The wrong mate

TESSA

The car door closes behind me with a finality that feels like a coffin being closed, and Marcus is still standing there when I turn to look through the tinted glass — his face is pale, hands hanging uselessly at his sides, watching me be taken away with the helpless stillness of a man who already knows there’s no fixing this. I press my palm flat against the window before I can stop myself.

He doesn’t move.

The engine hums and the car pulls away, and I watch him shrink in the darkened glass until the road bends and swallows him whole. I face forward and don’t cry, because crying would mean accepting this is real, and I’m not quite ready for that yet.

Kaz Ryker sits on the other side of the backseat, one arm resting along the window ledge, gaze fixed ahead. He hasn’t looked at me once since we left. The silence between us isn’t empty — it has weight and shape, pressing into my ribs like a third presence consuming all the remaining air.

Hours pass before he speaks.

“You should eat.”

His voice is calm and unhurried, like this is ordinary, like we are ordinary, like I haven’t just been taken from everything I’ve ever known.

I glance over despite myself. He’s holding out a small box — real food, not the usual dry wartime rations, and the scent reaches me before I can brace for it, my stomach tightening with a hunger I refuse to acknowledge.

“I’m fine.”

It’s a stupid lie and we both know it, but I won’t take anything from him. He studies me for a long moment, then sets the box on the seat between us without argument, and somehow that quiet acceptance unsettles me more than if he’d insisted.

The silence thickens again until he finally says, “You’re shaking.” Not concern, just observation, delivered with the same detachment he might use to note the weather.

“Don’t pretend you care,” I snap.

He turns his head slowly, assessing me like I’m something he’s still figuring out. “If I didn’t care,” he says evenly, “you’d be dead.”

The words settle somewhere uncomfortable in my chest, and I hate that they do.

By midday the car slows to a stop, and the driver steps out. Kaz reaches for his door without looking at me.

“We’re stopping for a few minutes. Stretch your legs if you want.”

“I’m fine here.”

“Suit yourself.”

The door shuts, and he’s gone. I exhale like I’ve been holding my breath for hours, and I might as well have. I uncurl my hands and stare at the half-moon impressions my nails have left in my palms, evidence of everything I’m not allowing myself to say.

He’s attractive in the way storms are attractive, the kind of thing you can recognise as beautiful and still know with every instinct you possess will undo you completely if you stand in it too long.

I press my fingers against my eyes and breathe through it until the door opens again and he slides back in, unhurried, filling the space like he never left it, and we’re moving again before I’ve done anything useful with the time at all.

“Why me?”

The question escapes before I can stop it. He glances over, one brow slightly lifted. “What?”

“You could’ve taken Marcus’ head,” I say, steadier than I feel. “Ended it clean. So why didn’t you?”

Silence stretches between us, long enough that I begin to think he won’t answer, and then he finally says, “Because I didn’t want his head.”

“Then what did you want?”

He turns fully toward me, his gaze locking onto mine with a weight that does something entirely unwanted to my breathing.

“You.”

No hesitation, no apology, no qualification. Like it was never a choice at all.

Heat crawls up my neck and I look away, watching the landscape bleed from grey to black outside the window as the hours carry me further from everything I’ve ever known.

***

Moonscar territory emerges from the dusk like something inevitable.

Stone walls tower high enough to make my pack’s defenses look like children’s play. Beyond the gates, buildings stretch inward for miles, training grounds wider than our entire land, everything built with the quiet certainty of people who have never once considered losing.

The car passes through the gates and people stop to look — curiosity, suspicion, and something that might be pity moving through the crowd in a slow, rolling wave. I lift my chin and stare straight ahead, because whatever I am here, I won’t be something they watch break.

Kaz leads me inside through a stone corridor warmed by firelight and lined with tapestries with histories I might never know about, stopping at the foot of a staircase.

“Your room is the second door on the right. Someone will bring you clothes. Dinner is in two hours.”

I nod once, and he pauses — just a beat too long — his hand lifting slightly at his side before dropping back to it. Whatever he was going to say, he decides against it, turning and leaving without looking back, and I stand there listening to his footsteps fade until the silence is total.

***

Two hours later I’m dressed in deep emerald green that fits like it was made for me, which somehow makes it worse. I sit at a long candlelit table across from Kaz, who has traded his black armor for dark trousers and a white shirt with the sleeves pushed to the elbows. He looks less like a warlord and, annoyingly, more dangerous for it.

“This is a welcome dinner,” he says, pouring wine. “For you.”

“I don’t feel very welcome.”

His mouth moves, almost a smile, but it doesn’t quite arrive.

“You will. Eventually.”

Food arrives, and my stomach betrays me immediately, growling loud enough that there’s no pretending he didn’t hear it. I eat slowly and carefully, trying to hold onto whatever dignity I have left.

“You fought well,” he says after a while, and I pause mid-bite, surprised enough to look up.

“Most fighters panic when the ground shifts under them. You didn’t.” He says it plainly, without flattery or performance. “Your brother did well by you.”

Something tightens in my throat at the mention of Marcus.

“He did,” I say, and take another bite, looking back down at my plate.

The silence that settles between us is almost bearable, which is somehow worse than if it weren’t, and I’m just beginning to think I might survive this dinner when a knock cuts through it and a guard steps in with a bow.

“Alpha. The Beta has returned.”

Something moves across Kaz’s face — unguarded warmth, genuine and unhidden, there and gone almost before it lands — and he straightens in his chair with an alertness that hadn’t been there a moment ago.

“Ezra’s back?”

“Yes, Alpha.”

He glances at me, and there’s something almost human in his expression.

“Ezra is more like a brother than a best friend, and even though he’s not usually a fan of people, i know he’ll want to meet you.”

The door opens, and the man who enters is tall and broad and dark-haired, moving with the unhurried ease of someone who has never needed to announce himself. His eyes sweep the room in one practiced pass —

And then they find mine, and the world fractures quietly down the middle.

It doesn’t build. It doesn’t warn. It simply arrives — heat slamming into me so suddenly my breath stutters mid-inhale, the stem of my wine glass slipping in my fingers and striking the edge of my plate with a sharp ringing note that cuts through the stillness of the room. My wolf surges forward with a force that steals what’s left of my breath, every instinct I possess straining toward him with a desperation that has nothing to do with choice and everything to do with something far older and more absolute than either of us.

Not Kaz. Him.

Across the room he has gone completely still — not subtly, not partially, but entirely, his shoulders locked and his hands curling slowly into fists at his sides, his chest rising once in a sharp involuntary breath like a man absorbing a blow he didn’t see coming. His eyes, ice-blue and suddenly blazing, hold mine with a recognition so stark and undeniable it turns my blood to static.

He feels it too.

The bond snaps into place between us like something ancient and irreversible, a line pulled tight in a single heartbeat.

My pulse roars in my ears.

Every instinct I possess is screaming at me to move toward him, to close the distance, to confirm what my wolf already knows.

To confirm that he’s my mate.