Chapter 2

Point of view: Kade

“Tonight the moon turns red, and you will stand in front of both packs and make a promise you do not believe in,” my father said. “Do not embarrass me.”

I had heard some version of that sentence my whole life, but never quite so close to something I could not undo. Tonight was the arrival ceremony. Tomorrow, or the day after, would be the wedding itself. The treaty had a clock built into it, and that clock ran on the blood moon, the one night a month when a wolf’s instincts sat closest to the surface and every oath sworn carried the weight of law.

My father, Alpha Magnus Ashborn, stood at the edge of the courtyard in his ceremonial coat, watching the road for the Thorne wagon like a man watching for a storm he had already decided to survive. He had built this pack back up from ash after the war took my mother, and he had done it with rules instead of feeling. Rule number one, the one he repeated most: an Alpha’s choices belong to the pack, not to his own heart.

“I know my duty,” I told him.

“Then act like it. Whatever this girl is, she is not your mate. She is a treaty with a heartbeat. Do not let anyone in that courtyard think otherwise, especially not her.”

Ronan fell into step beside me as we walked toward the gates, close enough that only I could hear him. We had grown up together, trained together, buried people together, and there were very few things he did not say to my face.

“You look like a man walking to his own funeral,” he said.

“Feels about right.”

“For what it’s worth, the Thorne pack is weak enough now that this marriage barely costs us anything. You get a wife who stays out of your way, we get to stop bleeding soldiers on a border nobody even remembers starting a war over.”

“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“No,” Ronan said. “It’s supposed to make you do your job.”

The gates opened as the sun dropped low enough to turn orange, and somewhere behind the trees, I felt the pull of the coming moon start to rise in my blood, the low hum every wolf feels before a blood moon night, sharper senses, thinner patience, instincts crowding closer to the surface than any other night of the month. It was the worst possible night to meet a stranger and pretend not to care.

The wagon came into view first, then the four wolves I had sent to escort it, then the Thorne Alpha himself climbing down looking older and more tired than I remembered from the treaty negotiations. And then her.

She stepped down from the wagon slowly, chin lifted like she was daring the entire courtyard to look away first, and the moment her boots touched Ashborn ground, something inside my chest turned over so hard it nearly took my breath.

It was not attraction. I had felt attraction before, plenty of times, and it had never once made my wolf go silent and screaming at the same moment, some animal part of me suddenly, violently certain that everything else in the courtyard, my father, the treaty, the century of blood between our packs, had stopped mattering compared to the woman standing forty feet away in a borrowed looking dress with her fists clenched at her sides.

Mate.

The word arrived in my head whole, uninvited, and completely unwelcome.

I had spent my whole adult life believing the mate pull was a story told to children, or worse, a trap my father warned me about constantly, the exact kind of blind devotion that had let the Vane pack manipulate wolves into starting a war that cost him everything. I did not want to feel this. I had planned, very specifically, not to feel this.

She looked up and found my eyes across the courtyard, and I watched the same shock hit her face, quick and involuntary before she smoothed it away into something careful and unreadable. So it was not only me. That should have made it easier. It made it so much worse.

“Alpha Ashborn,” her father said, stepping forward with a bow that did not quite reach his eyes, “may I present my daughter, Ivy.”

I made myself walk forward. Made myself take her hand, which was cold and steadier than I expected, and made myself say the ceremonial words while the blood moon rose fat and red over the tree line, sealing them the way it seals every promise made on this one particular night, permanent, undeniable, the kind of vow our law does not let a wolf take back.

“Under this moon,” I said, the old words rough in my mouth, “I accept this joining, for the peace of both our packs.”

Her eyes did not leave mine. “Under this moon,” she said, “I accept it also.”

Her voice shook, just slightly, on the last word. I was the only one close enough to hear it.

We were led inside for the formal dinner that followed, two long tables of Ashborn and Thorne wolves eyeing each other like the century of war between us might restart over the soup course, and I spent the entire meal aware of her the way you are aware of a held breath, every small movement, the way she answered questions about herself half a second too slowly, like she was translating the answers from somewhere else first.

Ronan noticed it too. I caught him watching her from across the room more than once, head tilted slightly, the exact expression he wore when a piece of a plan did not fit the way it was supposed to.

Afterward, alone in my study with the blood moon still burning outside my window, I tried to tell myself the pull would fade once the shock wore off, that instinct was not the same thing as truth, that my father’s law existed for exactly this reason, to keep an Alpha’s judgment from being swallowed whole by something he could not control.

I almost believed it, until Ronan knocked, let himself in without waiting for an answer, and closed the door behind him with the careful quiet of a man about to say something he knew I did not want to hear.

“I need to tell you something about the bride,” he said, “and I don’t think you’re going to like it.”