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Blurb
I barely survived a brutal Rogue wolf ambush on the highway, an attack designed to ruin my purity right before my high-profile pack wedding.
But the real betrayal came when I returned home. Even after I endured a humiliating public test to prove my scent was completely untainted, my fiancé Deondre and my father still abandoned me.
My step-sister Brandee, the one who secretly paid the mercenaries to attack me, was given my place as the primary Luna.
Deondre tossed a revised contract at my feet, demanding I stay as his unranked concubine.
When I tore the papers to shreds, my own father slapped me hard across the face, stripping me of my name and banishing me from the pack entirely.
“You will end up as a nameless Rogue in the dirt!” Deondre sneered.
I stood bleeding on the front steps, my heart entirely dead to the family that had just thrown me away like garbage over a fabricated rumor.
I couldn’t understand how blood and sacred vows could be discarded so easily, leaving me to face the wasteland alone.
But before I could leave the estate, a fleet of twelve armored black SUVs surrounded the gates.
Hillery Zimmerman, the Supreme Alpha of the continent and the most feared warlord alive, stepped out of the shadows.
He crushed my ex-fiancé to his knees with a single wave of his aura, wiped the blood from my lip, and asked me to be his only Luna.}
The Jilted Mate’s Rise To Supreme Luna Chapter 1
Ember’s POV
Seven days until I’m bound to Deondre Langley.
The Bowers needed Langley’s border troops. Langley needed our mineral corridor. I was the thing caught in the middle. My father hadn’t even asked me.
I’d made my peace with it.
Aunt Martha was the only one who grieved it with me. She let me take her up to the Sanctuary, where Elder Silas Thorne handed me pine boughs and sweetgrass. I laid the offerings into the brazier the way I’d been taught, listened to a few words of blessing, and helped her back down the hill. The armored SUV was waiting at the gate. I climbed in. The door shut, and the heater seeped into my fingertips.
The engine pressed low against my ears. Then the rear tire blew.
The sound was sharper than a gunshot. The car lurched right, the seatbelt cut into my shoulder, and my head cracked against the side window. White light burst behind my eyes. The tires screamed on the asphalt, gravel spraying, nothing outside but spinning gray and dead grass. The SUV finally stopped on the shoulder, hood smoking.
The driver drew his gun and screamed at me not to move. Out of the dust, three Rogue wolves came walking out of the dead brushwood. Too big. Too thin. Gray coats crusted with mange and dried scabs, jaws split wide to the ear. The stink of rot came through the door seams.
The biggest one hit the hood. Silver-black claws punched through the windshield, glass spraying inward, and it dragged the screaming driver out through the gap. Blood slapped across the seats, copper flooding my throat. The second tore the rear door off, teeth snapping inches from my ear.
I didn’t scream. My right hand found the silver dagger. When it lunged into the cabin, I put the blade into the soft hollow under its jaw. Silver hissed against wolf flesh, and the stench of scorched fur filled my nose and mouth. It yelped, pulled back, and went down twitching in the dirt.
I climbed out the other door and hit the gravel with my shoulder. My dress ripped. My knees split open, the pain sharp and bright. I pushed myself up and ran for the abandoned pump station fifty yards off. Behind me the third wolf howled and came, claws hammering the ground, closer with every stride.
I squeezed through the broken metal partition, pulled my wolf sense in tight, held my heartbeat down, back pressed to a rusted pipe, both hands locked on the hilt. Its muzzle pushed through the gap. Hot, wet breath steamed against the metal, drool hitting the ground inches from my boot. My muscles ached and shook.
Then, as it took a step toward my shadow, an overwhelming Alpha pressure came down.
The air went heavy all at once. The rogue froze, whined, and ran with its tail tucked.
I slumped against the pipe, gasping, sweat soaked through my collar. Through a gap in the wall I could hear the sirens closing in, blue light sweeping the wreckage of the pump station in slow pulses.
Between the flashes, a figure in a black cloak crossed the waste ground behind the station. Tall, wide-shouldered, moving fast, like a shadow cut out of a storm. I narrowed my eyes, trying to make him out, and he was already gone into the gray dead grass, leaving only a trace of cedar and blizzard in the air.
“Ember!”
