Chapter 1 - Bron

Bron

Someone's going to die tonight if he doesn't shut his mouth.

"You heard me, Alpha." The guy in front of me is drunk, swaying, jabbing a finger at my chest like he's got a death wish. Some cousin of a random Conrad, invited because his family owns half the docks. "Your daddy's selling you off like a prize bull. Everyone in this room knows it.” He says.

I don't say anything. I just grab his wrist before his finger touches me, and squeeze until I hear the bone creak.

He goes white. Drops to one knee, gasping.

"Say it again," I tell him.

He doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t.

I let go. He scrambles back into the crowd holding his wrist, and nobody around us even reacts, because this is normal. This is just Tuesday for an Alpha. Somebody always thinks they can test you at a party like this, especially when there's an open bar and three hundred people watching. I straighten my jacket and go back to hating my life in peace.

Because tonight I'm getting engaged. To a woman I don't want. In front of everyone I know.

"You good?" Ronan appears at my elbow, watching the guy limp away. "You look like you want to kill somebody.” He says.

"I already thought about it.” I let out.

"Cool, cool. Try not to, though. Selene's dad is already looking for reasons to be mad at you."

He's not wrong. My wolf's been pacing under my skin all night, snapping and restless, like something's wrong and he can't tell me what. I figured it was just the wedding thing. The forced-smile, sell-your-life-for-peace thing my father set up for me two years ago and never allowed me to say no.

I didn't know it was about to get a lot worse.

The ballroom's packed. Black tie, real diamonds, a string quartet nobody's listening to. Officially it's a gala, a "cultural heritage evening," whatever that means. Really, it's two things happening at once: my engagement announcement, and the Moon Ceremony, the one night a year every wolf who just turned nineteen finds out if they've got a mate somewhere out there. Half the room's here for that. The other half's here to watch my father sell me to the Conrad family for a business merger, dressed up in a tux.

Serena shows up at nine sharp, because Conrad people are always on time. She's beautiful, obviously: black dress, diamonds, hair perfect. Her dad's got a hand on her back like he's walking a product down a runway. She looks at me across the room, and I feel nothing. Not hate. Not want. Just nothing, which honestly might be worse.

At nine-fifteen, Adrien Conrad finds me at the bottom of the stairs. Hand out for the photo his people have been planning for a week. I take it. Phones go up around us, a dozen at once.

"Alpha Ashborn." His grip's too tight. Testing me, like always. "Shall we?"

I open my mouth to say the lines my father's lawyers wrote for me. And then something happens that's never happened to me in my whole life. It hits like fire. Right under my ribs, sudden and vicious, like someone stabbed me and lit the wound. I stop breathing. My knees actually buckle for a second, in front of three hundred people, in front of every phone in the room.

"Bron?" Ronan's voice goes sharp behind me. His hand's on my shoulder like he's about to catch me.

I can't answer him. The burn's climbing up my chest now, into my throat, and under the pain there's something else. A pull. A direction. Like I've been a compass my whole life and just found north for the first time.

My wolf slams forward so hard I almost hit the floor. Mate. Not even a word, really. Just a fact, hot and absolute, coming off that burning spot under my ribs. Mate. Here. Close. Now.

I've spent my whole life thinking that feeling was a fairy tale people told each other so arranged marriages hurt less. I stood on this same terrace six years ago and felt nothing. Figured I was one of the unlucky ones, like my father before me. And now it's happening in the single worst room it could happen in, in front of the single worst audience, and my hand's still locked in Adrien Conrad's.

"Alpha." His voice sharpens. He felt something change in my grip. "Is there a problem?"

Yeah. There's a massive problem. I'm standing in a ballroom built to broadcast my engagement to the world, about to promise myself to a woman I don't want, and somewhere in this exact room, right now, is whoever my wolf just decided belongs to me.

My hand opens on its own. I don't tell it to. Adrien's face goes from confused to cold in about half a second; he understands what's happening before I even say a word.

"Give me a second," I say. My voice doesn't even sound like mine.

I turn, and the pull turns with me, yanking my focus across the room like there's a hook set behind my ribs. Toward the group of nineteen-year-olds by the terrace doors, the ones who came tonight hoping for exactly this. Council members' daughters. Ronan's cousin in green. A couple of girls from the security team's families already grabbing each other's hands, excited.

My wolf snarls at every single one of them. Wrong. Not them, but closer.

I take a step, and the burn gets worse, bad enough that the room actually tilts. Sound goes far away. My vision sharpens the way it does right before a shift. Somebody gasps, loud, cutting straight through the music, and I realize a second too late that it's because my eyes have gone silver. The mark of a real bond. Visible to every single phone in the room. Being uploaded right now, probably, to God knows how many accounts.

"He found her," somebody whispers, and it spreads through the crowd like a match dropped in dry grass. He found her, he found her.

Except I haven't. I'm standing in the middle of my own engagement party, everyone staring, Adrien's face gone the color of ash, and I can't even tell where the pull's actually taking me. It's not the terrace. It's not the girls in silk waiting for their moment. It's past all of them. Further back, toward the kitchen hallway, where the catering staff lines the wall in plain black to watch a ceremony they're not allowed to be part of.

That's not possible. It's not allowed to be possible. No Ashborn Alpha in three generations has had the bond mark somebody outside the ranked families.

I look anyway.

For half a second, before the crowd shifts and blocks her, I see a girl frozen by the kitchen hallway. Gray hoodie instead of catering black, like she wandered in from somewhere she wasn't supposed to be. Wide eyes. Silver-gray, almost glowing, locked right on mine like she already knows she's been caught.

Then she's gone. Vanished through the service door before I can even be sure I really saw her. My wolf goes dead silent. The burn under my ribs settles into something worse than pain.

Certainty.

Adrien's voice cuts through the ringing in my ears, low and furious, meant just for me. "Alpha Ashborn. I believe you owe me an explanation. And I believe several hundred phones just recorded whatever that was."

I don't move. I don't look away from the door she disappeared through.

Three hundred people just watched their Alpha's eyes turn silver for a girl in a kitchen hoodie. By morning, everyone else will have watched it too.

And I don't even know her name.