When My Alpha’s Rejection Led Me to the Lycan Prince

The Black Veil smelled like spilled whiskey and bad decisions. Same as every other night.

I'd been working the bar for four months by then. Long enough to know which rogues tipped and which ones grabbed. Long enough to learn that if you kept your eyes moving and your expression blank, most of them left you alone. The Black Veil's owner, a scarred wolf named Dex, ran a tight enough operation that outright violence was rare. What wasn't rare was the low-grade threat that hummed under everything, the way a downed power line hums — invisible until you step too close.

I was pouring a double for a rogue from the northern territories when the crowd shifted.

Not loudly. Crowds don't part loudly for Alphas. They just... move. Like water finding a new path. One moment the floor was packed, bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder, and then there was a corridor of empty space cutting straight from the entrance to the bar. I didn't need to look up to know what that meant.

I looked up anyway.

Beau Thornton walked in flanked by two Ironridge enforcers, both of them built like they'd been assembled specifically to stand behind someone important. He looked exactly the same as the last time I'd seen him — the night he'd stood at his Alpha Ascension and said my bloodline wasn't worth standing beside. Same jaw. Same easy, practiced authority in the set of his shoulders. Same eyes that had looked at me like I was a problem he was solving.

He found me in about three seconds.

Of course he did.

I set the bottle down. Kept my hands steady. My wolf stirred somewhere deep and damaged, a low vibration that wasn't quite a growl — she couldn't manage a full growl anymore, not since Nancy Thornton's blow had taken half her hearing and most of her pitch. What she managed instead was a kind of pressure behind my sternum, hot and furious and useless.

I told her to be quiet. She didn't listen, but she stayed down.

Beau's Alpha tone hit the room before he reached the bar. It wasn't directed at me specifically — it never needed to be. It was the kind of aura that pressed on everyone in range, a reminder of the hierarchy, a hand on the back of every neck in the room. I felt it the way I always felt it now: like a bruise being pressed. The severed mate bond made it worse. It always made it worse.

He stopped at the bar. Didn't sit. Just stood there and looked at me the way he always looked at me — like I was something he'd misplaced and was irritated to find in the wrong location.

"Adelaide."

One word. My name in his mouth still felt like a violation.

"We're out of the house red," I said. "Everything else is available."

Something moved in his expression. Not quite amusement. Not quite anger. He reached into his jacket