it be severed cleanly?
A double bond — the strain on the heirs—” “There are rites.
Costly, but the temple has done it—” “Forgive me, but might the girl not be shaped into something?
Tutors, training — a Goddess-given bond is still a Goddess-given bond, and if she were presentable, the political value—” “No,” Luna Blackthorn said, before the man had even finished.
“That will not be considered.” They talked about her rank, her blood, her body, her future.
Not one of them asked her a single question.
Raven stood in the middle of the hall with her throat closing and her breath coming unsteady, and when she felt the heat spill down her cheek she wiped it away with the back of her hand, furious that it had gotten out.
And through all of it — through every word — her wolf kept pulling.
It whined toward Alaric.
It strained toward Kieran.
It wanted to cross the floor and press close to two men whose faces held nothing for her but distaste, and Raven hated the creature for it almost as much as she hated them.
Eighteen years of silence, and this was what it woke up for.
This was what the Moon Goddess had been saving her for.
She looked around the hall at the people currently deciding she deserved none of it.
“The severance should be arranged quickly,” Kieran was saying to his father.
“Before this spreads.” “It’s already spreading,” Alaric said.
“It should be done publicly.
Tonight, if the rite allows.
A clean rejection, witnessed, so no House can claim we buried it.” “Agreed,” Alpha Blackthorn said.
“The matter will be resolved before this scandal grows legs.
Now, as to the form of it—” And that was the moment something in Raven went quiet.
They were going to reject her.
Here, tonight, in front of a hundred guests — the last act of a plan they’d been holding for two years.
She would stand in her stained uniform while two Alpha heirs cast her off in formal language, and the hall would murmur its approval, then tomorrow she would wash their plates again.
They had decided everything else in her life.
Not this.
Raven stepped forward.
“Stay where you are,” Alpha Blackthorn said, without even turning his head.
She kept walking.
The guards moved and then hesitated, not sure what was going on — she was simply crossing the floor toward the twins, wet pages still in her fist, and something about her face made the nearest guests step back.
She stopped in front of Alaric and looked up at him.
Her cheeks were wet, but she didn’t wipe it away now.
“You had two years to say the words,” she said.
Her voice shook on the first sentence.
It did not shake on the second.
“You don’t get to say them first.” Alaric’s brows drew down.
“What are you—” “I, Raven Rivers, reject you, Alaric Blackthorn, as my mate.” CREATORS’ THOUGHTS Retroferd it’s my first time here and after extensive reasearch on werewolf lore.
Here i am to work something out on webnovel!