Chapter 3

Vane

What was he doing?

His fingers stayed on my neck, and my mind raced even as my body betrayed me. Was he confirming my scent? Checking it against whatever a mate was supposed to smell like?

If Ashen had been with me, I'd have known in a heartbeat whether this gold-eyed stranger was my fatedmate. I'd have felt the bond snap into place, or felt nothing at all. But the pendant had locked her away, and I was deaf to the one thing that mattered.

He took his hand back.

I let out a slow breath. Whatever he'd been hunting for, he hadn't found it. Not me, then.

Good.

The relief lasted exactly as long as his silence.

"An alpha's daughter," he said, "doesn't carry a scar like that."

My blood went cold. I kept my face still.

The scar ran the length of my back and climbed to the nape of my neck. A warrior's scar, won the hard way, the kind no sheltered lord's daughter would ever wear. Elara's skin was smooth, and so was every other daughter's in that hall.

He'd pulled my collar aside to find it. He'd known exactly where to look.

"I was attacked as a child," I said. My voice didn't shake; I made certain of that.

"A rogue came over our border. It nearly took my head before the warriors put it down."

He studied me. I held his gaze the way I'd hold a blade's edge, carefully, without flinching.

For a long moment I was sure he would call it a lie.

Then he turned and walked out. All I had of him was the cold line of his back and the sound of those unhurried boots fading down the hall.

Cold sweat slid down my neck, into the collar he'd disturbed.

He had known where to look. That was what stayed with me, after: not the threat in it, but the precision. He read a body the way I did, for the history written on it, and I'd let mine tell him too much.

I made myself breathe. My neck still burned where his fingers had been, a low hum that wouldn't quit, and I despised it. I had survived a war without wanting a single man, and now my own skin had turned traitor for the one who'd nearly hanged me with a question.

"You." Lucan's voice snapped me back into the room. He was already moving down the line with a ledger, pairing us off, naming rooms.

"Upstairs. Second door. Move."

No one argued this time. Even the sharp-jawed girl gathered her skirts and went.

They put me in with Sable and the quiet omega girl, in a narrow room with three cots and one window.

Sable cried herself to sleep without bothering to hide it. The omega lay facing the wall, breathing too evenly to be resting. I took the floor by the window out of habit, where I could see the door and the drop both, and the others were too frightened to think it strange.

Sable had left a candle burning and a strip of dried apple on the sill, an offering to the Goddess for a gentle master. I didn't pray. I'd buried twenty men who had.

That was the part none of them understood yet. They thought the danger was Cain. The danger was every hour the pendant stole from Ashen, and I was the only one in this house who couldn't afford to sleep.

I waited until the breathing in the room went slow and true.

The window had a long drop, but I'd come down worse walls than that on raids. I pulled on the plainest dress in Elara's bag, dark enough to vanish in, and went out into the night.

Darkspire slept like a town that had never been raided. No watchfires at the inner streets. One patrol along the lower wall, two men, slow and bored, passing a flask between them.

I waited for them in a doorway, counted their rhythm, and slipped across behind them while they laughed at something. Soft packs make lazy guards. I was almost insulted on their behalf.

The forest at Darkspire's edge was old and empty. For the first time in three days, I was alone.

I found a hollow well past the last houses, where no scent of mine could drift back to anyone. Then I reached up and unhooked the pendant.

I shouldn't have worn it this long. Elara had warned me: keep it on too many days, and it doesn't just hide your wolf, it starves her. Wear it long enough and she fades, and one morning she's simply gone.

I'd felt Ashen growing fainter every hour. The thought of losing her, of being truly wolfless the way the pendant pretended I was, frightened me more than Cain Corvus ever could.

The chain came loose in my hand.

She hit me all at once.

Finally. Ashen's voice flooded back into my skull, ragged and furious and so welcome my eyes stung. I was suffocating in there. Don't you ever do that to me again.

"I know," I whispered. "I know. I'm sorry."

Let me out. Just a little. I need to run or I'll lose what's left of my mind.

Five minutes, I told her. No more. Then back in the pendant before dawn.

I let go.

The shift took me the way it always had, a clean breaking rush, bone and muscle folding into something faster and surer than the woman I wore by day. Four paws sank into cold leaf-mould. The night turned silver and loud and alive.

I could smell the river now, and deer bedded down two ridges over, and the green rot of a fallen log. For five minutes I wasn't a tribute or an impostor or a girl who buried her friends' brothers. I was just Ashen and me, running flat-out through the black trees.

Back home I'd run the border this way every night, with a dozen warriors at our flanks. The flanks were empty now. I put my head down and ran until I stopped counting them.

Then Ashen stopped so hard I stumbled.

Vane. Her voice had changed, low and stunned. Do you smell that?

I lifted my muzzle. The wind carried something through the pines, warm and dark, and it pulled at me, bone-deep, the way nothing ever had.

That's no stranger, Ashen breathed. That's our fatedmate, and he's close.