Chapter 7

Selene POV

"Your grandmother never told you," Garrett said. It was not a question.

I sat across from him at the long table in the packhouse dining room with both hands wrapped around a mug of tea and the morning light coming through the windows at a low angle. Petra had brought me up the mountain path after breakfast because Garrett had asked to speak with me and Petra had described it as urgent in the way she described most things, with a directness that left no room for delay.

Garrett was perhaps seventy, with white hair and the deeply lined face of a man who had spent his life outdoors. His eyes were sharp and brown and kind.

"Tell me what?" I said.

He folded his hands on the table. "Helena Voss was not simply a lone wolf who owned a cabin on neutral ground. She was a Voss woman. And Voss women have a specific bloodline history that your pack, Blackridge, would not have known to tell you about because it is not documented outside of the old mountain records."

I set my mug down. "Garrett."

"I am getting there." He reached beside him and lifted a worn leather journal onto the table. "This belonged to your grandmother. She left it with me two years ago when she knew she was ill. She said to give it to you when you came to the mountain, but she also said you might not come for some time."

I stared at the journal. My grandmother's handwriting was on the cover, small and precise. My name. Just my name.

I picked it up and held it. "What does it say?"

"The parts that matter most are in the middle section," he said. "But I can tell you the summary if you prefer to hear it from a person first."

"Please," I said.

He was quiet for a moment, organizing his words. "Voss women carry a rare genetic marker. It is old, older than most current pack bloodlines. It is connected to the original lunar binding, the old magic that established mate bonds in the first generation of shifters." He paused. "Women with this marker do not always receive a single mate bond. Sometimes the moon assigns more than one."

The room was very still.

"More than one," I said.

"Two, in most cases. Occasionally three. The bonds are sequential rather than simultaneous, meaning they do not all activate at once. They activate as you encounter the individuals the moon has designated." He looked at me carefully. "You have already experienced two bonds."

"Damien was not a true bond," I said. "He was a mistake."

"He was not a mistake," Garrett said gently. "He was your first bond. The fact that he rejected it does not mean it was not real. It means he was not strong enough for what the moon asked of him." He paused. "The second bond is Colt."

"I know."

"What you may not know is that for a Voss woman, the second bond does not complete the sequence."

I looked at him. "There is a third."

"There is a third," he confirmed.

I sat back in my chair and breathed. Outside the window the mountain was doing its vivid beautiful thing, indifferent to the fact that the architecture of my life had just been quietly rearranged.

"Does Colt know this?" I asked.

"He knows the Voss bloodline history. His mother and your grandmother were close, as Petra may have told you. His mother shared the records with him when you arrived." Garrett's expression was steady and careful. "He wanted you to hear it from me rather than from him because he did not want you to feel as though he was using the information as leverage."

I almost laughed at that. It was such a precisely Colt thing to do.

"And the third bond," I said. "Do the records say anything about who it is?"

"The records say it will be someone connected to your path. The bonds are not random. They are connected to your purpose and your journey." He slid the journal closer to me. "Your grandmother writes about it in more detail than I can summarize. She experienced two bonds herself."

I looked at the journal. "She never told me."

"She was protecting you. She knew you were in a bond with someone who would not handle the knowledge well." He said it plainly and without judgment. "She waited until you were ready to know."

"How did she know I would be ready now?"

Garrett smiled. It was a slow and warm smile. "She said you would come to the mountain when you were finally done being small," he said. "Her words. She said Selene will make herself small for as long as she thinks she has to, and then one day she will stop, and that is when she will come."

My throat tightened.

I picked up the journal and held it against my chest for a moment, the way I would have held my grandmother herself if she had still been here.

"Thank you," I said.

"She loved you very much," he said. "Now drink your tea before it gets cold."

---

I sat on the packhouse porch for two hours with the journal in my lap and read every word my grandmother had written.

She wrote about the first bond, a man named Aldric who had been her mate from age twenty to thirty-one, when he was killed in the same border dispute that had taken Colt's father, though a generation earlier. She wrote about the grief of it, the particular devastation of losing a mate to violence, the way the bond did not simply end but tore.

Then she wrote about the quiet years. The years on the mountain alone.

Then she wrote about the second bond. A man named Joseph who had come to the mountain as a trader and stayed for twenty years and who she described as the steadiest person she had ever known.

She wrote about the Voss bloodline with the matter-of-fact clarity of a woman who had had decades to make peace with something extraordinary. She wrote about what she called the moon's architecture, the way the bonds were not accidents but intentions, the way each bond served a specific purpose in the life of the woman who carried them.

The first bond teaches you what love looks like from the outside, she had written. The second bond teaches you what it feels like from the inside. The third bond teaches you what it means.

I read that three times.

At the back of the journal there was a folded piece of paper. I opened it.

My grandmother's handwriting, but newer, more careful. Written recently.

*Selene. If you are reading this, you have come to the mountain and something has already begun. Do not be afraid of how much the moon has given you. Be afraid of how little you thought you deserved. Those two things are your only real battle. Everything else is just weather. I love you more than you know. Go be enormous.*

I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and breathed carefully until the tightening in my chest released.

Then I folded the letter and put it back in the journal.

Colt came out onto the porch and sat beside me in the other chair without speaking. He had a mug of coffee and he offered it to me and I took it and drank and handed it back.

"She was remarkable," I said.

"She was," he agreed.

We sat for a while in the mountain morning.

"You knew about the third bond," I said.

"I knew about the possibility of it," he said carefully.

"Does that concern you?"

He thought about this with the particular honesty I was beginning to expect from him. "It would be dishonest to say it does not require adjustment," he said. "But the moon does not make errors. If it is true for you, then I trust the intention behind it."

I looked at him. "That is a very evolved response."

"I have had a few days to think about it," he said, and there was a dry warmth in it that made me want to smile.

"I do not know who the third bond is," I said.

"No," he said. "But I suspect you will."

I looked out at the mountain and thought about my grandmother's words.

Go be enormous.

Somewhere below us on the south path, I heard boots on gravel. More than one set.

Petra appeared around the corner of the packhouse at a pace that was almost but not quite running, which from Petra meant something significant was happening.

"Colt," she said. "We have a situation at the east border."

He was on his feet immediately. "What kind?"

She looked between him and me with an expression that told me the situation involved both of us.

"There is a man at the east border," she said. "He says he is not here for Colt." She paused. "He says he is here for Selene. He says his name is Ezra Voss."

I went very still.

Ezra Voss was my cousin. My estranged cousin. The one my grandmother had quietly removed from her life fifteen years ago for reasons she had never fully explained.

"He should not know I am here," I said.

"He knows," Petra said. "And Selene." She hesitated. "He does not smell like pack. He smells like something else. Something older."

I looked at Colt.

Colt was already looking at me.

And underneath everything, underneath the surprise and the confusion and the sudden alertness of everyone on the porch, the bond in my chest did something it had not done before.

It reached.

Not toward Colt. Toward the east border.