CHAPTER TWO

Sage’s POV

For a moment, neither of us moved.

Ethan Cross stood across the clearing in his dark jacket, the one he always wore to pack events, the torchlight catching the sharp lines of his face. I had seen him a hundred times before, at ceremonies, at gatherings, walking through the pack house with that quiet, heavy authority Alphas carry. But I had never really looked at him. Not like this. Not with my whole body screaming that he belonged to me.

His eyes were wide. Whatever he was feeling, it was written all over his face before he could hide it and for one second, just one, I saw something soften there. Something close to relief. Like a man who had been drowning for years and just felt solid ground under his feet.

Then his eyes moved past my face, taking in the rest of me and I watched that relief crumble into something else entirely.

He knew who I was.

Of course he knew. Everyone in Redhollow knew Vanessa’s little sister, the girl who survived when she shouldn’t have. And I watched, frozen in place, as recognition turned into confusion and confusion turned into something that looked a lot like horror.

He didn’t move toward me. An Alpha finding his mate is supposed to cross a room without thinking, pulled by instinct too strong to fight. Ethan stood exactly where he was, like his boots had grown roots into the ground.

People around him started to notice. I saw heads turning, following his stare, trying to figure out what had stopped their Alpha cold in the middle of his dead mate’s memorial. Someone said something to him. He didn’t answer.

I should have walked away right then. Instead, my feet carried me forward, some stubborn part of me refusing to be the one who ran first, not this time. I crossed the clearing with my chin up, even though my stomach was folding in on itself, even though every step felt like walking into a fire I already knew would burn me.

By the time I reached him, the whole gathering had gone quiet in that slow, spreading way, like a stone dropped in water.

“Sage,” he said. My name sounded strange in his mouth, careful, like he was testing whether it was really true.

“Yeah.” My voice came out steadier than I felt. “It’s me.”

He looked at me the way you look at a puzzle piece that doesn’t fit no matter how hard you try to force it. Like he was searching my face for some sign that this was a mistake, that his wolf had gotten it wrong, that any second now the real answer would appear.

“This isn’t…” he started, then stopped himself, jaw tightening. He glanced around at the crowd watching us, at the banner with Vanessa’s smiling face hanging just behind his shoulder and something in him seemed to close off completely. “We should talk somewhere else.”

“Why?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer sitting heavy in my chest. “So you can tell me in private that you wish it was her?”

His silence answered for him.

That silence hurt worse than anything he could have said out loud. I had spent five years being told, in a hundred small ways, that I was the sister who lived when I shouldn’t have. I had told myself I was used to it, that nothing anyone said or didn’t say could touch me anymore. I was wrong.

“Sage.” He said my name again, softer this time, reaching a hand toward me like he wanted to fix something he didn’t even have words for yet. “Give me a minute. Just…”

“No.” I stepped back before his hand could land on my arm. “You don’t get a minute. You don’t get anything from me right now.”

Someone in the crowd whispered something I couldn’t quite catch but I didn’t need to hear the words to know what it was. I could feel their stares crawling over my skin, the same way they always did, except now there was something new mixed into it, pity, maybe, or disbelief, or the ugly satisfaction of watching a story get even more tragic than it already was.

Ethan’s eyes hadn’t left mine, but there was a war happening behind them and I could see he was losing it. Whatever instinct was supposed to be pulling him toward me, screaming at him that I was his, it was fighting against five years of grief that had built its home inside him and wasn’t ready to move out.

“I need time,” he finally said, and the words landed like stones. “This isn’t what I expected.”

“You mean I’m not who you expected.”

He didn’t deny it.

I felt something inside me go very still and very cold, like a door closing somewhere deep in my chest. I thought about all the years I had spent hoping, quietly, secretly, that meeting my mate would finally be the moment someone chose me first. I thought about how stupid that hope looked now, standing in front of a man who was looking at me like I was a cruel trick the universe had played on him.

“Forget it,” I said and turned to leave before he could see whatever was happening on my face. “I won’t make this complicated for you.”

“Sage, wait…”

I didn’t wait. I walked straight through the crowd, past the whispers, past Mrs. Whitfield’s raised eyebrows, past my mother’s confused stare from somewhere near the front and I didn’t stop walking until I was well past the tree line and the noise of the gathering had faded into nothing behind me.

My hands were shaking by the time I reached the road. Not from the cold. From something closer to fury, tangled up with a grief I didn’t even know I still had room for.

Behind me, I could hear Ethan’s voice calling my name one more time, distant and useless.

I kept walking.