Chapter 2 THE REJECTION NIGHT*

AMARA QUINN*

The Blackwood Estate in Aspen is not a house.

I know houses. I've cleaned enough of them in Seattle. I know the difference between the houses in Queen Anne where they try to look rich and the houses in Hunts Point where they actually are rich. This is neither. This is something else. This is a house built to remind you that you will never belong in it.

It's built into Red Mountain like it grew there. Glass and cedar and stone. Tonight, for the Moon Ball, they've filled it with elk antler chandeliers and pine branches and three hundred of the most beautiful, cruel people I have ever seen. I can smell them even from the service corridor. Pure-blood werewolves. Alpha bloodlines from Seattle, Vancouver, Chicago, New York. Their scents are heavy, expensive. Mine is - well, according to my aunt Rosa, I smell like a mistake. Half human, half wolf. Not enough of either.

I'm supposed to be invisible. That's the job. Black uniform, non-slip shoes a size too big, tray of water glasses. Fifty dollars an hour. I said yes before the lady from catering finished her sentence. Fifty dollars an hour is charcoals. Fifty dollars an hour is the electric bill.

I shouldn't be peeking through the service door. But I always peek. I'm an artist. I look.

And then I see him.

Ethan Blackwood is standing at the top of the grand staircase, talking to his father. Even from here, even in a room full of wolves who are all trying to be the most important, he is the most important. It's not just that he's tall. It's that everyone moves around him without thinking. Like he's gravity.

He's wearing a black tuxedo with no tie. His hair is too long. He looks bored. He looked bored at our graduation from Seattle Prep six months ago too, when he gave the speech about "legacy and responsibility" and didn't look at me once.

My heart does something stupid and traitorous. It starts pounding so loud I'm sure he can hear it. I tell myself I'm over my crush. That hallway moment in sophomore year when he picked up my canvas. That electric shock when our fingers touched. It was nothing. He was the billionaire Alpha heir. I was the scholarship kid who lived above a laundromat in Ballard.

I push the door open a centimeter more, just to see the way the light hits the crystal.

The air conditioning shifts.

A draft moves from the ballroom into my corridor. And it carries three hundred scents.

And it carries my scent to him.

I see the exact second it hits him. He goes completely still at the top of the stairs, mid-sentence. His head snaps toward my door. His nostrils flare. Even from here, I can see his eyes start to glow amber.

No. No no no.

I try to step back, but I'm frozen. My own body betrays me. Two weeks ago, on my eighteenth birthday, something woke up inside me. My wolf. A small, gray-brown thing with hazel eyes, fast and scared. She had howled at the moon over Ballard and then hidden. Tonight, she suddenly throws her head back inside my chest and howls.

Mate.

The word isn't a thought. It's a feeling. It's every nerve ending in my body turning on at once. It's warm and terrifying and wonderful.

It's him.

Ethan is moving. He's coming down the stairs two at a time, ignoring everyone. Victoria Ashford, in a red dress that costs more than my life, steps forward with her perfect smile, her hand out. He walks right past her.

He pushes open the service door and grabs my arm.

The tray wobbles. Water sloshes.

His eyes are glowing. His claws are out, pricking his palms. He pulls me into the shadows behind the champagne crates.

"Do you know what you are?" he hisses. He's breathing hard. Like he's run miles.

My wolf is whining. Mate. Mate. Mate.

"Ethan, what's happening? You're hurting me -" My voice is tiny. I'm crying already and I don't know why.

"I told you to stay away from me," he says. His grip is tight, not enough to bruise, but enough that I can't move.

"I - I work here. I didn't -"

"I told you to stay in Seattle. I had them make your scholarship permanent so you would stay in Seattle." He stops himself, like he's said too much.

I stare at him. What is he talking about?

"You felt it too, right?" I whisper. The tears are falling now. "In the hallway. For two years. I felt - I thought I was crazy."

"You felt nothing," he says. His voice is flat. Cruel. The cold voice he uses in the hallways at Seattle Prep. "You're a child, Amara. You're confused."

"My mom told me about mates -"

"Your mom was human."

I flinch like he's hit me.

The service door opens. His father, Richard Blackwood, stands there with two Betas. He smells the air and his eyes go wide. Victoria appears behind him.

Ethan looks at his father. At Victoria. At the crowd gathering, whispering, staring at me in my cheap uniform.

I see him make a choice. I see the boy I saved in the woods behind Lake Washington disappear. I see the billionaire take his place.

He turns to me. He makes his face stone.

"I, Ethan Blackwood, Alpha heir of the Cascade Pack, reject you, Amara Quinn, as my mate and Luna. I sever the bond."

*ETHAN BLACKWOOD*

I have been trained since I was old enough to walk to feel nothing.

