CHAPTER FIVE

ARIA

The silence that followed those words was so complete that I could hear my own heartbeat.

Let's get married.

I stood there and stared at him and waited for some part of my brain to catch up with what my ears had just processed. Nothing came. My mind had simply stopped, like a clock someone had yanked the battery out of, and I was left standing in the middle of his office at eight in the morning with absolutely no functioning response.

The moon goddess had a sick sense of humor.

That was the only explanation I had. Because I had gone through the last thirty-six hours like a person being dragged through water, barely keeping my head above the surface, and every time I thought I had found solid ground something else happened. My mate rejected me. He banished me. I wandered into the wrong territory. I got captured by wolves I had never met and hauled into a packhouse that looked like it had been built to intimidate people. I had managed to get through all of that without completely falling apart.

And now this man was standing across his desk looking at me like he had just said something completely reasonable.

It was my birthday yesterday. I had not expected a celebration. I had not expected anything good.

But I also had not expected this.

I exhaled slowly through my nose and tried to find my voice somewhere underneath the panic that was rapidly climbing up my throat.

"Alpha Kael." My voice came out steadier than I deserved credit for. "I, umm." I stopped. Started again. "I don't know how things work in your pack, but…" I searched for the most neutral way to phrase what I actually wanted to say, which was what in the name of every god is wrong with you. "Why do you want to marry me?"

He didn't flinch. He didn't blink more than he needed to. He just looked at me with that same steady, unreadable expression he had worn since the moment I met him in the forest, like he had anticipated the question and had already decided exactly how much of the answer he was going to give me.

"You were rejected by Logan," he said.

"I know that," I replied carefully. "I was there."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. "That rejection came with a banishment, which means you have no pack, no territory, and no protection." He said it plainly, not cruelly, just the way someone states weather. "You're unclaimed and alone and you walked directly into the border of a pack that Logan considers his primary threat. He will find out you're here. The question is what your position is when he does."

I felt the truth of that land somewhere in my stomach. I didn't like it but I couldn't argue with it.

"And marrying you solves that," I said slowly.

"Marrying me makes you untouchable," he said. "My Luna. My pack's protection. Logan has no legal claim over you and no standing to demand anything once you belong here."

The word belong landed oddly. Not badly, just strange. I hadn't belonged anywhere in a long time and I had definitely not belonged at Crescent Moon the way I had always told myself I did.

I looked at him carefully. He was watching me think through it, I could tell, watching me follow the logic the same way someone watches a chess piece move toward the square they already planned for.

That bothered me slightly.

"And what do you get out of it?" I asked.

The question seemed to interest him. He tilted his head a fraction. "Logan rejected you. Banished you. And he's going to spend the rest of his comfortable life assuming you crawled off into nothing." He paused. "I'd like to correct that assumption."

There it was.

I didn't know the full history between them, I had picked up enough in that single word he had muttered last night, typical, to know there was something real and ugly sitting between Kael and Logan. I didn't have the details and I wasn't sure he would give them to me even if I asked. But I understood the broad shape of it. Kael wanted to hit Logan with something. And I was what was available.

I should have been offended by that. Part of me was. But a larger, more honest part of me thought about Logan standing in front of the pack and saying I wasn't strong enough, thought about the way he hadn't even looked at me when he said it, and felt something sharp and ugly stir in my chest that I wasn't entirely proud of.

I wanted him to feel it too.

"You're offering me protection," I said. "And revenge."

"I'm offering you a position," he said. "What you do with the rest of it is your business."

I looked down at my hands for a moment. The rejection mark had faded to a dull soreness overnight, no longer the sharp burning thing it had been in the forest, but I could still feel the edges of it when I pressed. A reminder of exactly how little Logan had valued what the moon goddess gave him.

What she had given me.

I exhaled. "This is not a normal proposal."

"I'm not a particularly normal Alpha."

I looked back up at him and steadied myself. "What if I say no?"

Something in his expression didn't change exactly, but the air in the room did. He straightened slightly, just enough to remind me of the full scope of him standing there, and when he spoke his voice didn't harden but it didn't soften either.

"You walked into my territory, Aria." He said it quietly, which somehow made it worse than if he had been loud about it. "Alone. Unclaimed. With no pack standing behind you. Under my law, that gives me every right to decide what happens to you next." He let that settle for exactly two seconds before he continued. "I'm not asking you to choose between yes and no. I'm asking you which version of this you'd like."

My mouth went dry.

It wasn't a threat. That was the part that sat so strangely in my chest. He hadn't raised his voice, hadn't slammed anything on the desk, hadn't leaned into my space to make the point land harder. He had just said it. Plainly. The way a man says something he has already decided is true and sees no reason to argue about.

And he was right, that was the worst part. I had no ground to stand on. I had walked onto his land with nothing. No title, no pack, no Alpha backing my name. I was eighteen years old and I had been in his territory less than twenty-four hours and I had nowhere else to go, and he knew all of that, had known it since the moment he found me in the forest, and he was still sitting across the desk from me acting like this was a conversation between two reasonable people.

It wasn't. But I also wasn't being dragged to the altar in chains.

That distinction felt important somehow, even if I couldn't fully explain why.

I held his gaze because looking away felt like losing something.

"Okay," I said.

He nodded once. Like he had never considered another outcome.

I hated that. And I also had nothing left to say about it.

"When?" I asked, because I needed a number, a timestamp, something real to grab onto before the floor finished dropping out from under me.

He looked at me steadily.

"Tonight.”