Chapter 4

Kade Voss

The ballroom smelled of candles and too many wolves, and Kade heard every whisper in it.

An alpha's hearing comes in before anything else does, and it never switches off. His went further than the room knew.

Six years married, and Celeste still walked into a room the way you walk onto a stage. Heads turned for her. Then they bent together behind her, and that was the half only he could hear.

A woman in blue fanned herself by the refreshment table. An old alpha stood beside her, back to the room.

"—six years," the woman said, pitched under what the room could catch and perfectly inside what he could. "Not one pup out of that girl. I'd swear the fault isn't hers."

"Then it's his." The old alpha didn't turn around. "And he keeps her in diamonds for it."

Kade's jaw did not move.

"Does it matter?"

"This winter it does. The alpha court picks its Speaker — one chair that speaks for every pack in the territory, ten years in it. I'd sooner put young Lockhart in it than Voss."

"Lockhart's got no heir either."

"No. But he isn't dragging a barren luna behind him and calling it a dynasty."

Kade's right hand tightened on the waist it had been holding all night.

Celeste made a small, sharp sound through her teeth. "Kade. You're hurting me."

He looked down at his own fingers as if they belonged to a stranger, and let go. There were red marks. He didn't apologize.

Theodore Lockhart.

He'd known the name since they were boys at the same benches. Until this winter it had cost him nothing to say. Lockhart walked into a room and every alpha in it turned toward him — with no luna, no heirs, nothing behind him but himself.

The one thing Kade had over him was a wife and a line to carry on. Six years, and the line had come to nothing.

Kade walked out of the ballroom.

He'd meant to stay, to be seen, to be the alpha the room had to look at. He went out the side door anyway.

"Kade." Celeste came after him in a clatter of heels. She caught his sleeve. "What's wrong? Talk to me."

He stood at the window over the dark grounds and said nothing. He could hear her breathing, and behind it, faint, the party he'd walked away from.

"If you could go back," she said. "Would you have kept her? Your mate. You should know she isn't waiting. She found some other man years ago."

He turned.

Six years ago Freya went out of that valley in the night, and by morning his beta's household had the story: a man outside the pack, and papers gone from his father's study. The whole thing, assembled before he'd finished dressing.

He didn't ask to see the empty drawer. He already had a reason, and the reason was his own voice in a dark room. He had rejected her; she had gone bad over it.

The name came up out of a silence he had built on purpose, and it still came out level. "No. A wolfless girl with a rogue for a mother could never have been my luna. She was never a choice."

"Then why are you like this?"

"I'm not like anything."

He had wanted to know, once, what it was to lie down with a mate. One night, a test. He had never meant to keep her.

His wolf had. His wolf came apart over her, clawing the inside of his ribs, howling in his sleep. It took him fourteen nights to put it down. He said the words on the last of them, alone, lamps out, no idea what county she was in. She said yes to them anyway, somewhere out in the dark.

She was gone by morning.

"I can't help it if I can't carry," Celeste said, sharp and hot. "That isn't my fault."

"I didn't say it was," he said, and let it go.

He was already working out how to get back in front of Lockhart when the ballroom shouted.

A crash. A tray going down. Then the whole room at once, a current moving to one door, and Kade walked back in. A man in livery was up on a chair.

The Lycan King was choosing his princess a husband. The old wolf was coming to the border lands himself, in a matter of days, to hold a Selection, and the summons had already gone out to every pack that could get an alpha on the road inside the week.

Nobody in that ballroom could say what she looked like. Nobody could say her name. Lycans kept their heir behind the border along with everything else they didn't share. The room had a title and a date, and it was fighting over them anyway.

Kade's mind went quiet. It always did when a room finally made sense to him.

Lycans sat above werewolves the way a crown sits above a house. No pack in the territory would vote against a man the Lycan King had received.

He wanted the old King's hand on his shoulder where the whole alpha court could see it — and there was exactly one door into that, open for about a week.

Lockhart would work that out by morning. Kade had it now, and he'd be on that border before Lockhart could sharpen a tooth.

He thought he was very calm. His heart was going a little fast, but he told himself that was the finding, the plan, the getting.

One week later, the car crested the hill and the Meridian came up out of the valley floor.

It was the only hotel on the line between the lycan lands and the werewolf ones — grey stone, four hundred rooms, and a treaty signed in half of them.

Kade left Celeste at the front desk with one word. "Wait."

Then he went toward the sound of wolves. The great hall was high and chandeliered, grey marble, the cold of it coming up through his shoes. Full of every alpha with a stake in this.

And there, at the far end, was a back he knew.

He never saw the face. She was turned away from him, speaking to one of the King's men. She was taller than the girl in his head — taller than every woman in the room — and it didn't slow him down for half a second. It was the back. The dark hair pinned low. The stillness of her, straight through the shoulders.

Under the pinned hair, the nape of her neck, and the two knots of bone at the top of her spine.

His wolf came up so fast it took the air out of him. Six years quiet, and it knew the back of her neck before he did.

Kade had not thought about her in six years. He'd told himself so for six years. He told himself so now.

His legs were already carrying him across the floor.

"Kade?" Celeste hadn't stayed at the desk. Her voice came at him from somewhere behind, across all that marble.

He heard her the way a man underwater hears someone calling from the bank. He let the sound go. There was no argument in his chest, no speech, no answer ready for what he'd say when he caught her.

There was only the back, and it was moving away through a door at the far end, and he was going.

By the time he reached the door there were three corridors behind it. He took them one at a time.