Goldentreee

“He rejected me in front of the entire pack… because she stole my scent.”

Nobody wants a rejected Omega.

Ayla Riverwinddoesn’t care anymore. She's done waiting for fate. As Northmoon Pack’s healer, she’s content in the shadows—until the day her world burns.

Her best friend, ‘Cassia’, uses forbidden scentbinding magic to steal Ayla’s identity and claim her mate—high-ranking Alpha ‘Darius’—as her own. Publicly rejected, shackled in silver, and tortured with wolfsbane, Ayla is cast into a dungeon and marked feral. The rejection was meant to break her.

Instead, it awakens something ancient inside her. When she escapes into the Outlands, Ayla meets ‘Rylan Stormblade’—a rogue healer with secrets carved into his skin and knowledge of a lost ritual that may restore her scent... or kill her.

But Ayla’s scent is no longer just hers. It burns through the bond realm, ripping through the senses of one wolf in particular—’Kael Valerius’, the Alpha King. His wolf goes feral when her scent touches the wind, but he already has a Luna.

Now hunted by Alphas who want her dead, claimed by a King she doesn’t trust, and stalked by a prophecy that says “the next Luna will break the throne or bless it”, Ayla must rise—not as someone’s mate…but as the Luna they tried to erase.

Rejected By The Alpha, Desired By The King

My boots squelched in the mossy edge of the Grove. Not blood, not this time—just wet pine and the damp hush of spring after snowmelt. The kind of quiet that sinks into bone, that asks more questions than it answers.

It had been two days since the shrine.

Two days since the child burned a ring of ash into the altar with nothing but a pulse.

Two days since my mother placed her in my arms and whispered, She's yours now.

Kael hadn't left my side, but neither of us spoke the words yet. Words like ours, or heir, or future. Not because they weren't true. Because saying them out loud would make the weight of them real.

The baby slept beside me, wrapped in clothes, her breaths shallow but sure. Her presence pulsed gently across the thread—like a candle never quite going out.

I stroked her cheek, and the scent that rose made my breath catch.

45: THE PACT OF CINDERS