Ch. my pack erased me, the lycan king didn’t 14 my pack erased me, the lycan king didn’t 14

Chapter 14 

I opened it in front of Kael. 

Heavy cream paper. A woman’s handwriting. Elegant. Unhurried. 

Miss Ashford, 

+45 Coins 

My brother Casimir is cruel, sentimental, and now in the King’s cells, where sentimental men belong. I have no interest in owning you. That was his ambition, not mine. 

You should know one thing. 

Rose did not die childless. She gave birth to a daughter in our house in 1982, a year before she ran. The baby was kept. Raised. Married off. And that daughter had a daughter of her own. 

Her name is Vera. She is nineteen, in a house outside Prague, and she listens at doors and remembers everything. Just like you. Just like Rose. Her eyes are silver at the edges. 

My cousins intend to collect her the way my father collected yours. 

She has no brothers. No mother who kept notebooks. No King with gray eyes. No army. 

She has eight months. 

What will you do with them, Miss Ashford? 

– A. Morrow 

I read it twice. Then I set it down. 

Kael had gone completely still. 

“Did you know?” 

A long pause. “That’s a conversation for a locked room.” 

“Then lock one,” I said. “I’ll bring coffee.” 

Here’s where I am now. 

Nine days later, I’m standing on the lawn of my family’s lake lodge in a dress the color of midnight, in front of three hundred wolves from eleven packs. 

Chapter 14 

They threw the party. 

+45 Coins 

Eleven months of planning, seven months late, and my mother didn’t cut a single thing. Not the blue. Not the silver. Not the ridiculous menu of every dish I ever cooked. 

Kael Draven stood in front of every Alpha on the continent and said, in that quiet way only he can, that Sienna Ashford is his chosen mate and his future Queen. And that anyone who touches her answers to him. 

Nobody breathed for ten full seconds. 

My brothers each stood up and told a story designed to make me want to die. Ryder came on crutches to tell the one about me stealing his truck at fifteen. Three hundred wolves laughed. I threw a dinner roll at his bad leg. 

Logan Hale came, because his father made him. Because suddenly the Ashford pack is the one everyone wants to stand beside. 

He found me by the champagne tower. 

“Sienna. I want to take back my rejection. The bond is still there. Accept me again.” 

Three hundred wolves were watching. 

So I gave him exactly what he gave me. In public. 

I took the microphone from the band. 

“I, Sienna Ashford, daughter of the Ashford pack and chosen mate of the Lycan King, reject you, Logan Hale,” I said, loud enough for every wolf on that lawn. “I’ve found someone worth more.” 

I felt the last thread of that old scar snap clean. It didn’t hurt at all. 

I set the microphone down. “Enjoy the food, Logan. I picked it.” 

He walked out. Nobody moved to stop him. That part felt fair. 

Then my mother stood up holding a shoebox. 

Twenty–two notebooks. One for every year. Every color, every song, every silly thing I ever said, starting the day I was 

born. 

“I made a list,” she told three hundred wolves. “A hundred and forty–one things for my daughter. She crossed off a hundred and forty of them herself, which is the most Sienna thing that has ever happened.” 

She looked at me. 

Chapter 14 

“Item one. She will never doubt, for one single day, that she was wanted.” 

Her voice broke. 

+45 Coins 

“I failed item one. For three hundred and sixty–five days. And I will spend the rest of my life making it right. Sienna, you were wanted before you were born. Your five brothers howled at the moon for a sister every night for six years. And the moon said yes.” 

There wasn’t a dry face on that lawn. Including mine. And I’ve been shot at with crossbows. 

I didn’t forgive them in that moment. I forgave them in pieces, over months, the way people really forgive. Badly. Backward. Mostly on Sundays in a greasy diner, where my mother orders a salad and then eats half my fries. 

Here’s what I know. 

I’m twenty–two. I sit at the right hand of the most powerful wolf alive. Maya’s getting mated in the spring. And a gray–eyed King has had a ring box in his desk drawer for three weeks and thinks I don’t know, even though I hear it creak every time he opens it. 

I have a family that answers on the first ring. In my head and on my phone. All seven of them. Which is excessive, and which I will never ask them to stop. 

And I have a letter in my purse with a nineteen–year–old girl inside it. 

Eight months. No army. 

Well. 

She’s about to have mine. 

I found Kael at the edge of the lawn as the moon rose over the lake. 

“How long to plan a job in Prague?” 

He looked at me for a second. Then he smiled. That slow, beautiful disaster of a smile. 

“Give me forty–eight hours.” 

“You have twenty–four.” 

Behind us, across three hundred wolves, my mother called my name. Out loud, and through the pack link, both at once. 

And this time, for the first time in over a year, 

I turned around. 

Chapter 14 

And I answered. 

THE END of Book One. 

Book Two: THE SILVER–EYED GIRL OF PRAGUE.