Chapter 30 — Damian on His Knees

I made him wait in the rain.

Not long. Long enough. Long enough for the press pool to get cold and curious, long enough for the clip to start its life on every screen that had spent a week calling me a monster — the rogue White Lycan's gate, and who is this kneeling in the road — long enough that whatever happened next would happen in front of the entire country Cyrus had turned against me.

If a man is going to grovel, you do not waste the audience.

Then I walked out into the rain alone, no coat, no crown, no guards at my shoulder, because I have always walked toward the men who wronged me alone or not at all. The cameras swung to me. The rain plastered my hair to my face. And there, in the mud of the gate road, soaked through his fine Mooncrest grey, knelt the man who had stood up in white five years ago and told three hundred people he was ashamed of me.

Damian Blackwood looked up, and the rain ran down his face, and he had the decency to look like a man who finally understood the size of his own mistake.

"Aurora," he said. "I—"

"On the ground, you already are. Good. Stay there." My voice carried; I made it carry. "You wanted me to come out. I'm out. So say it. All of it. In front of them." I didn't look at the cameras. I didn't have to. "You've never once in your life had to mean an apology where people could hear you. Today you do."

The rain came down harder, as if the sky had decided to help. The cameras drank it in. Somewhere in a tower in Argent, I knew, a silver-templed man was watching this feed with the rest of the country — and I wanted him to watch every second of it, because Cyrus Voss had spent a week telling the world I was a monster, and here was a wolf of an old, proud pack kneeling in the mud of my gate, about to tell them all what the monster really was.

Damian looked at me, and the old arrogance tried to surface — the reflex of a man who'd been handsome and high-born his whole life — and then it died, because there was nothing in my face to perform for.

He swallowed. The smug heir was gone; the rain had washed him down to something smaller and truer.

"I rejected you," he said. "At the mating ceremony. In front of the pack. I called you a charity case. I told everyone the Goddess had made a mistake when she fated us, because you were wolfless, and wolfless was beneath the heir of Mooncrest." His voice cracked. "I chose status. I chose a woman with eleven thousand head of pack because I thought a mate was a transaction and you were a bad one. I have never been more wrong about anything in my life, and I have had five years and a thousand sleepless nights to count exactly how wrong."

"Keep going."

"You were never wolfless. You were the most powerful bloodline alive, hidden in the one girl I was handed by fate and threw away for arithmetic." He bowed his head into the rain. "I had the one thing every wolf prays for. A fated mate. And I looked at the gift of my entire life and I called it not enough." The rain came down. "I'm not asking you to take me back. I know what you are now, and I know whose mark you wear, and I know I was never the man who deserved to stand beside it. I'm asking you to let me kneel here long enough for the whole world to watch me say that the wolfless girl Mooncrest threw away is worth more than every wolf who threw her."

I let the silence sit. I let the rain fill it. I let the whole country watch the heir of Mooncrest kneel in the mud to a woman their Regent had told them to fear.

And I understood, standing over him, that this was the thing fate had done: it had handed me to a man who threw me away, so that I could choose a man who chose me back. The bond at my throat — cracked as it was, cold as it had gone — was still the only thing in my life I had ever truly picked. Fate gave me Damian. I gave myself Kael. And kneeling in the rain between those two facts, I had never been more certain which one made me a queen.

I thought of Kael, three days cold, somewhere behind me in the house, feeling all of this through the bond I'd walled off. I didn't soften the wall enough to know if he heard it. But I felt him go still on the other side of it — the way a man goes still when something he's afraid he's lost reaches out in the dark and brushes his hand.

"Get up," I said at last. "You've groveled enough for the cameras. Now tell me the real reason you drove through a war to kneel at my gate. Because Damian Blackwood has never in his life done a single thing for an audience that he wasn't also doing for himself."

He got up. Slowly. Soaked, and shaking, and something new in his face now — not shame. Fear.

"Because you're the only one strong enough to stop it," he said, low, for me and not the cameras now. "And because I owe you, and a debt's the only thing I've got left worth spending." He wiped the rain from his eyes. "Mooncrest is being bought out from under me, Aurora. Quietly. Pack by pack, alpha by alpha, debt by debt. It started with the Highcrest match — Liana's father took the first coin and turned, and once he did, the rest read which way the wind was blowing. Liana herself was married off again inside a month, passed to a Voss cousin like a deed changing hands — the last I heard she was somewhere in the capital, bored in a finer cage, which is the only ending men like her father ever buy their daughters. Someone's been moving on my territory for weeks now, turning my own wolves, and doing it so cleanly I didn't see it until half my pack already answered to another hand." His jaw tightened. "I came to grovel because I meant every word of it. But I drove here through your war because I'm out of time, and there's exactly one name behind the money, and you already know it."

"Say it anyway."

"You want me to say it on camera." Damian almost laughed, rain in his teeth. "You want the whole country to hear a Mooncrest alpha name the Regent as the man buying wolves out from under him. You want me to do your war's first work for you — kneeling in the road, in front of every screen he owns."

"I want the truth said out loud by someone who isn't me," I said. "He spent a week giving the world his story. You're going to give them a crack in it. That's the price of the gate opening, Damian — the truth, on the record, where he can't fold it into his grief."

He understood. I watched him understand — that I hadn't made him kneel for vanity, that the rain and the cameras and the waiting had been a single move, and that the wolfless girl he'd thrown away had become a woman who could turn even a grovel into a weapon.

Damian looked at me through the rain, the heir of a pack that was no longer entirely his.

"Cyrus Voss is buying my pack."