*Chapter 8** **The Butcher's Choice**

The runner came back a little after midnight.

I was standing at the big window of my study when he knocked. The window looked out over the cliffs, and far below, the sea was crashing on the black rocks. I had been standing there for two hours. I had not taken off my boots. I had not eaten. I could not sit down.

"Come in."

The boy stepped inside and bowed low. He was young, maybe sixteen, and he was trying very hard not to look at my face. They all did that. They had heard the stories.

"The letter is delivered, Alpha. Into the Gamma's own hand."

"Did he say anything?"

"No, Alpha. He just took it and closed the door." The boy hesitated. "But I heard a woman laugh inside, Alpha. A happy laugh."

The Gamma's wife. The tall woman in the green silk dress. I had not liked her. She smiled too much, and her smile never reached her eyes.

"Go and eat," I said. "You ran well."

The boy bowed again and hurried out. The door closed.

I turned back to the window, and I let myself remember the whole of this long, terrible day.

It had started at dawn, when I woke up alone in the grass by the Weeping Spring.

I had reached for her before I even opened my eyes. My hand found only cold, wet moss. Her smell was still on my skin and in my hair. Wild honey and moonflowers. I sat up and looked around, and the mist was thick, and the forest was silent, and she was gone.

At first I thought she had only gone to wash. I waited. I called out. I didn't even know her name, so I just called, "Where are you?" into the trees like a fool.

Nobody answered.

Then I reached for the bond. A mating mark is not just a bite. It is a thread. It ties two souls together, and once it is made, you can feel the other one always, like a second heartbeat beside your own. Last night I had felt her. I had felt her heart beating against my chest, and I had felt her inside my blood like warm light.

This morning, the thread was still there. I could feel it. But it had gone silent.

Not broken. Not cut. Silent. Like a song that stops in the middle, and you wait and wait for the next note, and it never comes.

I had never been so afraid in my life.

I am twenty-eight years old. They call me the Butcher of Nine Packs. I have walked into burning houses. I have fought three wolves at once with my bare hands. I have done things that made grown men wet themselves and run. I am not a man who is afraid of anything.

But this morning, on my knees in the wet moss, I was afraid.

I sent Rowan to the Hollowmere Alpha. I sent my wolves along every border. And then I went myself to that small, weak pack with its frightened people, and I lined up their girls in the square, and I smelled every one of them.

None of them was her.

And then the last girl came.

I turned away from the window and looked at the guest wing across the courtyard. There was a light in one of the windows. The Gamma's daughter, Selene. She was over there now, in the best guest room in my house, sleeping in silk sheets.

When she walked across that square in the grey coat, I had smelled the spring. Moss and cold water and wet earth. I had smelled the night we spent together. My wolf had gone crazy inside me, and for one wonderful moment I had thought, *There she is. I found her.*

Then I bent my head over her neck, and I smelled her. Not the coat. Her.

Perfume. Expensive and sweet. Rose oil and something like sugar.

And under the perfume, very faint, something else. The smell of another man. Young. Ashfall.

I told myself it meant nothing. She had stood near that screaming boy in the square. Everyone had been crowded together. Smells mix in a crowd.

But I had sat beside her in the car all the way home, and she had not stopped talking. She touched my arm. She laughed at nothing. She told me how brave I was, and how strong, and how she had dreamed of me her whole life. She asked how many rooms my house had.

The girl in the forest had said almost nothing at all.

*I do not know you,* she had said. And when I asked her if she wanted me to leave, she had looked at me for a long time. A long, long time, like nobody had ever asked her a question before in her life.

*Don't leave,* she had whispered.

That girl and this girl did not feel like the same person.

But the coat smelled right. The story was right. The mark was there on her neck. And I had not seen my mate's face. Not once. The moon had gone behind the clouds, and the dark had covered everything. How could I say for sure who she was?

There was another knock at the door, and Rowan came in without waiting. He was the only one who ever did that. We had been friends since we were boys. He was the only person alive who had seen me cry.

He closed the door and looked at me. "You haven't sat down all night, have you?"

"No."

"You should sleep."

"I can't sleep."

He sighed and dropped into the chair by the fire. "Was the letter delivered?"

"Yes."

"And the Elders?"

I didn't answer, because he already knew. He had been in the room with me three hours ago, when the Elders came.

They had been waiting for me when I got home. Five old wolves, sitting in a row in my great hall like crows on a fence. Blackfang law is old and hard. Our pack was built on it. And one of those old laws says this: an Alpha who has passed his twenty-eighth winter must be married before the Council sits at the next new moon. If he is not, the seat goes to any wolf strong enough to take it.

