Chapter 5: North

The pain in my leg had gone strange and distant, drowned out by something louder that I did not have a name for yet.

He was carrying me. The Blackthorn alpha, the man whose wolf had just torn out his own guard's throat over me, was carrying me north through the trees like I weighed nothing at all, and every part of my training was screaming at me to fight while some other part of my body, some part I did not recognize and did not trust, had gone quiet and strangely still against his chest.

"Put me down." My voice came out rougher than I wanted. "Put me down, or I swear to every god either of our packs believes in, I will make you regret it."

He did not answer. He did not even slow down.

I tried anyway. I got one arm free and drove my elbow back into his ribs as hard as the angle allowed, which was not very hard at all given the way he held me, but it was something, and he grunted like it had actually cost him effort to ignore it.

"Stop that," he said. His voice was low and rough, like the shift had not entirely left it yet.

"Give me a reason to."

"I could give you several. None of them will matter to you right now, so save your strength."

That answer made me angrier than anything he could have said, and I fought harder for it, twisting against his grip until the movement pulled at the wound on my leg and the mark on my neck both, and pain finally cut through whatever fog had been holding me quiet. I gasped, and he stopped walking entirely, and for one long moment neither of us moved.

"You're hurting yourself," he said, quieter now. "Stop fighting me and I will stop making this worse."

"You already made this as bad as it can possibly be."

Something crossed his face that I could not read. Guilt, maybe, or something closer to disbelief at his own actions. "I know."

I stopped fighting, not because he had convinced me of anything, but because my body had simply run out of strength to keep it up, and some small, humiliated part of me hated him for that more than for anything else he had done that morning.

The forest blurred past for a long time after that. I tried to track direction, distance, anything that might matter later if I found a way to run, but shock and blood loss made it difficult to hold a single thought steady. What I could not stop thinking about, underneath the fear and the fury, was my parents. My mother's face if she ever learned what had happened in that valley. My father's silence, worse than any anger he could have shown, at the daughter he had sent out to prove herself coming home marked by the one pack he hated most in the world.

If I came home at all.

We reached a stretch of road wide enough for a cart sometime past midday, and he set me down at last against a fallen log, more careful than I expected, and knelt to look at the wound on my leg without asking permission first.

"Don't touch me."

"It needs binding, or you will bleed through whatever I do next and slow us both down."

"I don't care what slows you down."

"I do." He said it simply, without heat, which somehow made it worse than if he had argued. He tore a strip from his own shirt and pressed it against the cut before I could stop him, and the moment the fabric touched skin, something in my chest pulled tight and warm in a way that had nothing to do with pain at all. I hated that my body responded to him like that. I hated it more than I had hated almost anything in my life.

"What is your name?" I asked, mostly to have something to focus on besides the sensation of his hands near the mark at my throat.

"Damian." He did not look up from the wound. "Damian Blackthorn."

The name landed like a second wound. Blackthorn. The pack my father had spent my entire childhood teaching me to fear and despise in equal measure, the pack whose guards I had been sent out to fight three days ago with no thought in my head beyond duty and pride. I had been marked, against every wish I had ever had, by the alpha of the one pack Silverwood would never forgive.

"You have to let me go," I said. "You have to understand what this means. My father will not stop. Your pack will not accept me. Nothing about this can end well for either of us."

He finished binding the wound and finally looked up, and whatever I expected to see in his face, it was not the quiet, uncertain honesty that was actually there.

"I know that better than you do," he said. "I have spent eleven years building a pack that trusts my judgment, and I just handed them a Silverwood mate in the middle of a border skirmish with my own guard's body still cooling on the ground. I know exactly what this costs. I do not have the option of pretending otherwise."

"Then let me go."

"I cannot."

"Cannot, or will not."

Something flickered across his face, tired and honest in a way I had not expected from an alpha with his reputation. "Both. The bond does not care what either of us wants right now. I wish I could tell you it did.

I looked down at the mark I could feel throbbing faintly at my shoulder, and then out at the unfamiliar tree line stretching north in every direction I could see, and understood, with a cold, sinking certainty, that whatever life I had been riding toward three days ago no longer existed. Somewhere behind us, my parents were about to learn that their daughter had been taken by the one pack they hated most, and somewhere ahead of us, a pack house full of people who had never wanted me was about to learn the same thing.

I did not cry. I promised myself I would not, not in front of him, not in front of anyone who wore the Blackthorn name. But something in my chest ached in a way that had nothing to do with the wound in my leg, and everything to do with the sudden, terrible understanding that fate had just made a decision about my entire life without bothering to ask me first.