Chapter Two – Damien

I felt her before I saw her.

That was the part I hadn't told anyone, and didn't plan to. Everyone on those grounds had felt the bond snap into place, there was no hiding that from four hundred witnesses. What I hadn't told anyone was that I'd felt her a full second before my eyes found her in the crowd, like some part of me had already known exactly where to look.

My wolf had gone still in a way he never went still. Not tensed. Not alert. Still, the way something goes still right before it finally stops running from whatever it's been running from its whole life.

I said no anyway.

It came out of me before I had fully decided to say it, which unsettled me more than the bond itself had. I don't operate that way. I don't say things I haven't already weighed against what they'll cost Blackthorn. That single syllable came from some older, less disciplined part of me, and I'd spent every hour since regretting the way I'd said it more than the fact that I'd said it at all.

Wolfless. I'd heard the word about her before I ever saw her face. A Luna who couldn't shift was not just a personal tragedy; she was a liability with Blackthorn's name attached to it, right when unity between the four packs mattered more than it had in a generation. That was the reasoning I'd given myself walking off those grounds. It had sounded far more convincing before I'd actually looked at her.

“You did the right thing.”

My mother said it the way she said most things just like a verdict already reached, delivered to spare me the trouble of reaching my own. Selene Cross had run Blackthorn's actual affairs since my father died, and had never once let the fact that I wore the Alpha title stop her from making sure I understood who still held the leash. “A wolfless Luna would have made us a target within the year. You know that.”

“I know what I did,” I said, which wasn't the same as agreeing with her, though I let her hear it that way. Easier than explaining a feeling I didn't have words for yet.

“Isabel Sterling will be at the winter gathering. Her father's amenable to an alliance, if you're open to being sensible about it.”

“I just publicly rejected a fated mate in front of three rival packs, Mother. Sensible left the building with her.”

“Good,” Selene said, without a trace of irony, and left it there.

I watched her go and wondered, not for the first time, how much of what I called my own judgment had actually been hers, worn smooth enough over the years that I'd stopped noticing the seams. My father had died when I was seventeen, a border skirmish gone wrong, and my mother had spent the years since making sure Blackthorn never once looked unsteady, even when I was. I owed her the pack's survival more than once over. Owing someone your survival and trusting their judgment about your life were not quite the same debt, even if she'd spent years teaching me to treat them as one.

I didn't sleep that night. Rejections were supposed to be clean, when done right. It was a single, decisive act that severed a bond before it could take root. I'd rejected one mate before this, years ago, a mild, manageable pull that faded inside a week, no worse than a bruise healing.

This didn't fade.

It got worse. By the second night my skin felt too tight for my body, some low, constant ache sitting under my ribs like I'd swallowed something jagged that hadn't finished working its way through me. By the fourth night I couldn't hold a conversation without losing the thread of it, her face surfacing behind whatever I was supposed to be paying attention to.

I knew what it was. Every Alpha's education included the old warnings about mate-bond sickness, the price a body paid for rejecting a bond that had already fully formed. It was supposed to be rare. It was supposed to happen only when the bond itself was unusually strong.

I didn't tell my mother it was happening to me. I told myself it would pass, the way I told myself the rejection had been the right call, the way I told myself a great number of things that week that didn't survive contact with the actual, physical ache of missing someone I'd spoken exactly nine words to.

On the fifth night, a knock interrupted whatever I might have done with that thought. My Beta, Marcus, didn't wait for an answer before letting himself in, which told me before he spoke that whatever he was carrying wasn't good.

“Border patrol didn't check in on schedule. East ridge, past the old treaty line.”

The patrol turned up two hours before dawn, shaken and short two members nobody could account for, describing something in the dark that didn't smell like wolf, didn't move like wolf, and had left claw marks in bark eight feet off the ground.

My mother called it wildlife. My mother called most things she did not want to deal with by smaller names than they deserved.

I didn't call it anything yet. But something in the report sat wrong in my chest in a way that had nothing to do with the ache still living under my ribs, and for the first time since the ceremony, the two feelings sat side by side instead of one drowning out the other; some old, buried instinct telling me the timing was not going to turn out to be a coincidence.

I told myself that the Voss girl was someone else's problem now.

I was wrong about that too. I just didn't know it yet. And somewhere underneath the ache and the pride and every reason I'd given myself for what I'd done on those grounds, a smaller, quieter thought kept surfacing that I didn't have the courage yet to sit with: that whatever had left those marks on the east ridge had chosen this particular week to announce itself, and I didn't believe in coincidences that convenient.