"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

Obsidian saplings shiver as though stirred by a wind that doesn’t exist, their glass-black leaves chiming like fractured bells. Eden kneels at their center, the Lumen shard trembling in his palm, its light fracturing across his cracked ore-shell. Blood—human and iridescent—drips from his joints. **“Please,”** he whispers. The word is raw, stripped of the Weaver’s harmonics. For a heartbeat, he’s my son again: twelve years old, begging me to check for monsters under his cot. 


Jara’s rifle stays leveled. **“He’s baiting you. The second you take that shard, the Weaver’s claws sink in.”** 


Veyd staggers, golden filaments pulsing beneath his skin like parasitic roots. **“She’s right… but the shard could stabilize me. Maybe him too.”** 


The Hunger’s voice coils through my mind, colder now, threaded with the static of dying stars. *Take it. Let me in. We will end this.* 


The garden