Stay away from me

TESSA

I’m still reeling from the realization when the sharp scrape of Kaz’s chair cuts through the fog in my head.

“Ezra.”

Kaz crosses the room in three long strides and claps the other man on the shoulder with an ease that speaks volumes about their history.

“Didn’t expect you back until tomorrow.”

“Finished early.”

I hate that two words are enough to unravel me.

He doesn’t acknowledge the greeting beyond those two clipped words. His eyes are already back on me, locked there with an intensity that makes breathing feel like something I have to think about.

I press my nails into my palms, grounding myself in the sting. Don’t think.

“This is Tessa Thorne,” Kaz says, turning slightly toward me. “My bride-to-be.”

Bride-to-be.

The words land like a slap, and I watch Ezra’s face carefully for any crack in the surface—anger, surprise, the faintest flicker of recognition that mirrors even a fraction of what’s tearing through me right now.

There’s nothing. Not a seam, not a tremor.

“Nice to meet you.” He inclines his head, minimal, deliberate. My stomach drops. The bond is supposed to be mutual—instantaneous, impossible to override—but he’s standing there like I’m a stranger whose name he’ll forget before morning.

“You look exhausted,” Kaz observes. “Trip rough?”

“Long.” Ezra finally breaks his gaze from mine, and air rushes back into my lungs in a sharp gulp.

“I should clean up.” He’s already turning away, as though this entire interaction hasn’t just quietly rearranged something fundamental inside me.

“Stay for dinner. We just started.”

“I’ll pass.” No hesitation, no apology, no backward glance. “Welcome to Moonscar, Miss Thorne.”

The door clicks shut, and the sound moves through my bones like a struck bell. I stare at the empty space he left behind, heart pounding so violently I’m stunned Kaz can’t hear it from across the table.

“Don’t take it personally,” Kaz says easily, reaching for his wine. “Ezra’s never been good with new people.”

I nod, because I don’t trust my voice. My skin feels too tight, too hot, like something underneath it is straining toward a direction I can’t allow it to go, and the only thing that could have cooled it just walked away.

I reach for my wine and drain half the glass in one go. Get it together, Tessa.

By the time dinner ends, I’ve smiled so many times my face aches.

***

The moment my bedroom door shuts, my composure slips.

I sink onto the edge of the bed, staring at my hands trembling in my lap. The quiet makes everything sharper. My father is dead. I am in enemy territory. I am promised to a man I barely know.

And the mate bond—the one sacred thing the Goddess designed with some degree of mercy—has snapped into place with someone else entirely. Someone who looked straight through me and found nothing worth pausing for.

The knock at the door makes me flinch hard enough to hurt. Kaz, I assume.

I smooth my nightgown and straighten my spine. “Come in.”

The door opens.

It isn’t Kaz.

Ezra steps inside before I can process that he’s there, pulling the door shut behind him with a quietness that is somehow more alarming than if he’d slammed it. The lock clicks into place—a small, final sound.

Oh, Goddess.

“What are you—”

“We need to talk.”

His voice is stripped of the careful restraint he wore downstairs, something darker moving underneath it, held back by sheer will alone.

He moves toward me, and every instinct fires at once. I step back, then back again, until my spine meets the wall and there is nowhere left to go.

His heat reaches me before he does, then his scent hits—cedar and smoke and something devastatingly familiar—and my wolf surges awake so violently I nearly lose my footing.

He braces a palm flat against the wall beside my head, black ink spiraling up his forearm, and the cage he’s made involves no contact whatsoever, which somehow makes it worse.

I should push him away.

Instead, I stand frozen as he leans in, mouth beside my ear, breath hot across my neck.

“I don’t want this bond.”

Each word is precise, a blade finding the gap between ribs.

“I don’t want you—and you are going to keep your mouth shut about it. You don’t tell Kaz. You don’t tell anyone.”

His jaw grazes my cheek, rough stubble against sensitized skin, and I feel my breath hitch in a way I cannot stop.

“Do we have an understanding?”

His other hand braces against the wall opposite mine, leaving nothing but him—heat, scent, tension barely leashed.

“Answer me, Tessa.”

My name in his voice does something irreparable.

“Yes,” I whisper. “I understand.”

He holds the position for one unbearable heartbeat, close enough that I can see the pulse working in his throat, close enough that the smallest turn of my head would—

And then he pulls back.

The sudden absence of warmth lands like a physical loss, swift, humiliating, more honest than I want it to be.

He looks at me then—really looks—for the first time since he entered, and I see it all in a second: rigid control, restraint visibly costing him, hands fisted at his sides like he’s fighting himself as hard as he’s fighting whatever exists between us.

