My mate chose my sister

The worst part wasn't watching him choose her. It was the smile she gave me right after.I heard my name in the bond before I even saw his face. That's the only way I know how to say it. One second I was standing at the edge of the Blackwood pack's gathering hall, half-listening to the music, half-deciding whether the smoked salmon canapés were worth the walk across the room, and then the world split open down the middle and something deep inside my chest yanked so hard I stopped breathing.Mate.My wolf said it like a prayer. Like she had been holding it her entire life just to say it once.I spun around. My drink nearly went to the floor. And across the packed, swaying, laughing hall, through the bodies and the candle haze and the too-warm air that always built up when two hundred wolves got dressed up and pretended to be civilized, a pair of dark eyes found mine like they had been waiting.Alexander Blackwood.I had known him my entire life. Grown up watching him train in the east

By breakfast, I had already been tried, convicted, and sentenced by people who weren’t there.I heard it before I saw it. Two pack women talking outside the communal hall, voices low and pleasant the way voices get when the gossip is particularly good. I caught my name and slowed without meaning to, pressing close to the wall of the corridor with my tray in my hands and my stomach already tightening.“…cornered him in the hallway, apparently. Right after the announcement.”“No.”“That’s what Dena said. She was practically throwing herself at him. In front of everyone.”“She’s always been obsessed with Sophia’s life. Remember when they were teenagers and she—”I didn’t wait to hear what I’d done as a teenager. I pushed through the side door into the cold morning air and stood on the path with my untouched tray and breathed carefully through my nose until the urge to go back in there and say something passed.It passed. Barely.The communal breakfast hall held about sixty people on a no

Alpha Victor Blackwood had a way of making rooms feel smaller than they were. Not through size, he wasn’t a physically imposing man, but through the specific quality of his attention. He looked at you the way a surveyor looks at land he is already planning to develop. Assessing. Deciding. The decision made before you even opened your mouth.I had been summoned to his study at ten in the morning, four days after the gathering, with a note slipped under my bedroom door that said simply: Please attend at your earliest convenience. Which in pack language meant: Come now. Bring nothing. Say less.I dressed carefully. That was the only act of defiance available to me, so I made it count.The study smelled like leather and old wood and the faint mineral cold of the stone walls beneath the paneling. Victor sat behind his desk with a folder open in front of him that he didn’t look at once during the entire meeting. Alexander sat to his father’s left, in the chair that meant second-in-command,

I had not shifted since before the gathering.That was ten days. Ten days of keeping my wolf pressed down and quiet and small inside me the way you keep a door shut against wind, both hands on the handle, all your weight against it. Shifting required space and privacy and the particular absence of dread that I had not been able to locate anywhere inside myself since the night everything broke. My wolf had been patient about it. She had waited. But I could feel her patience thinning at the edges the way ice thins in early spring, still holding, still holding, and then one morning simply not.I went to the trees at the eastern boundary of the pack grounds before dawn, when the sky was the color of a bruise healing at the edges and the air tasted like frost and pine resin and the specific cold that lives in the hour before the world remembers it is supposed to warm up. Lily was keeping watch at the tree line. She had not asked why I needed a lookout. She had simply come.“If anyone heads

Lily came to my room on Friday afternoon with red eyes and steady hands, which meant she had already finished crying and had moved on to deciding.I knew those two states in her the way I knew the difference between rain coming and rain arrived. She had been my closest friend for eleven years, since the second week of our first year in pack schooling when she had sat next to me on a bench outside the history room and said, without introduction: you look like you’re doing mathematics in your head. What’s the problem? I had told her. She had solved it in four minutes. We had been inseparable since.So I recognized the look. I just didn’t know yet what it was going to cost her.“Sit down,” I said.“I’m fine standing.”“Lily. Sit down.”She sat. She put her hands flat on her knees and looked at me with the expression of someone who has rehearsed what they want to say and is now deciding whether the rehearsed version is honest enough. Then she scrapped it, apparently, because what came out