Chapter 3

I lost the bet.

The nine days ended with me on the floor of a dungeon. The wound the cold-iron dagger had cut would never heal — the iron-poison was working its way deeper, an inch at a time, into the bone beneath my shoulder blade.

On the third day, Damien came down to look at me. He stopped outside the iron bars, holding the dagger in his hand. He laid it flat on the stone step outside my cell and told the guard: Make sure she sees it every day. Then he asked, "How long does an elf survive outside the forest?"

"One year," the Beta said.

"Then one year."

His footsteps faded up the stone stairs.

The next six months, I counted the days from inside that cell.

Every few days he came down. Never inside. He would stand outside the bars and look at me for a while, then go.

Once, my fever climbed high enough that I started talking nonsense and rolling on the stone. The guard didn't report it; he came on his own. I half-saw him crouched outside the bars, his fingers reaching through, stopping an inch from my shoulder. He didn't touch me. He just stayed there, like that, for a long time.

The next day he stood outside the bars as usual and asked, "Where is Sera."

I shook my head as usual.

He left as usual.

But in those six months, my medicine never ran out. He had it sent down. It arrived at my cell door at the same time every day. Never more than I needed. Never less.

After six months, he made the choice. On the altar of the Moon Goddess, he spoke the Rejection.

The day of the wedding, I was chained to the stone pillar in the dungeon with cold-iron shackles.

The pillar was ice. I had no clothes. The cold-iron chain was around my throat, my wrists, my ankles, and every place it touched was burning. The skin had rotted to a purple-black. The dungeon stones smelled of mold and rust and a faint trace of blood — the blood I'd coughed up a few days before.

Above me, the wedding procession was crossing the floor. Through the cracks between the boards, white camellia petals drifted down — the same kind he and I had planted at the edge of the forest when we were fourteen.

The wolves call this rite Rejection. The day an Alpha takes his Chosen Mate, the True Mate he is casting aside must kneel below ground until the ceremony ends. The final step: the Alpha descends to the dungeon, cuts a lock of the True Mate's hair, burns it on the Moon Goddess's altar, and speaks three lines.

He crouched in front of me, one hand caught my chin, his eyes cold — but I saw the vein at his temple jumping.

"Last time. Where is Sera."

I looked at him. I wanted to say: Damien, your sister wasn't killed by us. She is still alive. But I couldn't — the blood oath had locked my tongue. I just looked at him, and shook my head.

The moment the Mate Bond tore loose inside my body, I heard the sound that came out of me — the sound a small animal makes when it's being crushed.

When the rite was finished, he didn't leave at once. He stood over me, silent, for a long time.

I thought he was going to say something. He didn't. He only looked down at the smear of my blood on the back of his hand, where I'd bitten my lip raw, and lifted his thumb and wiped it away.

Then he turned and walked up the stairs. There was a bride waiting for him. Tonight was his wedding feast.

I dropped my head and listened to his footsteps fade up the stairwell, until the wedding music swallowed the last of them.

I didn't sleep that night. Not because of the pain. Because draped over the cold-iron chain was a cloak — heavy grey, the kind only a Alpha King wears.

I didn't touch it. But I leaned against the stone pillar, my back to it, and I stayed like that until dawn.

There was another tether, deeper than the Mate Bond, running through my veins and his. He didn't know about it. No Rejection could tear it out — because my father had cut it loose from my wrist himself, one cup at a time.