Nostalgic Memory

The mate bond slammed into her with a force that had nothing to do with grief and everything to do with something older, drowning out Darius's face, drowning out Naomi's dark hair and every cruel word from downstairs. She looked up too fast, breath catching, into a pair of pale silver eyes gone suddenly, sharply wide.

She didn't recognize him. Not really—some distant, still-functioning part of her mind registered tall, dark hair, expensive suit and filed it away as unimportant, because whatever was moving through her had no interest in names or faces. Only in the overwhelming, bone-deep certainty that this stranger was the only solid thing left standing between her and coming completely apart.

Neither of them let go.

He was watching her with a mix of awe, surprise and desire. His grip hadn't loosened, and hers had somehow tightened, fistfuls of his jacket she didn't remember reaching for, and the air between them had gone thick and electric, humming with something that made words feel unnecessary and slightly beside the point. His gaze dropped once—to her mouth, unmistakable.

No.

This couldn't be right.

She had a mate. Darius was her mate. They were supposed to be married in three days. Their union was supposed to secure her people's future.

Yet the stranger's touch had awakened something that made all those facts feel impossibly far away.

She stared at him, struggling to compose herself as his captivating scent engulfed her senses, arousing her.

"I— don't know what's happening."

His gaze held hers.

"I do." He cut in, his voice, low and certain.

Amara's fingers tightened against his chest. She could feel the tension in him, the effort it took to remain still. He gulped, looking at her as though he had found something he had never expected to find.

"You're… my mate."

The words struck harder than they should have.

Amara's world had already fallen apart once tonight. She had watched the man she intended to marry betray her with her own cousin. She had walked away with no idea what would happen to her, her future, or the people depending on her.

And now the Moon Goddess had placed another man in front of her.

A stranger.

She should have stepped away. She should have remembered Darius, the engagement, the pact, and everything her people stood to lose.

Instead, she moved closer. The blood moon heightening the arousal seeping through her primal veins.

"I want you. I don't know your name. I don't care. I want you."

For a moment, the man simply searched her face. Something in his expression cracked open—raw, hungry, and beneath it, barely leashed. He searched her face for one long moment, as if giving her one last chance to take it back.

Then his arms swept beneath her, lifting her effortlessly from the floor, and she clutched at him as he carried her towards the shadowed end of the corridor.

---

He hadn't meant to touch her. Hadn't meant for any of this — but the scent of her had hit him like a blow to the chest the moment she rounded that corner, and by the time he had her steadied against him, something else had risen up beneath the wanting, quieter and far older.

Her eyes.

Amber. The exact shade of a pair he hadn't seen in ten years — not since a girl no older than fifteen had found him bleeding out at the edge of her territory, dragged him into hiding, and kept him alive for six days while the men sent to kill him searched the trees less than a mile away.

It can't be.

He didn't let himself finish the thought. There wasn't room for it—not with her hands curling into his jacket, not with his own wolf repeating a single word until it drowned out everything else he might have tried to reason through. He filed the thoughts away somewhere he could examine it later, when she wasn't looking up at him like he was the only solid thing left in a world that had just come apart, when his own hands weren't shaking with the effort of staying still.

Then he carried her deeper into the shadows anyway, telling himself it was a trick of moonlight and grief and a decade of memory gone soft at the edges.

But some part of him — the part that had spent ten years half-convinced he'd imagined the girl entirely — already knew better.