Brandee’s voice came from the highway, sweet enough to rot teeth. I stayed flat against the rusted wall. The Langley convoy sat on the shoulder, silver falcon emblems cold under the headlights. Deondre got out, his uniform knife-creased. Brandee had her arm through his, rose perfume heavy enough to fight the wind. There was red clay on her heels.
I never expected that all of this had anything to do with Brandee.
They walked a few steps toward the pump station. Deondre frowned and scanned the waste ground, hand resting on the holster at his hip. Brandee went up on her toes, peering, her gaze skipping right over the Rogue’s corpse and never quite reaching the pipe where I was hidden.
I didn’t make a sound. My fingers tightened on the dagger, blood running off my knee onto the broken brick at my feet.
Where the cloaked figure had vanished, there was nothing but dead grass bending in the wind.
The Jilted Mate’s Rise To Supreme Luna Chapter 2
Hillery’s POV
Morning frost still clung to Zimmerman territory, and the Old Wastes Highway was the shortest line through the gray buffer zone. I should have been at the northern outpost by nightfall, dealing personally with the smuggled cargo my border patrol had seized.
But taking a shortcut never actually saves time.
The intelligence was clear enough: the eldest Bowers daughter would be bound to Deondre Langley in seven days. I hadn’t planned to remember the name. Until this moment.
“Alpha. Smoke ahead.” Arlin sat in the passenger seat, and the armored car was slowing on the gravel. I looked up and saw a column of black smoke cutting straight up at the end of the dead grass, like someone had scored a burn mark across the horizon.
The convoy slowed. I lowered the window and let the cold in. It carried rust, scorched rubber, and something deeper.
Blood. A lot of it. Fresh.
Then the bond moved.
That thread, the one that had always been there, the one it had taken me years to learn to ignore, jerked hard inside my chest. My wolf was awake instantly. It reached down the other end of the bond and rolled a low sound in its throat. It knew her. My fated mate.
I pressed my hand to my chest, knuckles white. The sigils under my collar burned.
“Alpha?” Arlin looked over, his face tightening in a heartbeat. He’d known me too long not to know what that expression meant on me.
“Coordinates.” My voice came out rough. “Hers.”
“Whose—”
“Ember Bowers.”
I didn’t wait for his second sentence. The door was open, my boots were in the gravel and the cracked dirt. The other end of the bond was shaking hard. Fear, sharp and cold, mixed with adrenaline. Then pain — knees, shoulder, palm burned on an iron pipe. Every place she was hurt drove into me like a needle.
She was running.
My wolf was snarling. Hunt. Go. Now.
I shut my eyes and forced it down. Something else came through the bond: her heartbeat, held very low. Not panic. Cold. The feel of fingers locked around something — metal, silver, a bloody hilt. She’d killed the first one. The recoil came back through my own hand, as if I’d held the blade myself.
When the third wolf closed in, I let the pressure out.
The Alpha command hit the waste ground through the bond and landed as precisely as a hand on a beast’s scruff. It froze, whined, and ran with its tail tucked. But Ember’s reaction tightened my chest. She didn’t relax. Her heart went from terror to alertness, then quickly into something colder, as if someone had turned her whole body’s temperature down a few degrees.
She knew someone had helped her. She didn’t know who. She had no intention of finding out.
“Alpha.” Arlin’s voice came from behind me, pitched low. “Langley’s people are here.”
I turned. Blue lights flickered at the end of the highway. The Langley convoy sat on the shoulder, silver falcon emblems cold under the headlights. Deondre Langley got out, uniform knife-creased, and scanned toward the pump station.
Deondre walked right past the pipe she was hiding in. Less than ten yards. He didn’t see her. Brandee followed him, her gaze crossing the broken wall of the pump station, pausing one second, sliding away. Her nose wrinkled slightly, as if she’d caught something, but the rose perfume and the scorched dirt of the wastes covered too much.
Interesting. His wife-to-be was hiding in a ruin, covered in blood, and he was standing in the sunlight with a hand over his nose, offended by the smell.
“Arlin.”
“Here.”
“The Rogue that got away ran east. Cut it off. Alive.”
“Yes.” Arlin typed the order into his tablet, and Black Guard squads swept around the flank.
Ember came out of the pump station. Brandee saw her first. That carefully arranged expression froze for half a second, then folded into concern, and she ran for her. Deondre turned, took in the ruined dress and the blood, stayed three steps back, and covered his nose.