My father taught me. My grandfather taught him. Blackwood Alphas don't feel. We calculate. We build. We own timber rights and tech startups and half of downtown Seattle. We make alliances with New York packs who own Park Avenue. We marry Alpha daughters who bring pure bloodlines and three hundred million dollar mergers.

We do not mate half-breeds who live above laundromats.

I have known Amara Quinn for four years. Or rather, I have known her scent for four years.

The first time, I was fifteen, bleeding out in a bear trap in the woods behind Lake Washington like an idiot pup on his first solo run. She was fourteen, with crooked glasses and a hairpin, crying while she fought rusted metal to free me. She smelled like cheap vanilla shampoo and charcoal dust. She didn't run. She saved me.

I tasted her blood that day. My wolf decided that day. Mine.

The second time, she was sixteen, in the hallway at Seattle Prep, arms full of canvases. I bumped into her on purpose. I wanted to see if she smelled the same. She did. When our fingers touched, the mate spark hit me so hard my knees buckled. I had to be cruel to make her stay away.

For two years, I watched her. I made sure no one sat in her spot in the cafeteria. I had the lacrosse team that messed with her art show suspended. I anonymously paid her scholarship permanent. I told myself it was responsibility. That as future Alpha, I protected all weak wolves.

It was a lie. I was obsessed.

I waited for my eighteenth birthday, for the Moon Goddess to give me my true mate, to free me from this insanity. My father had already arranged the match with Victoria Ashford. Pure blood. Upper East Side. Perfect Luna. Three hundred million dollars. Everyone approved.

And then tonight, at the Aspen Moon Ball, the draft from the air conditioning carried vanilla and paint thinner into the ballroom.

My wolf howled inside my skull so loud I thought I would shift right there in front of three hundred wolves.

Mate.

I looked at the service door and there she was. Amara Quinn. Eighteen years old. Hazel eyes. In a server uniform. Peeking through the door like she did in art class.

My mate.

My fated, Moon-Goddess-given, true mate is a half-breed art student with no pack.

No.

The word was not a thought. It was panic.

I walked past Victoria. I pushed open the service door. I grabbed Amara's arm and pulled her into the shadows. I needed to smell her up close, to be sure. To be wrong.

I wasn't wrong. Up close, she was worse. She was beautiful. Her wolf was new, just turned eighteen, small and scared and calling to mine. Her eyes were full of tears and hope.

"Do you know what you are?" I asked her. I was shaking. My claws were out. I wanted to bite her. Mark her. Throw her over my shoulder and run into the mountains and never come back.

I wanted to burn my entire empire to the ground for her.

And that is why I had to reject her.

My father appeared in the doorway. Victoria behind him. The crowd behind them. Three hundred wolves were about to know that Ethan Blackwood, heir to Cascade, was mated to a half-breed server.

If I claimed her, the pack would revolt. The New York alliance would collapse. My father's life work would crumble. My mother would cry. I would be a weak Alpha who chose love over duty. My grandfather's ghost would be ashamed.

So I did what Blackwoods do. I calculated.

I made my face stone. I used my Alpha voice, the voice that makes Betas kneel.

"I, Ethan Blackwood, Alpha heir of the Cascade Pack, reject you, Amara Quinn, as my mate and Luna. I sever the bond. I break it."

The words have power in the old language. To reject a fated mate is to spit in the Moon Goddess's face.

Amara screamed. A small, broken sound.

And then I felt it.

The pain hit me like a truck. Like ice being branded into my chest. My bond - the golden thread that had been growing since I was fifteen, since she saved me in the woods - snapped. My wolf howled in agony and tried to take over, tried to force me to take it back, to bite her, to beg.

I dug my claws into my own palms so hard blood dripped onto the concrete. I had to stay standing.

She fell to her knees. Glasses shattered around her.

Richard grabbed my shoulder. "Enough."

I looked down at her. At the girl who saved my life with a hairpin. At my mate, on her knees in her ugly shoes, in the snow of my own estate.

She looked up at me, her face wet.

"You saved me," she whispered, so quietly only I could hear. "In the woods. You were the wolf. I saved you."

"I don't need saving from you," I said. My voice broke.

She pushed herself to her feet. She walked past my father, past Victoria, past everyone, out the back exit into the Aspen snow. Twenty-three degrees. No coat.

My Beta, Marcus, came up to me. "Alpha, should I send someone after her? She'll freeze."

I watched the back door close. I watched the snow where she disappeared.

Every cell in my body screamed to go after her.

"No," I said. "Let her go. She doesn't belong here."

I turned and walked back into the ballroom, back to Victoria, back to my future. Every step felt like walking on broken glass.

My wolf went silent inside me. Not dead. Worse. Hollow.

And in the snow, somewhere on Red Mountain, my mate was walking away with a piece of my soul in her chest.

A piece I would spend the next three years trying to get back.