CHAPTER 2: THE BORROWED DRESS

Mama Sira knew.

I could feel it in her hands, trembling against the six buttons at the back of the borrowed blue dress, finding each hole and losing it again, as if her body was stalling what her mouth refused to say.

"What do you know?"

Her forehead pressed against the back of my shoulder. One second. The gesture cracked the room open. Mama Sira did not lean on people. She had survived sixty years in this pack by standing upright when everyone around her was bending.

"I heard the Beta talking to the Elders this morning," she whispered. "The council room door was open. I don't think they knew anyone was in the hallway."

"Tell me."

"He's rejecting the bond. In front of the whole pack. There's a replacement bonding written into the declaration. Vanessa Drake's name." She swallowed. "The ink is already dry, Amara."

I knew. Some part of me had known since I saw that white dress carried toward Vanessa's corridor. But knowing it in my gut and hearing it spoken aloud were two different kinds of violence. One was a bruise. The other was a blade.

"And there's something else." Mama Sira's voice dropped so low I almost didn't catch it. "The amended declaration includes an omega transfer clause. Any rejected omega of bonding age is to be reassigned to a labor pack within seventy-two hours." Her hand tightened on my shoulder. "Not three months, child. Three days."

The floor tilted under my feet. I grabbed the wooden stool and held on while the room swam and the bond in my chest screamed like a trapped thing. Three months had been a countdown. Three days was a trapdoor.

Mama Sira's hand found my back. Steady. Warm. Holding me in the world.

I locked my spine. I stood.

"Don't go," she said. "Stay here. Let them do what they'll do."

"If I don't go, they erase me." I turned from the cracked mirror. The blue dress hung loose at my shoulders, slightly too long at the hem. Beautiful in the way that sad things were sometimes beautiful. "I have spent nine years being invisible in this pack. I will not be invisible for this."

She looked at me with eyes that were wet and fierce and old, carrying decades of watching omegas walk into rooms that would break them and not being able to do anything except button their dresses and pray.

She cupped my face. Her palms were rough and warm. "You are worth more than any of them will ever know."

I covered her hands with mine. Three seconds. Then I let go and walked out.

The corridor was thick with wolves moving toward the great hall. A few glanced at me and looked away. Others held my eyes too long, their mouths pressed into thin lines of sympathy that didn't reach past their cheeks. Already rehearsing how they'd describe this to someone who wasn't here. Near the entrance, Sera, a Beta female who had once dumped dishwater on my cot as a joke the whole barracks laughed at, caught my eye and smiled. The kind of smile that had teeth behind it.

I kept walking. My palms were smooth. No blood. No crescents. No proof of anything. As usual.

The great hall doors stood open. Light from the iron chandeliers poured out, golden and warm. The kind of light meant to make celebrations beautiful. It made this one obscene. The scent of pine and candle wax and three hundred packed wolves hit me like a wall.

I stepped inside.

The chatter died. Three hundred heads turned. Silence moved through the hall like a current, sharp and electric, as I walked down the center aisle. Borrowed dress. Bare feet on cold stone. Every eye tracking every step.

I looked at the platform.

The Elders stood in a half circle. Beta Conall stood to the right, his jaw tight, his eyes fixed on a point above my head as if looking at me directly would cost him something he wasn't prepared to spend.

Kael stood in the center. Black formal clothes. Jaw locked. Hands at his sides.

The moment I entered the hall, the bond detonated. Every nerve between my ribs and my throat caught fire. My wolf slammed against my chest so hard I stumbled. Half a step, barely visible. But across the hall, Kael's nostrils flared. He felt it too. His eyes found mine and something moved behind them, fast and anguished, before he buried it so deep not even his wolf could reach it.

And beside him, standing exactly where I was supposed to stand, was Vanessa Drake.

The white dress. Silver thread catching candlelight like stars stitched into silk. Her red hair swept up. Hands clasped. She did not look at me. She looked straight ahead with the fixed expression of a woman who had agreed to do something and would see it through regardless of who it cost.

My feet stopped.

The hall held its breath.

Elder Yemisi stepped forward. Her hands rose. Her voice carried across the stone with the weight of ritual, of law, of something that could not be undone once spoken.

"We gather tonight under the authority of the Moon Goddess to witness a formal rejection of a fated bond and the establishment of a new union."

She turned to Kael.

"Alpha Kael of Silver Ridge. Speak your declaration."

Kael opened his mouth.

Nothing came out.

One heartbeat. Two. Three. The Elders shifted. Elder Yemisi's hands tightened at her sides. Vanessa's composure flickered, a crack fast as lightning, sealed just as quickly.

And in the silence, the bond between us surged so hard my vision whited out and I heard his wolf. Not mine. His. Howling inside my chest like it was trying to tear its way out of him and into me.

Then someone behind Kael cleared their throat. Low. Deliberate. A sound like a leash being pulled taut.

Kael's eyes went dead.

And he began to speak.