The Sixteenth Moon: A Rejected Mates Romance

Chapter 3: Rejection

Rueger finished buttoning her white dress shirt and turned away from the naked female in his bed, her body replete from hours of fucking.

How better to test compatibility as a consort than to fuck her on every flat surface in his cabin? Compatibility was important, then again, so was bloodline, lineage, and the ability to be in the same room with one another without wanting to rip out each other's throats.

Not that he had a choice in who he mated anyway. The Elders had demanded his cooperation, his father—the former Alpha—had pounded Pack duty and responsibility into his head for the last seventy years, and the people in his Pack looked to him to secure their future. He was duty bound to go through with the ceremony. It was only a bonus that he had no problem fucking his intended consort. Their sexual chemistry was explosive, she was gorgeous, a natural leader who'd learned about leading a Pack at her father's side. Their pups would be strong—though not as strong as they would have been if he'd sired them with his fated mate.

Too late for that. Far too late. He'd made his choice, and he couldn't let his father, his Pack, nor the Elders down.

Ingrid Magnusen slipped from his California King bed and strode to the bathroom door, completely unaffected by her nakedness. Her confidence was one of the sexiest things about her. Her bloodline was nearly as old as his, and so her lineage was pristine, as was the Magnusen reputation among the Canadian packs. Making her a consort mate would be a boon to his Pack; their pups would be strong, our binding of the two large Packs even stronger.

There was little else he could want.

Other than his fated mate.

But his hopes for that died years ago. At twenty, he'd been eager to find her, his one true mate, the Luna to his Alpha, a gift from the Ancestors bestowed upon him as a blessing. But she hadn't come. At forty, he'd begun to wonder if she would not come to him but that he should go to her, wherever she was, but by then his father had been training him up as the next Alpha, the one to rise into leadership once his father had reached the time of stepping down. Of letting a younger, stronger Alpha take his place. In many Packs, there would have been an all-out Pack war to see who came out the strongest of the strong to take the title Alpha. But in the Great North Territories, the Pack Alpha mantle was passed from father to son.

After fifty years of waiting for his mate, it was time to move on. The Ancestors had other plans for him, apparently. His Pack deserved a grounded Alpha, one with a family, and the promise of a next in line. Waiting provided him nothing. Provided the Pack nothing.

It was time to take matters into his own hands. For the good of the Pack.

And now that he was Alpha, he needed his own son in order to hand down the mantle when his time came. But the longer he waited for his mate, the more malcontented the elders had become until they were summoning him monthly for an accounting. "Where is your mate?" "Have you been looking?" "Have you done something with which the Ancestors are displeased?" Over and over again, they called his legitimacy as the Alpha into question. If he had no mate, he could not sire a new generation of Alphas, and therefore the mantle should rest on another male's shoulders.

He couldn't let that happen. In the Great North Territories, strength was the power, and there was none stronger than the Laarsen. None more fit to lead than him.

So, at seventy years old, in a bid to retain his position and ensure the strength of the Pack for future generations, he'd finally acquiesced to the elder's demand for him to take a consort: a strong female of Alpha blood on which to breed his pups.

After seeking the council of the Ancestors, the elders determined that Ingrid would be said consort, one supposedly chosen by the Ancestors to provide him with the strongest pups. Pups he would be proud to call Laarsen Alphas.