My Pack Erased Me, The Lycan King Didn’t

My mate rejected me in front of three hundred wolves.

My father didn’t growl. My mother stared at the floor. My five brothers let him walk away breathing.

Then my whole pack erased me for a year. Tonight, I’m erasing myself back.

I rolled my old truck down the gravel road with the headlights off. I passed the border stones, where the guards change shifts at 2:10 a.m. and never once look left. At the edge of our territory I stopped and looked back at the packhouse I was born in.

Thirty–one windows. Every single one lit.  Not one of them watching for me.

“Goodbye,” I whispered. “You won’t miss me. I’ll miss you anyway. That’s the part that makes me pathetic.”

Then I turned the key.

My name is Sienna Ashford. Only daughter of Alpha Gideon Ashford, the wolf who rules the northern woods of Minnesota and never has to raise his voice. Five older brothers. A mother who used to call me her moon–blessed miracle.

Used to.

One year ago tonight was my twenty–first birthday. The night of my Mating Ceremony.

My mother planned it for four months. Midnight blue and silver, because I hate pink. White roses. Candles floating on the lake. She got every detail right.

Then Logan Hale stepped into the circle.

Heir to the Crescent Moon pack. The boy I’d loved since I was sixteen. The moment the moon cleared the trees, the bond snapped into place between us, and I felt it all the way down to my bones.

Mate.