Chapter 3

POV: Rhen

"Where did you get that," Dorian Greymane said, and his voice had gone very, very still.

I had not meant to show anyone the locket. I never took it off, so nobody usually asked, but the feast had me dressed in a borrowed collar shirt with a neckline lower than my kennel clothes, and the little bronze oval had slipped free while I carried water jugs across the courtyard, straight into the path of the Ashveil pack's Enforcer.

"My mother gave it to me," I said, tucking it back under the fabric fast. "Why."

Dorian did not answer right away. He was looking at me the way you look at a puzzle piece that has landed somewhere it should not fit and fits anyway.

"Can I see it," he said, and though it was phrased like a question, an Enforcer's version of a question tends to arrive with the answer already assumed.

I pulled it out again, reluctant, and watched his face do something complicated when the crest caught the torchlight. Two wolves circling a full moon, one dark, one pale, noses almost touching.

"Where did your mother get it," he asked, and this time there was an edge under the words that had not been there a moment ago.

"I don't know. She's never told me. She doesn't talk about where she came from." I closed my hand around the locket, suddenly protective of it in a way I could not explain. "Why does it matter to you."

Dorian's jaw worked like he was deciding how much of an answer I deserved. "That crest," he said finally, "is carved into the oldest standing wall on Ashveil land. It predates the current pack house. Predates the treaty. It's from before the curse."

The word landed in my chest like a dropped stone. "The curse."

"You don't know the story." It was not really a question, but I shook my head anyway, and something in his expression shifted, weighing whether to say more.

Before he could decide, the horn sounded from the pack hall, three long notes calling the feast to order, and his face closed like a door.

"Go," he said. "Get in position with the other Omegas before someone notices you're not there. We'll talk about this later."

I did not want to go. I wanted to shake the rest of the story out of him right there in the courtyard. But an Omega defying a direct order from an Enforcer in front of a feast crowd gathering by the second was not a story that ended well for the Omega, so I went, locket cold against my collarbone, heart going faster than the walk should have justified.

The pack hall was already full when I slipped into the back rows reserved for lower ranks, torches blazing along both walls, both packs' colors hung side by side over a long central floor kept clear for the ceremony. Sable found me in the crowd and grabbed my sleeve.

"You look worse than before," she muttered. "What happened."

I did not get the chance to answer. Alpha Alaric rose at the head table, and the entire hall dropped into silence so complete I could hear my own pulse in my ears.

"Tonight," Alaric said, voice carrying easily to every corner without him raising it, "we seal thirty years of peace between the Ashveil and Duskmoor bloodlines." He gestured, and Elara rose from her seat, composed, beautiful, utterly still in the way of someone who has practiced looking unbothered. "My son, Kieran, will take her as his bonded mate, sanctioned by pack law, sealed tonight by pack magic before both our peoples."

Kieran stood beside her. He did not look at her. For one terrible, electric second, across an entire hall of two hundred wolves, he looked at me instead, and I felt the mate pull surge so hard my knees actually buckled, Sable's hand shooting out to catch my elbow before anyone noticed.

"Rhen," she hissed. "Eyes down. Now."

I dropped my gaze, chest heaving, and missed whatever Alaric said next, missed the exact moment the ceremony began, because I was too busy trying to breathe around a bond that had apparently decided the rules of the room did not apply to it.

Then the hall gasped, all at once, a single sound like wind through dry leaves, and my head snapped back up.

Kieran had stepped away from Elara. Not far. A single step, but in a hall built entirely on ceremony and precision, a single step was an earthquake. Elara's face had gone white with something that was not quite hurt and not quite relief, an expression I did not have time to decode before Alaric's voice cracked across the hall like a whip.

"Kieran." One word, and it carried every year of expectation he had ever placed on his son. "What are you doing."

Kieran's eyes were still on me, and this time he did not look away, did not bury it the way I imagine he had promised someone he would.

"I felt the pull tonight," he said, loud enough for the whole hall, loud enough for it to be unable to be unheard. "I am not going to stand here and lie to two packs about which mate I've already found."