3

The moon rose at ten past nine.

I spent the three hours before it locked in the omega bathroom with the tap running so no one could hear me being sick. It was a tiny room with a cracked mirror and a bar of soap shaped like a thumb, and I knew every inch of it, because it was where I had always gone to cry. I sat on the cold tiles and held my knees and rocked, and after the second hour I started to hear something under the sound of the water, a low, steady whining, like a dog outside a door.

It was Wren. She had not stopped since the forest.

"Talk to me," I whispered.

"I can't." Her voice came out of the dark, small and raw. "It hurts too much to talk."

"Is it the bond?"

"It's pulling. Sage, I can feel it pulling. Like a hook behind the ribs." She made a sound that was almost a laugh. "It's real. It's him. The Goddess gave us him, and he's the one who did that."

I pressed my forehead to my knees. For two years I had told myself that fate could not be wrong. I had said the words in the dark, over and over, like a prayer, and now I understood that I had been praying to someone who did not mind how it ended.

I told myself I would not go to the ceremony. I told myself I would climb out of the cracked window and keep walking until Silverwood was a smudge behind me. Then the moon came up behind the clouds, pale and swollen, and the golden thread tugged hard at my chest, and I found myself at the door with my hand on the latch.

Wren was right. It was a hook. It did not care what I wanted.

I changed into a plain gray dress, because the blue one was in the mud, and I pinned my hair back with fingers that would not stop shaking. At the edge of the training field a hand caught my arm.

It was Mara, the old omega who ran the pack kitchen, round and gray-haired and perpetually smelling of onions. She was the only person in Silverwood who had ever slipped me extra bread, and she looked at my face now with an expression I had never seen on her, a hard, flat watchfulness like a woman checking a pot for burning.

"Whatever he says tonight," she whispered, "don't let it be the last thing you hear. You hear me, girl? Don't you dare let it be the last thing."

"Mara, what do you know?"

"I know that boy's father sits too close to his ear." Her eyes flicked toward the platform, then back. She pressed my hand between both of hers. "Keep your chin up. And don't take off that necklace."

She vanished into the crowd before I could ask what she meant.

The whole pack had gathered in a ring under the rising moon, lanterns glowing, silver ribbons tied to the fence posts. The air smelled of woodsmoke and roasted meat. A line of nineteen-year-olds waited at the center of the field with their faces scrubbed and nervous, and I took my place at the end of it. People looked at me. Some of the women whispered behind their hands. A few of them were already smiling, and I knew that smile. It was the one you wear when you are waiting for somebody to trip.

They knew. They all knew.

Alpha Jaxon stepped up onto the stone platform with Tanya at his side. She wore the blue dress, rinsed and re-pinned, and she held his arm as if it already belonged to her. Elder Marcus stood behind them with his hands folded and his thin mouth curled up at one corner, and he was looking at me, not at his son.

"Wolves of Silverwood," Jaxon said, and his voice carried across the field. "Tonight the Goddess shows us who we belong to. And tonight, I will not hide from her will."

The moon cleared the tree line. Light poured over the field, and the golden thread in my chest snapped taut so hard it stole my breath. Around me a dozen young wolves gasped. A boy two places up fell to his knees in tears, and a girl across the ring broke from the line and ran straight into someone's arms, laughing and sobbing together.

My thread pulled me toward the platform. Toward Jaxon.

He felt it too. I watched it strike him. His shoulders locked, and his eyes found mine across the crowd, and for one fragile second I thought, maybe. Maybe he'll stop. Maybe he'll say he's sorry.

His lip curled.

"Sage Sterling," he said. "Step forward."

I walked. I do not remember my feet moving. Hundreds of faces blurred on either side of me, and Wren was howling in grief before he had said a word, because she already knew.

"The Goddess has named you my fated mate." He let the silence stretch. Someone in the crowd tittered. "And I, Alpha Jaxon Vance of the Silverwood Pack, reject you, Sage Sterling, as my mate and as my Luna."

The pain tore through me like a blade. It did not feel like a feeling. It felt like something physical being ripped out of my body, vein by vein, and I dropped to my knees in the wet grass. Wren screamed, a thin animal sound that scraped the inside of my skull, and I clutched my chest as if I could hold the pieces together with my hands. My vision went white at the edges. I tasted blood where I had bitten my tongue.

Nobody moved to help me. Not one person.

"Look at her," Jaxon said, over my head, to the whole field. "An omega. Weak. Small. A Luna must protect this pack, and Sage could not protect a field mouse. Tonight I choose a she-wolf worthy of the title." He turned and drew Tanya forward. "My chosen mate, Tanya Blackwood."

The crowd erupted. Some cheered. Some laughed. Not one of them looked ashamed, and I thought, absurdly, of all the extra bread Mara had hidden in my pockets, and of how a person can starve in a room full of people who have eaten.

And then, quietly, so quietly I almost missed it, the little silver moon pendant my mother had left me grew warm against my breastbone.

It grew hot. It grew hot enough to burn.

Elder Marcus had stopped smiling. He was staring at my throat, then at my face, and the color drained out of his skin as if somebody had pulled a plug. His lips moved. I could not hear what he said, but I saw the shape of it, and it looked very much like a name.

"Get her out of here," he said sharply. "Now."

I did not wait for anyone to touch me. I got up off my knees, and I ran for the one border no omega had ever crossed.