The Mark on Her Neck

POV: Elva

Water hit my face like a blade of ice.

I came up choking, spitting the taste of stone, and found Saskia perched on the edge of my bed in a silver-threaded gown, the one only a Luna was permitted to wear. She held an empty basin in her lap.

"Look at you," she said. "Five years of silk, and you're asleep on the floorboards."

I pushed myself upright, every muscle protesting. "That alarm bell. It was you."

"I had a little pain. It was a very good bell."

"You're a surrogate, Saskia. Once you've delivered, Eriq will send you away."

She laughed, low and genuinely amused. "Is that what you tell yourself at night? I bled beside him on the border, Elva. My son will be the heir to this pack, and the mother of the heir doesn't leave."

"Your son."

"The healers all say it's a boy." She smoothed her gown. "The elders have never liked you, you know. They'll strip your title by midwinter, and Eriq will thank them for sparing him the trouble."

I wanted to answer, but my tongue was too dry, and the worst part was that she wasn't wrong about everything. I had watched the elders go silent when I entered a room. I had watched the younger wives study my hands as though measuring them for bandages rather than rings. I had only ever been Luna because Eriq loved me enough to demand it, and the pack had never forgiven either of us.

Then I saw the mark on her neck.

It sat on the left side, fresh and dark, the crescent of an Alpha's bite with the skin around it still pink. I knew both kinds. A pack-mark was a shield, a claim of protection over someone he wanted kept under his name. A mate-bite was a vow sealed in blood. Eriq had given me the second kind on our wedding night, in candlelight, his mouth warm against my throat and his hand spread over my heart as though he could keep it beating by holding it. Now he had given her the first.

"A pack-mark," I said, and my voice scraped. "He shielded you. He didn't bond with you."

"He chose to shield me, Elva. Not you."

She leaned until her breath brushed my ear. "Can you feel him when he walks into the room? Does the bond flare for you, the way mine does? No? Then you'll never understand what he really is. You were a wolfless girl he felt sorry for, and he built a whole marriage out of pity."

I'd waited five years for the mate bond to sing the way Eriq swore it once had, and all I'd ever felt was a dull ache, like a bruise that never fully healed. She had named it perfectly, and I wanted to hit her for it.

"Eriq will love your pup," I said, "even though..."

"Even though?"

"Nothing."

Her smile never moved, but her fingers tightened on the basin. "He'll love him because he's his. Whatever else you've heard in the kitchens, that's all it is." She stood, shook out her skirts, and crossed to the door. "Leave early, little Luna. It's kinder than waiting to be thrown out."

She left the door wide open. The corridor beyond lay silent, and I realized the guards had been pulled to the east wall that afternoon on an order none of them had questioned. It had been arranged, the way a table is laid for a meal.

I stayed on the floor for the length of three breaths, and then I got up.

My bag was already half-packed from the days I'd spent rehearsing escapes I never meant to take. Two dresses. My healer's pouch. The carved swan. Three years of coins I'd saved from my allowance in a stocking. I laid the little green silk box on Eriq's pillow with the ribbon retied, because he deserved to find it after I was gone and not before.

"I would have told you with my hands on your face," I said to the empty room. "That was what I'd planned."

The bed was too wide and too cold, and I did not cry. I put the feeling down in the same hard place where I'd kept everything else I loved, and I closed my fist over my stomach.

"Come on, little one," I whispered. "We're going."

I knew the north postern better than any guard in that house. Two winters ago I'd signed the grain manifests myself, which meant I knew which hinge the gatekeeper oiled on Sundays and which bolt stuck in the cold. The grain carts left through that gate at first light, and tonight the wall guards were gone to the east. I pulled my hood low, slipped down the back stairs, and crossed the kitchen yard with my heart trying to climb out of my throat.

A stable boy sat on the postern step, whittling a stick. He looked up, and I thought I'd die right there.

"Luna?"

I drew the old grain manifest from my sleeve, the one with my seal pressed into its corner, and held it toward him with a hand that wouldn't stop shaking. "Carts for the market road. I'm checking the count."

The boy studied the seal, then the crooked bolt, and went back to his knife. "Carts go at dawn, Luna," he said. "Mind the bolt. It sticks."

"Thank you."

"I don't know what I'd be thanking, my lady." He didn't look up. "Go on."

I walked through the gate without looking back, because I understood that if I looked even once, I would see the green dress on the hook and the swan's twin in the hall and the whole bright, burning house I'd called home, and I would go back.

Far behind me, from the Alpha House roof, a horn sounded long and low. A second horn answered it from the wall.

Someone had found the empty room.

I ran.