The three of them exchanged a few words. From half a waste ground away, all I saw was Ember standing straight, Deondre’s lips moving, Brandee gesturing beside him. Then Ember walked around them, toward the highway. Deondre reached for her shoulder. She spun, dagger tip at his throat. He went still. Brandee stepped back twice.
Ember put the dagger away and kept walking. Deondre stood there a few seconds, straightened his collar, and turned back toward the convoy. Brandee followed, glanced over her shoulder, then got into the car. The blue lights died. The convoy turned and headed for the estate.
Down the bond, Ember’s heartbeat settled slowly. She was still walking. Not fast, but not stopping.
I watched her go. At the other end of the bond, her heartbeat knocked against the inside of my ribs, one beat at a time.
“Alpha.” Arlin turned from the front seat. “The Rogue’s contained, in the third squad’s vehicle. What do you want done with it?”
“Bring it to the underground cells.”
“Yes.”
I took one last look at her back. She was moving fast across the waste ground, the blood on her knees darkening the gravel, and she didn’t stop. I leaned back into my seat, palm still pressed to my chest, the heat of the sigils slowly fading.
“Back to command.”
The Jilted Mate’s Rise To Supreme Luna Chapter 3
Ember’s POV
I walked out of the pump station with the blood on my knees soaked dark brown through the inside of my skirt. Deondre stood a dozen yards off, his pressed uniform like a clean flag planted in the waste. Brandee saw me first. Her face froze for half a second, and then she ran over, heels ticking on the gravel.
“Oh my God, Ember!” She stopped in front of me, both hands hovering in the air. “You scared me to death! What did those filthy Rogues do to you?”
Under the rose perfume: the red clay of the Old Wastes, cheap tobacco, and the rotting sweetness of Rogue breath. The red clay was on her heels.
I looked at her and said nothing.
Deondre turned, took in the ruined dress and the blood on my knees. He stood three steps away and raised a hand to his nose.
“Your scent is contaminated.” His voice was a military report. “Did they touch you?”
There was nothing in his brown eyes but disgust and calculation. This man had promised to protect me. He hadn’t asked how many places I was bleeding.
“Three Rogues. My driver is dead. I killed one and hid in the pump station.” I said it one word at a time. “While you were standing here covering your nose, did it occur to you that I might be in there, bleeding?”
Deondre’s jaw locked. “What kind of attitude is that?”
“Ember, you have to understand his position,” Brandee cut in, her voice soft as syrup, reaching for my arm. I stepped aside.
“If the elders smell this on you, the engagement is—”
“The engagement?” I turned to her. The little smirk was well buried. Not well enough. “You’re that concerned about my engagement.”
“Of course I’m concerned about you!” She pressed a hand to her chest, and her eyes went red on cue. Deondre patted her shoulder.
I looked at the two of them standing together and was suddenly very tired. Seven years. Or longer. I’d told myself all I had to do was be obedient. Aunt Martha said the ceremony would be set within the week. I had already made my peace with signing the contract.
Deondre took a step toward me. “Get in the car. Don’t make a scene here.”
I stepped back.
His hand closed on air. His face changed. The patience he’d been pretending was finally worn through. “Ember. I said get in the car.”
“I don’t need your car.”
“You—”
I pulled the silver dagger from my sleeve. The blade came up at his throat, the tip still carrying rogue blood. Deondre froze, pupils shrinking. Brandee stepped back twice.
“Touch me,” I said, “and find out how fast silver works on an officer.”
He didn’t move. I watched the arrogance crack across his face, one inch at a time, and something underneath it show. Cowardice. I put the dagger away and turned for the highway.
Blood ran down my leg, leaving dark marks on the gravel with every step. Behind me, the Langley convoy started its engines, tires grinding the shoulder, the sound fading out.
I walked the highway a long time. By the time the sky went dark, the estate had come up at the end of the road. The iron gate stood open, the gatehouse light on. I stood on the gravel and looked at the familiar door.
The crescent birthmark above my collarbone burned, once. Faint, like a fingertip brushing it.
I pressed my hand over it and looked back. The highway was empty. Nothing there.
I pushed the door open and went in. Warm light spilled out of the foyer, mixed with woodsmoke and the kind of quiet that had been held down all day. Everyone was there. My father by the fireplace, Agatha on the sofa, Deondre and Brandee leaning in the archway like two statues waiting for me to come home.
The door slammed shut behind me.
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