Chapter 5: Mate

Wren POV

I felt it before I understood it.

One moment, I was standing on the cold gravel of a riverbank with forty strange wolves staring at me and Silvercrest's last torch vanishing into the trees. The next, the wind swung around, and something inside me moved.

Not my heart. Not my stomach. Something deeper, lower, coiled in a place I hadn't known existed. Like a sleeping animal turning over in the dark.

It stretched. It lifted its head.

And it spoke.

There you are, a voice whispered inside my skull. Soft. Female. Amazed. Oh, there you are.

I stopped breathing.

Twenty-two years. Six full moons standing alone in the shifting circle. Six years of laughter behind my back, of wolfless and broken and Silvercrest's little mistake. Six years of praying to a Goddess who never answered.

And now, on a riverbank at the edge of the world, with my wrists still burning from the rope, there was a voice in my head that wasn't mine.

Who are you? I thought, and it felt like shouting into a dark well.

Lark, she answered, as if it were obvious. As if she'd been waiting. I'm Lark. I'm you. And he—

I didn't need her to finish.

The Alpha of Thornvale had gone completely still beside his horse, one boot in the stirrup. In the torchlight, I watched his hands. The fingertips had split. Black claws curved where his nails had been, digging deep grooves into the leather of his saddle.

Slowly, very slowly, he turned his head and looked at me.

His eyes had changed. A moment ago they'd been dark, flat and cold as slate. Now they burned gold from rim to rim.

Mate, Lark breathed inside me, and every hair on my arms rose.

No.

No, no, no.

This couldn't be happening. I was here to kill him.

The little glass vial was sewn into the hem of my cloak, where Celeste's maid had stitched it with her own hands. I could feel its weight against my ankle, small and cold and terrible. In his wine. On the first night. Or Finn dies.

And the Moon Goddess, who had ignored me my whole life, had chosen this moment to give me a wolf, and tie her to the one man in the world I was sent to murder.

I wanted to laugh. I wanted to scream. Instead, I stood perfectly still, the way I'd learned to stand in Celeste's chambers, and waited to see what he would do.

"Kade?" The red-haired Beta took a step toward his Alpha. "Kade, what is it? Your eyes—"

"Mount up." The Alpha's voice came out rough and strange, like gravel dragged over stone. He didn't take his eyes off me. "Everyone. Now. We ride for the keep."

"But the girl—"

"She rides with me."

The warrior woman with the twin blades went rigid. The one who'd called me a broken toy. Her dark eyes flicked from her Alpha to me and back again, and I saw her realise something at the exact moment I did.

She hated me. Instantly and completely.

The Alpha swung onto his horse, leaned down, and before I could take a breath, his arm closed around my waist and lifted me off the ground like I weighed nothing. He set me in front of him on the saddle, my back to his chest.

Heat. That was all I could think. He was so warm. After the cold of the ford and the damp of the wagon, his body behind mine was like sitting with my back to a fire.

And where his arm crossed my stomach, my skin buzzed. Sparks. Tiny, bright and impossible, dancing everywhere he touched me.

The old women in Silvercrest's kitchens used to talk about the mate bond while they kneaded bread. Sparks, they'd say, and sigh. Like lightning under your skin. I had always assumed they were exaggerating.

They weren't.

Behind me, I felt his chest rise and fall, too fast. His breath stirred my hair. Then he leaned closer, and I felt him inhale, long and slow at the curve of my neck, and a shiver ran all the way down my spine.

"Don't," he said in my ear. Low and furious. "Don't you dare enjoy this."

Then he kicked his horse forward, and we rode north into the dark.

We rode for hours. He didn't speak to me once.

The forest closed in around us, pine and birch and black rock, so different from the flat green river country I had grown up in. Owls called overhead. Somewhere far off, a wolf howled, and forty wolves around me lifted their heads at once and answered. The sound went straight through my bones.

I had never howled. I had never been able to.

We can now, Lark whispered. She sounded drowsy and amazed, like a child woken in the middle of the night to see snow. When you're ready. We can do everything now.

Where have you been? I asked her. All this time. Every full moon, I stood in that circle and waited for you.

She was quiet for a long moment.

Sleeping, she said finally. Waiting. I couldn't wake up until I found him. I'm sorry, Wren. I didn't know it would hurt you so much.

I bit the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste blood, because if I didn't, I was going to cry in front of the Alpha of Thornvale, and I would rather have died.

Him, I thought bitterly. You waited twenty-two years for him. Do you know what he is? Do you know why I'm here?

He's ours.

He's a job, I told her. That's all. One cup of wine.

Lark didn't answer. But I felt her press closer against the inside of my ribs, warm and stubborn, and I knew she hadn't believed a word.

  *

I had heard of Thornvale all my life. I had never imagined it.

