Chapter 3

Audrey

He opens his mouth. "Aud, I was going to tell—"

The slap lands before I finish deciding to do it. Open palm. The exact same place he hit me this morning. He reels back.

The room makes a noise — Nadia's sharp inhale, Lucille's outraged half-syllable.

I am not finished.

The second one lands before anyone can say anything — harder, the full force of the eight months of our bond and a *I can still smell him on you* — and this one snaps his head to the side and leaves us both breathing in the silence of my father's study with the amber lamp and the dark wood walls and the three people watching us.

"Audrey!" My father's voice cracks like a command.

I ignore him.

I look at Rhys.

He is looking back at me now — finally, fully, the way he should have been looking at me all along — with his hand pressed to his jaw and his eyes wide and something in them that might be shame or might be shock and is probably both.

"I reject you," I say.

His eyes grow wider. “Audrey—"

"I, Audrey Calloway," I say, and my voice is steady as a surgical line, "reject you, Rhys, as my mate. Fully. Completely. And without condition."

The bond reacts like a thread pulled too fast, snapping back from both ends. I feel it go through my chest like a current and then a hollow, specific silence where something used to be.

My eyes water. I don't let them do anything else.

Rhys makes a sound — low, involuntary, the sound of his side of it snapping too.

"Accept it," I say.

"Aud—"

"Accept it, Rhys. Right now."

He looks at me for a long moment with those wide eyes and whatever is sitting behind his expression that I am not going to spend any more of tonight trying to read.

"I accept," he says. Quiet. Raw. "I, Rhys, accept the rejection."

The last of it goes.

I have no word for what the absence feels like. I don't think there is one. It is not pain, exactly — it is the specific feeling of a space that used to be occupied, which is different and in some ways worse, because pain at least has a shape.

Something rises in my throat. I press my lips together.

It doesn't hold — one thin trail escapes, copper-warm, and I feel it reach my chin before I catch it with the back of my hand and close my hand and look at no one.

I turn toward the door.

"Audrey." My father's voice. "Wait."

"I'm going to bed—"

"There is another reason I called you here."

“It can wait till the morning,” I yank the door open.

“You're getting married by morning.”

The words hit the back of my head as I'm already halfway through the door.

"I'm sorry,"I turn around slowly. "Say that again."

My father's face hasn't changed. He sits behind his desk with his hands folded and his eyes on mine and he says it again, same tone, same measured register.

"You're getting married," he says. "And you'll be leaving for Ironhold by morning."

I look at him for a long moment.

Then I look at the room.

Rhys is staring at my father with his jaw slightly open and the hand he'd pressed to his cheek dropped to his side, forgotten. Whatever he came here expecting tonight, it was not this. Nadia, who is never caught without her composure, is sitting very straight with her eyes on her husband and something in her expression that is not quite confusion and not quite alarm and is entirely unlike her. Lucille's winning expression is gone. In its place is something raw and unguarded — genuine shock, the kind that doesn't have time to arrange itself — and she is looking between me and our father with the specific face of someone who just realized the board had more pieces than they knew.

None of them knew.

"Ironhold?"

"Yes."

"As in Ironhold Regional Pack?"

"Yes."

I March right up to the front of his desk. "How did an arranged marriage happen?"

He unfolds his hands. He folds them again. "The Council of Wolves sent a directive," he says. "Three weeks ago. A formal request — a demand, in practical terms — that Ashveil contribute a daughter to the Ironhold alpha's household. As a bonding arrangement. A political consolidation of the northern territories."

"The Council," I say.

"Yes."

"Sent you a letter."

"Yes."

"Asking for a daughter."

"Requesting," he says. "The language was requesting."

"Dad." My voice comes out soft. Softer than I intended. "We both know the difference between a request from the Council of Wolves and an actual request."

He says nothing.

"It can't be revoked," I say. "A Council directive. If you refuse it—"

"The pack would bear the consequences." He looks at me steadily. "Yes. I know."

"So you agreed."

"I agreed."

I press my lips together. The copper taste is still in the back of my throat from the rejection — faint now, but there — and my cheek still has Rhys's morning across it, and I am standing in my father's study at nearly midnight in a robe over an oversized shirt, and my father has just told me I am leaving for Ironhold by morning.

I take a breath.

"You agreed," I say, "while I was still bonded to Rhys."

A pause.

"The directive specified availability," he says. "There were — complications, with the timing."

"Complications." I look at him. "Dad. You agreed to give me to a regional alpha while I was still bonded to my fated mate."

"The bond has been—"

"The bond was dissolved twenty minutes ago in this room." I keep my voice level. It costs me something. "Twenty minutes ago. After eight months. Because of a pregnancy that had been happening for at least three of those months." I look at Lucille, then back at him. "How long have you known about Lucille?"

Silence.

"How long?" I say.

"A month," Nadia says, from her chair.

I look at her. She meets my eyes with the specific steadiness of a woman who has calculated the cost of every word she says before she says it, and has decided that this one is manageable.

"A month," I repeat.

"The situation needed to be managed carefully," she says.

"Managed." The word comes out flat. "My mate was having a baby with my sister for a month while you managed it. While I was still bonded to him, going to work, performing surgeries, living in this house."

Nobody says anything.

"And the Council directive," I turn to my father now, “was received three weeks ago, knowing about Lucille.”

My father looks at me unable to refute that he tried to protect Lucille's situation first.

I have lived in this house for seventeen years.

I have performed surgeries under my half sister's name. I have received no salary because my stepmother convinced my father that shelter was sufficient compensation for a fully booked neurosurgeon. I have attended pack functions as Dorian Calloway's invisible first daughter, stood at the edges of rooms I was technically entitled to be in the centre of, and I have done all of this while building a private practice in the dark and saving money in a secret account for a life in Valencia that nobody knows about.

And tonight I rejected my mate, tasted my own blood, and am now being told I will be on a road to Ironhold before the sun comes up.

I think about the number in my bank account.

I think about my mother's urn on the shelf in my room.

I think about the particular clarity that comes, sometimes, when everything that was already broken finishes breaking and the rubble settles and you can finally see the ground clearly.

"Okay," I say.

My father blinks. "Okay?" 

"I'll go." I look at him. "I'll go to Ironhold. I'll marry the regional alpha. I'll honour the Council directive."

“Audrey!” Rhys’s voice sounds like nails on chalkboard which I ignore.

"But I have conditions."

The room is very quiet.

My father leans back slightly in his chair — the specific lean of a man recalibrating. "Audrey—"

"They're not negotiable," I say. "And if you want me to leave willingly by morning, without making this complicated, you'll hear them."

He looks at me for a long moment. Then he nods. “What are they?”