The Sixteenth Moon: A Rejected Mates Romance

Chapter 4 (Revised): One Year Later...

***The following chapter has been revised for plot and continuity.***

One Year later....

Kana offered the little girl a smile with her morning muffin. Cornbread with chocolate chips—one of the compound bakery's specialties.

"Thank you, Kay," the little girl—Jasmine—called, as she hurried out the door and off from the tiny front porch of Kana's small cabin to make it to her class in time for morning salutations. Every school day, the ten children in the compound attended class in one of the smaller of the five community buildings in the four-acre compound just outside of Colorado Springs.

To the human population, the compound was listed publicly as a women's shelter, a place where homeless women, battered women, and runaway girls could come and find safety, a hot meal, and a warm bed. To shifters, however, the compound was a safe haven for rejected mates or banished female wolves. Surprising to Kana, there were more the latter than the former, as rejected mates was a nearly unheard of phenomenon. But there were a few.

Like her.

But she was special—rejected and banished. Like the Ancestors doubled down on their hatred for her. Losing her parents at nineteen, meeting her mate at twenty-two, being rejected then banished then...losing the connection to her wolf.

Out of all that happened to her, that was the worst.

Her wolf was gone. Or silent. Or dead. She didn't know. She only knew that one moment she was heartbroken, her soul crying, and terrified of trekking into the wilderness where Nils had tossed her, and then next thing she knew the presence of her wolf, her constant companion since she'd first drawn breath, was gone. There was an echoing, agonizing emptiness where her wolf once was.

That first night, without her wolf to help her regulate her body temperature, she would have died. But her mate wouldn't have cared—he'd proven that. She'd been left to die without a single one of her own belongings. Not her cell, her clothes, her thicker winter coat, or even her passport.

Stop! Thinking about this will only ruin your day. No more ruined days, Kana. You've lived too many of those already.

"Hey, honey," Holly, the shelter coordinator called as she came through the open door to take the seat at the small kitchen table Jasmine vacated moments before. "I see you brought the best of the bakery's goodies once again."

Kana grinned, loving the easy comradery between herself and the older female shifter. Holly Books was an unmated shifter who, unlike those she worked to support and protect, had never been rejected or banished. She'd yet to find her mate and didn't seem all the interested in doing so, either. She seemed happy enough to help other female shifters. As if it were her calling.

Perhaps it was.

Kana had no idea what that would feel like—to have a calling, to have something she was passionate about. Before her rejection, she'd been passionate about finding her mate, starting a family, and living and loving with the one male destined for her.

Well, that had all been blown to hell, and now she was still trying to piece her life together after the worst experience of her life. Not even the death of her parents could compete with being rejected and then having a part of her soul ripped from her body.

She was mateless and spiritless, like an empty bag caught on a fence, just waiting to be caught up in the wind. No roots. No rudder. She was still shocked she was able to find Holly and the Sister Fate Women's Relief compound where she'd spent the last two years, just trying to find her place on the fringes of the shifter world. Before that, she'd been adrift, moving from town to town, looking for safety in a few other Packs. However, the moment they heard what happened in the Great Northeastern Territories Pack, they showed her the door.