Rejected By My Mate, Wanted By The King

POV: Serena Vale (first person)

“Say it out loud, Vale—find your fate,” Hailey purrs behind me, sweet as spun sugar and sharp enough to cut, and the chant swells on cue because a queen bee never has to raise her voice to be obeyed.

She claps in time with the subwoofers while banners—Northwood Academy Lunar Trials: Find Your Fate!—droop from the rafters like weary confetti, and a strobe rig flutters overhead as if the lights themselves are nervous about what they’re about to expose.

The whole place smells like sweat braided with glitter spray and berry punch that bled into a starburst stain near the free-throw line, a fake-fruit promise that sticks in my throat until I wonder if hope can be aerosolized and weaponized against scholarship kids who don’t know when to stop dreaming.

“Breathe with me,” Lyria whispers inside my skull, a ribbon of cool air winding through heat that keeps climbing my neck. “In—hold—out. I’m here.”

I try to obey, but breath frays as the spotlights pin me in the ceremony circle, too bright, too hot, too intent on turning my cheekbones into proof that I can be fixed into place if enough electricity is applied.

The senior class folds around the ring with hunger disguised as curiosity, faces tilted like sunflowers that learned to drink gossip instead of light, and I feel their collective lean, that little forward shift that says they want a miracle and a failure in the same heartbeat so they can film whichever arrives.

“Eyes up,” Lyria urges again, yet my gaze has already found Jace Blackthorn across the chalked sigils, lounging as if the gym was built for him to practice boredom. He wears the careless royalty boys rehearse in locker rooms—dark hair falling exactly where it wants, shoulders cut to fit any rumor, mouth tipped in that half-smirk he saves for lacrosse victories and the sound of his name on other people’s tongues.

He watches the faculty at the invocation dais like this is another appointment between kissing Hailey behind the bleachers and letting the world pay rent to his confidence, and the sight scrapes something raw along my ribs because my crush since sophomore year looks least interested on the night the universe might choose me for him.

“Serena, the circle’s waking,” Lyria breathes, and I feel it before the floor glows—runes thrumming under my shoes, a hum that threads my arches and laces up my spine. Magic tightens around my body like invisible ribbons cinched by hands I can’t see, and a spark pricks behind my sternum where Lyria lifts her head as if a scent just struck, alert without panic, poised without peace.

Light answers the call, rising from the painted symbols in two colors that should never meet—silver from me, gold from him—skeins climbing and twisting until they bridge the space and knot themselves between our chests with a shimmer that makes the crowd inhale as one living creature.

“Shut up—look,” someone says near the pep banner, and a flock of phones takes flight because proof tastes better than truth.

Hailey’s voice breaks the gasp into glitter. “No freaking way,” she squeals, bright with the thrill of a favorite show betraying its fans, and I stand very still because any movement might break the last good thing a girl is allowed before a room decides what she deserves.

The glow braids tighter, spinning a soft-gold thread through my silver until the air presses back against my skin, and I understand with a steadiness that feels like falling without speed: my fated match is Jace.

“Don’t look away,” I tell myself, but I do—right back to his eyes, and horror flickers there first, an unmasked flash that arrives before triumph can remember its lines.

He steps in until cedar and smoke slide under the strobe burn, and his mouth barely moves while every syllable carves itself into me with a craftsman’s care for permanence. “You’re not good enough for me.”

The words are simple, ordinary, almost gentle in their quiet, yet they land like a seal on a decree I never got to read before signing.

“What did you just say?” I ask, and the sound is small, a breakable thing that embarrasses me as it leaves, the ghost of twelve-year-old me hearing a guidance counselor translate grit into “know your place.”

He leans in, not close enough to touch, but close enough to colonize the air I need, and his voice slides in like a surgeon’s blade that claims mercy while it separates. “Don’t get excited. This changes nothing.”

He straightens, lifts his chin toward the spinning lights, and lets the gym have the rest. “I reject this match.”

Noise detonates around us in a messy rain—laughter that tries to pass as shock, shock that tries to pass as empathy, a serrated “brutal” from somewhere near the mascot mural, and a chorus of whispers that hiss like a nest you didn’t see before you stepped. Heat floods my cheeks, drains away, returns in a punish-and-repeat cycle, and inside me Lyria makes a sound I have never heard from her, a broken whine that skitters along my spine and asks a question my mouth can’t form.

