Scars From a Velvet Bite - A Rejected Mate Shifter Romance, #1

He gave her the moon, then threw her away in front of the whole pack.Mara Wren waited nineteen winters for the bond to wake. When it finally did, it chose the one wolf she could never have: Kaine Ardenmoor, the pack's new Alpha. For one night she believed she had been made for something. By dawn he stood before three hundred wolves, spoke the words that unmade her, and let them all turn their backs while she bled.Rejected mates waste. They fade, and they die, and no one mourns them. That is the law.Mara does not fade.Cast out with ash on her forehead and a scar that will not heal, she staggers into the wild country beyond the border stones to die alone. Instead the moon pours itself into the wound the rejection tore and refuses to let her go. What crawls out of that first terrible night is something the old law has no name for and every pack has reason to fear: a Moonscarred, rare and powerful and hunted, worth more to the cold Wardens of the Moon Court than any wolf alive, and worth the most while her heart still beats.She finds a home among the thrown-away. She finds a fragile new strength, and a valley willing to stand for her, and a lone alpha who looks at her and does not look away.And then the mate who discarded her comes running back into the dark, because the hunt he brought down on her is closing in, and neither of them can survive it alone.Kaine will spend the rest of his life proving he understands what he threw away. Mara will never let him forget the stone. But the Court is coming to erase them both, and the only weapon that can stop it is the one thing a rejected mate was never supposed to want again.The bond he broke. Freely chosen. From both sides.She was unmade once. She will not be unmade twice.