The test-b

She was not crying because she was unhappy. That was the terrible part. She was crying because underneath the terror, down in a place she hadn't known she kept, something small and fierce had lifted its head and said  mine. 

And that was worse than anything. That was so much worse. Because she knew exactly what happened to omegas who carried an Alpha's child without his name on it. She knew what the council did. She had grown up hearing the stories whispered in the clinic hallway when she was small, stories about girls who'd gone to the old territory border and never come back. Girls whose names got struck out of the pack records as if they had been written in pencil.

She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. It didn't help. Her tears just came faster.

Then her neck began to burn.

It started as a warmth, low and gentle, right at the curve where her neck met her shoulder. She thought at first she'd leaned against something hot. She reached up to rub at it, and the warmth spiked into heat, and the heat turned into a bright, searing line, as if someone had pressed a drawn blade to her skin and written on her.

She made a sound. It came out small and strangled.

She scrambled up and staggered to the little mirror taped to the inside of the closet door, the one Orla used to check her teeth for lipstick before the monthly pack meeting. She tilted her head. She pulled her collar aside.

There was light coming out of her.

A seal. A perfect crescent moon, delicate as frost on glass, with a thin ring of tiny marks circling it like stars. It shimmered on her skin in pure silver, and it pulsed, slow and steady, in time with her heartbeat. Or faster than her heartbeat. Or in time with some second heartbeat she had no name for yet.

She had seen this mark before.

Not in life. In a drawing. Her mother had drawn it once on the back of a receipt, years ago, in the kitchen of the little hut at the edge of the woods. Lyra had been seven. She remembered the pencil and the careful curve. She remembered her mother's face, which had gone very still, and very afraid.

If you ever see this on yourself,  her mother had said,  you come home. You don't tell anyone. You come home to me. 

Lyra had asked what it was. Her mother had put the pencil down and said, A mercy and a curse. Mostly a curse. 

Her mother hadn't been there to explain it, and now it was glowing on her neck in a supply closet in the middle of a Tuesday.

"No," Lyra said. She clapped her hand over it. The light bled between her fingers. "No, no, hide, please. Please hide."

It didn't hide.

She grabbed her scarf from the hook and tried to wind it around her throat, but her fingers had gone clumsy and stupid, and the silk kept sliding off. Her whole body was shaking. She could hear her own breath, ragged and high, filling the little room like water.

*Think. Think. Orla's in the front. Nobody comes in here. You have a minute. You have a minute, just fix your face and walk out.*

She got the scarf around her neck. She tied a knot. She turned toward the shelves to steady herself.

The door opened.

She had locked it. She was certain she had locked it. But the latch gave way with a soft click, and the hallway light cut a long yellow rectangle across the floor, and a shape filled the doorway.

Broad shoulders. Dark hair, a little too long. A black jacket with the pack's silver pin at the collar.

"Lyra." His voice was low and casual, the voice he used in public. "Orla said you'd gone to find the—"

He stopped.

She watched him see it. Even through the scarf, even with her hand over it, the glow was leaking through the silk like light through a curtain. His eyes went to her neck and stayed there. Every bit of color left his face.

For a long moment he didn't move. He didn't breathe. He didn't seem to be the Alpha of anything at all. He was just a man in a doorway looking at something he had not believed was real.

"Dante," she said.

He stepped in. He closed the door behind him, quietly, and turned the lock, and the sound of it was the loudest thing she had ever heard.

"Take the scarf off," he said.

"I can't—"

"Lyra." His voice cracked on the second syllable. "Please."

She took the scarf off. Her hands were shaking so hard she dropped it. It pooled on the floor between them, a small pale puddle, and neither of them looked at it.

He came closer. Slowly, the way you'd approach a spooked animal, and she hated that, hated being handled like something that might bolt. He lifted one hand toward her neck and stopped an inch short, as if the light itself might bite.

"That's a bond seal," he said. His voice had gone rough and hollow. "That's—Lyra, that's a mate seal."

"I know what it is."

"You know ?"

"My mother drew it for me once." She heard her voice come out thin and strange. "I didn't understand. I was a kid. I didn't know it was..." She laughed, an ugly little cracked laugh. "I didn't know it would be  me."

He had gone completely still. His eyes dropped from her neck to her face, and then, slowly, lower. To the small plastic test still clutched in her left hand. She had forgotten she was holding it.

She watched him read it. She watched him understand.

"How long have you known?" he asked.

"About ten minutes." She swallowed. "I was going to tell you. I swear I was going to tell you, I just needed to—I needed to be sure , Dante, I needed to—"

"Ten minutes."

"Yes."

"And the seal?"

"About two."

He turned away from her. He actually turned his whole body, put his back to her, and walked to the end of the closet, which was only four steps, and stood with both hands braced on the metal shelf as if the room had begun to tilt. His shoulders rose and fell. The bulb buzzed above him. Somewhere a long way off, the phone was still ringing.

"Say something," Lyra whispered.

"Give me a second."

"You've had a second. You've had a lot of seconds." The words were coming out of her faster than she could stop them. "I'm standing here with a  glowing neck and a positive test and you're staring at the shelving. I know this isn't what you wanted. I know it's not something either of us planned. I'm not asking you for anything, I'm not, I just need you to look at me and say—"

"I don't know what to say."