Chapter 5

Vane

I had never let myself picture finding my mate.

I was still running when it hit me, four paws over cold ground, and the thought wouldn't shake loose. Warriors don't get fairy tales. We get scars and short lives, and I'd made my peace with both a long time ago.

If the Goddess had a match for me somewhere, I'd always assumed I would die in some border skirmish before I ever caught his scent. She'd waited until now. Until Darkspire.

The black wolf was somewhere in the dark behind me, and every nerve I owned wanted to turn and run back the way I'd come.

That was him. Ashen's voice shook with something I hadn't heard from her in years. That was ours, Vane. Go back.

I didn't.

He was big. Bigger than anything I'd ever run from, and faster than he had any right to be. But I'd spent my whole life outrunning bigger things, and it showed. I cut through a thicket he had to swing around, doubled back over my own trail, and shook him loose in the dark.

I didn't even know his face. He was one of them. A Darkspire wolf, which made him the last creature on this earth I could afford to want.

Please, Ashen whispered.

"No," I told her. "Not him. Not here."

I found the hollow where I'd hidden the chain and fastened the pendant back around my throat.

Ashen went out all at once. The river-smell and the deer-smell died. The whole loud silver night flattened, and I was just a cold woman in the dark again, smelling like a lord's daughter.

I came up the wall and through the window the same way I'd gone out. Sable and the omega girl never stirred. I lay on the floor and watched the sky go gray, and I did not let myself reach for his name, because I didn't have one to reach for.

I prayed I would never have to learn it.

Noise woke me.

Not the ordinary noise of a houseful of frightened girls. Boots in the yard. Voices pitched low and moving too fast. That particular sound a place makes when something has gone wrong and the people in charge are working hard to keep it quiet.

I was on my feet before my eyes were all the way open. Old habit.

I'd slept in Elara's plainest dress, and I tugged it straight as I stepped into the corridor. Sable was already at the railing, her hair a wreck, her eyes huge.

"They've been at it since dawn," she said, low. "The Alpha's got half the pack out searching."

"Searching for what?"

"A woman." She wrapped her arms around herself. "Nobody knows who. They say he wants her found before nightfall, and he won't tell anyone why."

Cold slid down my spine and settled low in my gut.

A woman. There had been a woman in those woods last night, silver from nose to tail, and I had buried her under a pendant and a borrowed name. I made my face do nothing.

I'd put the chain back on. No one had watched me leave or come back. There was no thread on this earth tying the tribute on this floor to the wolf in those trees.

I told myself that twice. The second time, I almost believed it.

Then Lucan came up the stairs.

He came straight for me. He looked me over the way he had on the first day, when he'd weighed every one of us and found us wanting, and his mouth went thin.

"You," he said. "The Alpha wants you."

“Me.” The word slipped out before I could stop it. “You’ve made a mistake. Alpha Corvus can’t possibly be looking for me.”

His gaze dragged over me, full of open distaste.

“He asked for the girl with the scar.”

The floor tilted half an inch under my feet.

The scar. He'd dragged my collar aside in the hall yesterday and found it, the warrior's mark no daughter would ever wear. That was what he'd kept. That had to be all this was — yesterday, not last night.

It did not feel like all it was.

Lucan clicked his tongue. "Goddess. Look at you. You can't go before the Alpha looking like a drowned servant." He snapped his fingers at someone behind him. "Fix her. Quickly."

An hour later I stood outside the Alpha's door in a dress that was not mine, in every sense of the word.

It was deep red, cut low, the silk thin enough that I could feel the draft of the corridor move across my skin. Whoever had laced me into it had done it so that a man would look. I'd worn battle leathers that covered me better than this. I felt skinned.

"Go in," the guard said.

I went in.

He sat at a desk by the window with his sleeves shoved up and a map spread under his hands. He looked up, and the gold of his eyes traveled down the red silk once, and whatever had been open in his face closed.

"Who dressed you like this?"

Heat climbed my throat into my cheeks. It felt like a slap. I had closed twenty graves with these hands. Now I stood in his doorway in borrowed silk while he frowned at me for it.

"Your steward, Alpha," I said. "Shall I apologize for it?"

He didn't answer. He just watched me, and the watching was worse than the question.

I needed out of this room. I had not crossed three days of road and sold my own name to end up warming an alpha's bed. If I could make myself enough of a nuisance, he would hand me back to Lucan and forget my face by supper. Clumsy, sullen, more bother than I was worth.

A cup of black coffee steamed at the edge of his desk.

I drifted toward it, let my hand swing wide, and reached for the clumsiest version of myself I could find.

I never touched the cup.

His hand closed around my wrist before mine got there. The contact went through me like a current, a hot, helpless jolt that arched up my arm and into my chest, the same as it had in the hall, and I hated that my body still remembered it. He turned me and put my back against the bookshelf hard enough to knock a few books loose. They hit the floor by my feet.

He was close now. Too close.

His scent reached me before I could brace for it. Warm, dark, something underneath it that pulled low in my belly and curled there. My breath thinned without my leave. Something in the smell tugged at a memory I couldn't reach, and I clawed for it and came up empty, because the pendant had Ashen sealed away, and whatever my wolf knew, she couldn't tell me.

He wasn't looking at my face. He was looking at my throat.

His free hand rose and lifted the pendant off my collarbone, turning it slow in the light. My heart slammed once against my ribs.

"This is a strange little thing," he said, quiet. "Where does a lord's daughter come by something like this?"

I had an answer ready. I'd kept one ready for days.

I never got to give it.

"Last night," he said, and his eyes came up to mine. "Where were you?"