"Hi, yes you aren't dreaming, it's the chubby Kelly," I say inwardly as I see the unhappy face expression of Jason who is disheartened. 

The guests laugh at us. They call our couple all sort of names. "The prince charming and the pancakes' eater Kelly" is one I can sadly remember."

"I, Jason Bentley of the South pack, reject you Kelly Thompson as my mate and the Luna Queen," he declared fiercely.

***
Kelly Thompson, an eighteen-year-old curvaceous and wolfless she-wolf, has been quietly admiring Jason Bentley, the heir apparent to the throne of the dominant South pack, for a number of years.

Unfortunately for Kelly, she doesn't get the same attention in return from Alpha heir Jason, as the handsome daughter of his old father's Gammas, Betty Nord, is already the love of the pack's future Alpha. But, the plump Kelly has an advantage over the skinny Betty because of a strong vow made by Jason's father, the Alpha King Don Bentley, that his son will marry the daughter of his Betas who gave their lives two years ago in a fight against the North pack's fiercest adversaries in order to preserve the life of the Alpha heir.

But clearly, nothing goes as smoothly as Kelly imagines.

The Rejected Curvy Luna Queen

The moon’s corpse left a void in the sky, a starless wound that bled silence. In its absence, the laws of the world frayed. Rivers ran backward. Wolves gave birth to stillborn shadows. The plague-veins in Eden’s arms lay dormant but restless, a sleeping storm neither he nor Isolde could name. The packs called it *the Hollowing*—a sickness of the soul, a hunger for what the moon had taken. 


Rhydian’s serpents were gone. In their place, a lattice of scars stretched across his chest, thin and white as spider silk. They ached when the wind shifted east, as though mourning their lost purpose. He refused to speak of the tomb in the fen, of the thing that had worn my face. But at night, when the camp slept, I heard him whispering to Eden’s shadows. *“Stay with him. Keep him whole.”* 


The moon's curse