We came over the last ridge as the sky was starting to grey, and the keep rose out of the forest like something carved from the mountain itself. Black stone walls. Watchtowers lit with steady orange fire. Below it, a town spread down the slope in neat rows. There were timber houses with smoking chimneys, a market square, and a river crowded with barges.

It looked alive. It looked rich. Everything Silvercrest pretended to be, and wasn't.

The Alpha didn't slow down. He rode straight through the gates, past bowing guards and staring servants, into a stone courtyard. He swung down and pulled me after him, and his grip on my wrist was hard enough to bruise. He didn't stop. He marched me up a flight of stairs, through a long hall lined with weapons, and into a room that smelled of leather, ink and woodsmoke.

He kicked the door shut behind us.

Then he let go of me so suddenly that I stumbled.

For a long moment, he didn't speak. He stood with his back to me, both hands braced on a huge oak desk, head bowed, shoulders rising and falling. I could see the claws still digging into the wood. He was fighting his wolf. I could feel it, faintly, through the strange new thread that had woven itself between us. Like hearing a storm through a closed window.

He's hurting, Lark whispered. Why is he hurting?

I don't know, I thought back. Please be quiet.

The Alpha turned around.

His eyes had faded back from gold to dark, but they were no less dangerous. He looked at me the way a man looks at a snake in his bed.

"What did she do to you?" he said.

I blinked. "Alpha?"

"Celeste." He spat the name like it was poison. "What did she do? A spell? A potion? Some Silvercrest witch's trick? Because I know this isn't real."

"I don't—"

"You smell like mine." He came around the desk, slow, stalking. I backed up until my shoulders hit the door. "My wolf has been dead to the world for five years. And you walk across a river and he goes mad. That's not fate. That's not the Goddess. That's a trap. So tell me what she did."

He stopped a foot away from me. Close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him again. Close enough that the sparks started up under my skin even though he wasn't touching me.

"She didn't do anything," I whispered. "I didn't know. I swear to you, I didn't know."

"You expect me to believe that a wolfless girl just happens to be my second-chance mate? And that Celeste just happened to choose you, out of every servant in Silvercrest?" He laughed, short and bitter. "She chose you personally. She told me so."

My chest tightened. Personally. I thought of Celeste's face in the cellar, lit with delight. I know exactly what I just saw.

Did she know? Was that why she'd laughed?

No. She couldn't have known this. I hadn't known this. Until an hour ago, I hadn't even had a wolf.

"I'm not wolfless," I said. My voice cracked on the word. "Not anymore. She woke up at the river. When the wind changed. She spoke to me for the first time in my life."

Something flickered across his face. Surprise. Maybe, for a heartbeat, something softer.

Then it was gone.

"Convenient," he said.

"It's the truth."

"Truth." He leaned one hand on the door beside my head, caging me in. His voice dropped to something very quiet and very cold. "Let me tell you what I know about the truth, Wren Hollis. Five years ago, a woman stood in front of every pack in the North and told me the Goddess had made a mistake. She said I wasn't worth being fated to. Then she walked out the door with Lucian Vane, and an hour later my pack's treasury burned to the ground."

I knew some of this. Everyone in Silvercrest knew the story of the night Celeste left Thornvale. They told it like a fairy tale. The beautiful Luna who escaped the beggar Alpha.

They never told it like this.

In Silvercrest, he was the villain of the story. The broke, brutish Alpha who had tried to trap a beautiful girl in poverty. I had heard Celeste tell it herself at dinner parties, laughing behind her fan while her guests laughed with her. I had poured their wine while they did it.

Standing here now, I couldn't remember a single one of them asking about the fire.

"I swore on that night that I would never take another mate," he said. "Fated, chosen, or anything else. I've kept that vow for five years. And I'm not breaking it for a girl Celeste gift-wrapped and sent across my border."

I made myself meet his eyes. "Then reject me."

It came out before I could stop it. Lark whimpered inside me, a small, hurt sound, and I ignored her.

"Do it now," I said. "Say the words. I won't fight you."

If he rejected me now, maybe the bond would break before it took root. Maybe then, when I did what Celeste wanted, it wouldn't feel like killing a piece of myself.

The Alpha looked at me for a long moment. Something moved behind his eyes that I couldn't read.

Then he straightened and stepped back. The heat went with him, and I was cold again.

"No," he said. "Not here. Not quietly. Not in a room where no one will see."

He walked to the window and looked out at the pale dawn spreading over his pack.

"She humiliated me in front of nine packs. She made me the joke of the North." His voice was calm now. Too calm. "So I'll give her an answer she'll hear all the way in Silvercrest."

He turned back to me, and his smile was the cruellest thing I'd ever seen. Crueller, even, than Celeste's.

"At the next full moon, in front of my entire pack, I will reject you, Wren Hollis. Publicly. Formally. Exactly the way she rejected me."

He opened the door and held it for me, like a gentleman.

"And then I'll send you back to her in pieces."