The new moon was ten days away.

"We have heard the news, Alpha," the oldest one had said. "We hear you marked a woman in the woods and then lost her."

"I did not lose her. She is somewhere. I will find her."

"And this girl you brought home? The Gamma's daughter?"

"I don't know yet."

"Her mark is silent, they say."

"So is mine."

The old wolf had nodded slowly. "Then the law is clear. A silent mark is not a marriage. A mate who is missing is not a wife. You have ten days, Alpha. Take a wife, or we will open the seat." He smiled a thin little smile. "There are many in this pack who have waited a long time for that."

That was true. There were wolves in Blackfang who smiled at me in the hall and sharpened their knives in the dark. They had been waiting for me to make one mistake. Just one.

"Ten days," Rowan said now, staring into the fire. "We could make it work with the Gamma's daughter. Marry her now. If the bond wakes, wonderful. If it doesn't…"

"If it doesn't, I am tied for life to a girl I don't trust." I shook my head. "No. If she is my mate, the Moon Goddess will show me. I won't marry her blind."

"Then you need another wife." Rowan looked up at me. "Like I said before."

"A wife for paper."

"A wife for paper. A contract. One year. You give her a room and a name and some money at the end. She gives the Elders a wedding. Nobody gets hurt." He leaned forward. "But it has to be the right girl, Kael. Not some she-wolf from a big family who will try to trap you. Not a girl who will fall in love and cry when you find your real mate. Not a girl whose own fated mate might walk in one day and start a war."

"Then who?"

"Someone with no wolf," Rowan said. "A wolfless girl can't have a fated mate. She can't feel the mating pull. She can't make trouble with any bond. She will just be a name on a paper. And when your true mate comes home, the contract ends, and she walks away with enough money to start a new life."

That was when I remembered what the Gamma said in the square, with his red face and his sweaty hands.

*A weak girl. No wolf at all. She is nothing, Alpha. Not worth your time.*

I had not liked how he said it. Like he was talking about a broken chair, not his own child.

"The Gamma has another daughter," I said slowly. "A wolfless one."

Rowan's eyebrows went up. "The sick one? The one who didn't come out?"

"Yes."

"You haven't even seen her."

"I don't need to. It's a contract, not a love story. And Hollowmere owes me blood for what those rogues did on their land. Let them pay it this way."

So I had sat down at my desk and written the letter. And I had sent it, and now it was done.

"Do you think the father will send her?" Rowan asked.

"From the way he talked about her? He'll send her tied up in ribbon."

Rowan gave a small, tired laugh. Then he stood up and stretched. "Sleep, Kael. Please. You'll be no good to anyone like this."

"I'll try."

He looked at me for a moment like he didn't believe me. Then he went to the door. With his hand on the handle, he stopped.

"What happened in that kitchen today?" he asked. "You looked like you'd seen a ghost."

I didn't answer right away.

"I heard something," I said at last. "Under the floor. A scrape. Like something moving."

"Probably a rat. That woman said they had rats."

"Maybe."

"And the servant? You stared at her for a long time."

I had. The woman with the gentle face and the silver in her hair. I had looked at her and felt a strange cold feeling, like a hand on the back of my neck.

"She looked like a painting I saw once," I said. "When I was a boy. There was an old painting outside my father's study. A woman with silver in her hair. My father used to stand in front of it sometimes, staring at it. When I asked who she was, he hit me so hard I couldn't hear in one ear for a week. Then one day the painting was gone."

Rowan was quiet. "Strange."

"Yes."

"Get some sleep, Kael." And he went out.

I was alone again.

I didn't sleep. I sat down in the chair Rowan had left and stared into the fire, and I let my mind go back to that smoky kitchen one more time.

The pepper smoke had burned my nose like fire. My eyes had watered. I couldn't smell anything. Nothing at all. That was the trouble. A wolf without his nose feels blind.

But there had been one moment, just before the smoke got thick. One single breath, when I had stood near the middle of the kitchen floor, and the air had come up to me through the cracks in the old wooden boards.

I closed my eyes now and tried to find that breath again.

Onions. Earth. Old potatoes. Cold stone.

And under all of that, thin as a single thread of hair…

My eyes snapped open.

I stood up so fast that the chair fell over behind me.

Wild honey. Moonflowers.

Not the coat. Not Selene. Not her perfume. That smell had come from under the floor of that kitchen, in a small, frightened pack where I had just ordered the Gamma's house to send me a wife.

My mate had been right there, under my feet. Close enough to touch.

And I had turned around and walked away.