The Painful Rejection

Megan Anders has been unwanted since the day she was found abandoned at the edge of pack land. Taken in out of pity, raised beside a brother who loves her and a sister who never forgave her for existing, she has exactly one dream: a mate who will look at her and choose her. Wolves live for acceptance. She has spent her whole life preparing to earn hers.

The Moon Goddess has a cruel sense of humor.

The bond snaps into place on the happiest day of her life, bright and instant and absolute - and the man on the other end of it is Ace, the pack Alpha's youngest brother, a boy who has loved someone else for years. He does the one thing no wolf is supposed to survive. He rejects her. Publicly. Coldly. While his pregnant girlfriend watches.

Here is what nobody predicts: Megan does not beg. She does not wither. She looks the rejection in the eye and accepts it, then packs her things and leaves everything she has ever known for the Royal Pack - the savage court that raised her estranged sister, ruled by a young King whose family died in fire and shadow. A fresh start. That is all she wants. That is all she is allowed.

But the Royal Pack has been waiting for her longer than she knows.

Why does her magic flicker at the edge of her sight like a candle with a mind of its own? Why does a witch keep calling her by a name that is not hers - Faith? Why did a dying King spend his last breath insisting his little daughter did not burn with her mother, that someone hid the girl where no throne would think to look? And why does Edmund - the wry, unhurried wolf who lost his mate before he ever met her and laughs so he does not have to say so - keep standing between Megan and every danger that finds her?

Then the truth arrives the way truth always does: all at once, and far too late to stay safe. Rogues mass at the borders. A curse born of her brother's research is eating him alive. An old hunger stirs beneath the graveyard yew, awake at last because of what was buried - and never finished draining - inside Megan herself. The rejection that was meant to break her has cracked open a door, and on the other side stands everything the crown buried: her stolen name, her split power, and a war that will demand a price from every wolf she loves.

Megan was raised on one lesson: the pack comes first, and the unwanted come last. To save the people who became her home, she will have to unlearn it - to take instead of give, to spend instead of save, and to trust that the mate who threw her away was never her ending.

A slow-burn werewolf romance of rejection and rebirth: found family, lost heirs, a love that outlasts the grave, and a heroine who discovers that being chosen means nothing next to the power of choosing. Passionate, emotional, and fiercely hopeful - all intimate moments fade to black.

She was the rejection. She will also be the answer.