"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 drowned city is a graveyard of forgotten gods. 


Skyscrapers slouch like broken spines, their surfaces crusted with barnacles and veins of bioluminescent algae that pulse in time to the submerged heartbeat thrumming through the water. Eden steers the skiff through canals choked with the skeletons of leviathans, their bones picked clean by eels with human teeth. His silver scars flicker, threads of the Veil coiled around his wrists like serpents. He doesn’t speak, but his gaze keeps drifting to the tower on the horizon—a needle of black stone piercing the clouds, its apex crowned with a throbbing mass of storm and rot. The Weaver’s heart. 


The rot in me stirs, tendrils curling around my ribs. *“She’s waiting,”* it purrs. *“She’s always been waiting.”* 


I ignore it. The storm is ash, but the rot is worse—a patient, hungry thing. It dreams in my sleep now, showing me visions of Eden with the Weaver’s needle in his hands, stitching the world into a tomb. 


The sea