Chapter 4

Cain

I liked that one.

Razor had been saying it for an hour, ever since the tribute house, and I was tired of hearing it.

The girl with the scar, he went on. Elara. I want to look at her again.

"You felt no bond," I said. We were alone in my study, the only place I let him speak freely.

"No mate-pull. Nothing. You just liked her."

I liked her, he agreed, unbothered.

The study suited the rest of my life: dark wood, no clutter. One wall held a map of the territory, ten packs inked into it in my own hand.

I pressed the heel of my palm against my eye and stared at the map until the names blurred.

"Then she's nothing," I said. "We don't have time for things you merely like."

There was only one thing worth wanting, and we both knew it. Not the packs. Not the gold, not the title men were afraid to say to my face.

A mate. The one thing that would put the beast back on its leash for good.

The witch had been thorough.

Years ago, before I took my first pack, she'd worked her rot deep into my wolf. Every night, when the sun went down, Razor went feral, not angry, not wild but gone. Just an animal wearing my skin, with no more reason left in it at all.

There was one cure. Find my fatedmate, complete the bond, and the curse would break.

The Moon Goddess pairs every wolf with the one who steadies him. Mine would be the hand that finally took the beast's leash.

So I'd looked. Goddess help me, I'd looked.

The staff knew not to come near me after dark. The ones who'd learned it the hard way were buried; the rest had learned it from them. Every dusk I emptied the house and rode out alone, and every dawn I came back a man again, and no one asked what I'd done to the deer.

Ten packs I'd brought under Darkspire, and I'd walked every hall of every one with my nose open like a beggar, waiting for a scent that never came. Ten packs. Thousands of women.

Not one of them was mine.

I'd started to think the Goddess was laughing at me. That she'd cursed me and then hidden my cure on purpose, just to watch a conqueror crawl.

The light was failing now. I felt it the way I always did, a splitting pressure behind my eyes, and Razor's voice dropping out of words and down into a low, building snarl.

I left the house before I could frighten anyone. The border forest was where I went to lose myself. The trees didn't care what I became out there.

By the time I reached the tree line, I couldn't have told you my own name. The snarl had swallowed everything, and what was left of me went under.

I keep no memory of the hours after that. Razor ran the black woods and I rode somewhere beneath him, the way I did every night, until the moon hung high and the cold had sunk into the ground.

Then the wind shifted.

It caught me at the back of the neck and stopped me cold. A scent, wild and clean, with something beneath it that reached past the snarl, took hold of what was left of my reason, and would not let go.

Razor went still. For the first time in years, on the very edge of feral, he stopped.

That, he breathed. I want that.

I should have fought him; I always did. But the scent had its own pull, and I wanted to follow it as much as the beast did. So when Razor took the shift, I let him.

Black fur. Four legs. The forest cracked open into a thousand sharp threads of smell, and one of them ran silver through all the rest, and we ran.

We found her in a clearing.

A she-wolf, silver-white from nose to tail, standing in a fall of moonlight. I had never seen her before.

I knew every wolf in my territory by sight and scent, and she belonged to no one. Not a tribute, not a servant, not mine.

Somehow, the sight of her was what brought me back. The snarl quieted. I found my own mind again, sitting behind the beast's eyes, and I did a thing I hadn't managed in years on a feral night.

I spoke. Who are you?

She looked at me once, and bolted.

No hesitation, no posturing. One look and she was gone into the trees, low and fast, all economy, wasting no fear.

I went after her.

I am bigger than any wolf in these mountains, and faster than nearly all of them, and none of it mattered. She had spent her whole life outrunning bigger things, and it showed in every stride.

She cut between trunks I had to swing wide around. She doubled back across her own scent and lost me in my own woods.

Clever, Razor said, and there was something almost like delight in it. Oh, she's clever. Catch her.

I tried. She crossed the river to break her trail, climbed the far bank, and was moving again before I'd shaken the water from my coat. Twice I came close, and twice she turned it into open air.

Razor had never run like this for anything, not for a kill, not for a throat. He wanted her past reason, past hunger, and for once I did not fight him for the body.

I didn't catch her.

But on a tight pass through the pines I got close enough. Close enough to drag my scent down her flank as she twisted away, to leave my mark on her so deep that every wolf for a hundred miles would breathe it in and know she was claimed.

Mine, the mark said. Mine, even though I didn't have her name.

If she were truly mine, I'd have known the instant I touched her. The bond would have caught like a struck match. I felt nothing of the kind.

Only want.

It made no sense. I had taken a hundred things I wanted in my life, and not one of them had ever sat this heavy in my chest.

Then the trees took her, and she was gone, and I stood alone in the dark with my heart slamming and the beast for once perfectly, hungrily quiet. My own paw had stopped over her last print in the mud, holding it, the only piece of her I had left.

I had just put my mark on a stranger I couldn't name, couldn't catch, and might never find again.