Chapter 5

Elias's POV

"No. No, no, no."

I said it out loud like that would somehow make it less true, like the word itself could shove the fact back into whatever locked box it had crawled out of.

My mate. Easton's girl.

I pressed the heel of my palm against my sternum, right over the place where that phantom pull kept tugging, and for one insane second I actually considered that I was losing my mind. Head trauma, maybe. I'd taken a hit from one of those Abyss things earlier and hadn't noticed. That would explain it. That would explain literally anything better than the alternative.

My wolf did not agree. My wolf was still on its feet inside my skull, chest puffed out, absolutely delighted with itself, staring at me like I was the slow one in the room.

Mate, it said again, quieter this time, almost gentle, like it thought I just hadn't heard it right the first time.

"Shut up," I muttered, and pushed off the support pole before my legs decided to fold underneath me too.

I made myself look at her.

She hadn't moved. Still flat on the cot, dark lashes resting against pale cheeks, hands loose at her sides like she'd given up holding onto anything a long time before I ever found her in that canyon. If you didn't know better, you'd think she was just sleeping. Peaceful, almost.

You'd never guess that a few hours ago she'd been left for dead in a war zone, or that tonight, somewhere back in IronVale, my brother was standing at an altar promising himself to another woman entirely.

I dragged both hands down my face and let out a breath that shuddered more than I wanted it to.

Of all the people the Moon Goddess could've handed me. Of all the women in every territory, every neighboring pack, every rogue camp scattered across three kingdoms — she'd handed me the one currently property of my own brother. The one he'd spent two years parading around IronVale as his future Luna. The one whose name alone was probably being shouted through a cheering crowd back home right this second, except attached to a different face, a different woman standing where this one should've been.

I almost laughed. It came out more like a cough.

"This isn't funny," I told the empty tent, and the tent, unhelpfully, agreed with silence.

I made myself think it through logically, the way I'd been trained to think through every battle plan since I was old enough to hold a blade. Facts only. No feelings. Feelings could wait until I wasn't standing three feet from an unconscious woman while my chest tried to convince me the sun rose out of her ribcage.

Fact one: Rosalie was Easton's girlfriend. Had been for two years. Long enough that half the clan assumed the mating bond between them was already a foregone conclusion, a formality waiting on a calendar date.

Fact two: today was that date. Their twenty-first birthdays. The night their wolves were supposed to confirm what everyone already believed.

Fact three: she was here. Half-dead in a war camp a three-day ride from IronVale, nowhere near the altar she should have been standing at.

None of those facts fit together in any story I could make sense of. Something had gone catastrophically wrong somewhere between "girlfriend of two years" and "abandoned corpse in a canyon full of Abyss monsters," and the not-knowing crawled under my skin worse than the mate-recognition had.

I made myself lean back over her, slower this time, more careful, like she might shatter if I breathed wrong. In the low lamplight her face looked younger than I'd expected. Younger, and thinner than I remembered from the handful of times I'd glimpsed her across a crowded hall back home, always half a step behind Easton, always looking at him like he'd personally hung the moon he was supposedly born under.

What had he done to make her end up out here.

The thought arrived cold and sharp, and once it was there I couldn't unthink it. Easton didn't send girlfriends on unescorted road trips to the northern border for no reason. And he definitely didn't leave her stranded at the mouth of the Abyss on the single most important night of both their lives.

Unless he'd never meant her to come back at all.

My stomach turned over.

"Elias?"

Mac's voice, low, cutting through the canvas flap before his face followed it. He took one look at me, standing frozen over her cot like a man caught somewhere between prayer and panic — and his easy grin faded into something more careful.

"You look like you saw a ghost."

"Close enough," I said, and my voice came out rougher than I meant it to.

He stepped fully inside, letting the flap fall shut behind him, and glanced between me and her with the kind of scrutiny that had kept both of us alive more times than I could count. Mac had been at my side since before I left IronVale — through the exile, through every border skirmish since, through every stupid decision I'd talked myself into over the years. He knew my face better than I did at this point. Which meant he knew, immediately, that whatever was happening on it right now wasn't ordinary.

"Talk to me," he said. "What happened in here?"

I opened my mouth to lie. I really did try.

What came out instead was: "She's my mate."