“Why would he—Serena, why would he do this—”

There isn’t room in my chest to answer, not with the air cinched tight and the circle’s glow fading to leave me outlined in humiliation.

Hailey’s commentary slices again, pitched for maximum carry. “Guess the Silver Nobody wasn’t meant to shine,” she sings to her court, and giggles spark like flint while a camera shutter pops because memory requires evidence to stay cruel.

“I need to move,” I tell Lyria, and my body obeys before my brain can vote. I pivot toward the exit because if the first tear falls here they will name it for me and sell versions of it for the rest of senior year, but fingers catch my wrist with a proprietary certainty that steals what oxygen I had left.

Jace holds on like he purchased the right with a sentence, and his voice drops into a low murmur meant to sound like kindness even as it tightens the shackles. “Serena, it’s better if you don’t hope.”

Fire lifts beneath my skin, not the warmth of someone who cares, but the clean burn of a boundary I should have drawn seasons ago. “Let go,” I say, and I put iron under the words so they carry past the closest row.

His grip doesn’t ease. I pull free anyway—hard enough that it stings—and the shake in my voice turns into something I can use as I raise it for the people who collected my hurt like confetti. “Don’t touch me again.”

Surprise cracks his expression as if he didn’t expect a girl he shattered to have a spine, and I don’t wait for his recovery because my chest is all splinter and blood and I can’t hold the pieces together in public any longer.

I shoulder through bodies and perfume and whispers and Hailey’s syrupy, “Run, little wolf,” and the music keeps pounding because music never cares what it scores, and the lights spin because lights love a spectacle, and my breathing roars in my ears like ocean in a shell I can’t put down.

Cold air slams my face when the gym doors burst outward under my hands, a winter slap that tastes like permission. I stumble one step, two, three into night that feels almost holy after the fluorescent cruelty inside, and then I almost collide with a shape that wasn’t there a heartbeat ago.

I skid, heart lurching, vision rethreading to understand what my body already knows: this isn’t a student playing at danger, not a teacher pretending to be in control; this is a man built like a verdict, height turning the doorway small, shoulders dusted with mist, tattoos mapping his forearms before disappearing under a black shirt that fits like it was chosen to keep secrets and break rules.

He stands with the kind of stillness that doesn’t ask permission from storms or streets or girls who just ran from a room where their future got turned into content.

Storm-gray eyes track me as if he had been waiting for a very specific breath to leave a very specific mouth, and when I manage an apology that trips over itself—“Sorry, I didn’t mean to—” he says my name the way a key tests a lock it was forged to fit. “Serena Vale?”

The sound of it in his voice wraps the air tighter around my ribs without touching me at all, and Lyria’s head snaps up inside me, ears sharp, tail rigid, a growl of awe caught behind her teeth.

“Do you feel that?” she asks, stunned, and I do, God, I do—something electric and older than whatever the faculty tried to conjure, a thrum that crawls my skin and makes breath go shallow because the ground just tilted and I haven’t found my feet. He takes one unhurried step closer, a raven-black lock falling over his brow, gaze reading my face like a battlefield report he already expected to receive.

Wind shifts and carries his scent across the threshold—pine and winter storm and a wild note that curls around my senses like it remembers me from a story my mother never got to finish.

“Who are you?” I ask, voice unsteady but standing, and his mouth curves, not into a smile, but into something sharper that understands both invitation and warning.

“You already know,” he says, and the world hushes around that certainty because names with sharp edges don’t need volume to cut. “Look at me, Serena.”

I do, and the recognition detonates behind my eyes before my mind catches up: storm-gray gaze, a presence that bends the air, a legend that never belonged inside morning announcements and yet haunted them anyway.

Alpha King.

My pulse slams the inside of my throat hard enough to bruise as the rest of his name arrives like a strike of lightning that chooses where to land.

Kai Riven stands three feet from me, watching with a look that carries shock and recognition and hunger and something primal I don’t have language for, and then all those streaking emotions settle into an expression that feels dangerously, impossibly close to fate.

Heat trembles out of me on a breath I don’t remember drawing, and Lyria whispers a single word that sounds like a bow drawn and held. “Yes.”

He felt it too.