He feels it too. And he is choosing to reject it.

“Staying out of each other’s way would be best.”

Then he walks out, the door closing behind him with a softness that is somehow the worst part.

I slide down the wall until I’m sitting on the floor, his words seared into my skin like a brand, knowing with certainty that this is not an ending. This is only the beginning of something that will ruin us both.

***

The next evening I stand beside Kaz in a gown of midnight black that ripples like water with every movement—fitted, deliberate, and nothing like who I actually am. My makeup is flawless, my hair hours in the making. I am the picture of what they want me to be, assembled carefully from the outside in while everything underneath remains unrecognizable.

Kaz’s hand rests at the small of my back, warm, possessive, and belonging to the wrong man entirely.

He lets the silence work first, the way powerful men do, waiting until every pair of eyes in the great hall has found him.

“Ninety days,” he announces. “In ninety days, Tessa Thorne becomes my wife, and this pack gains its rightful Luna.” The corner of his mouth lifts. “I suggest you accord her every respect the position demands.”

The reaction fractures immediately—cheers rising from one side while murmurs ripple through the other. Not everyone is pleased, and I file that away quietly. Knowing who your enemies are before they announce themselves seems like the kind of thing that keeps you alive.

Kaz raises his glass, declares that the food should be eaten and the night enjoyed, and just like that the formality dissolves into noise, candlelight, and the bright clink of glasses. I drift toward the food tables, stomach rumbling, eyes scanning the crowd, snagging on every dark-haired silhouette before moving on. I don’t find him.

The spread before me is unlike anything I’ve encountered—whole roasted meats glistening under firelight, towers of steaming bread, deep-colored sauces, glazed vegetables arranged with casual abundance. My pack’s feasts had been modest. Standing here now, I understand what it means to have excess as a declaration: this pack wants for nothing, and they want you to know it.

I reach for a plate when I hear two women nearby, voices low and careless.

“She’s pretty enough, I suppose, but pretty doesn’t make a Luna.”

“He’ll be bored within a month. Her pack was barely a pack from what I’ve heard—Kaz will realize what he’s taken on eventually.”

They laugh, light and easy. I set my plate down quietly and walk away, moving toward the edges of the courtyard where torchlight thins and noise softens. I’m just beginning to feel something close to breathing again when a whistle cuts through the air, the smell of alcohol reaching me before I’ve fully turned.

I don’t recognize the man. His eyes are glassy, stance loose, the sour reek of booze clinging to him, and he looks at me like I belong to him already. His gaze drags over me, lingering, and when he smiles, it turns my stomach.

“I was enjoying the ceremony,” he says, slurred. “But something tells me it’s about to get a whole lot better.”

I turn and walk away, almost running, toward the warmth of my room. The front doors come into view, and I let out a breath I’ve been holding for hours.

The hand clamps around my arm, wrenching me off balance. “Not so fast, sweetie.” Hot, liquor-soaked breath against my ear. My eyes dart around—this side of the courtyard is empty, too far from the crowd, the music loud enough to swallow my voice.

I twist my arm, drive my elbow back, but he catches me easily, other hand tangling in my hair. Pain shoots across my scalp as he shoves me backward until cold stone meets my spine and drives the air from my lungs.

“This doesn’t have to be hard.”

“Leave me alone,” I grit, voice cracking. “Or I’ll scream.”

He laughs—loud, jagged. “No one’s coming for you. You know what you are? Nothing. A girl from a scraped-together pack. You’re not a Luna. You’ll never be a Luna.” His grip forces me downward, knees cracking against stone, and bile surges as the slow clink of a belt being undone cuts through the celebration.

He whistles something tuneless and wrong, like I’m entertainment.

Tears burn, though I refuse to let them fall. I pray, formless, desperate.

“Now be a good girl—”

“You might want to reconsider that.”

The voice is calm, but the edge beneath it shifts the air—cold, absolute, the quiet before catastrophe. The hand over my mouth loosens just enough, and relief nearly takes my legs from under me.

I know that voice.

Kaz’s hand closes around the back of the man’s neck like a vice, hauling him up until his feet hang uselessly off the ground. Heat rolls off Kaz—unrestrained, volcanic, nothing like the man at dinner.

“You will never again touch what’s mine.”

His hand plunges into the man’s chest with a sound that freezes me. Then he pauses, turns toward me, and our eyes meet—possession, fury, and something beneath both that feels almost like anguish.

When he pulls back, the body drops, hollowing out the surrounding air. I stare at the stillness, at the heart in Kaz’s hand, and realize he just killed a man.