CHAPTER 7: He Called Me His Mate

KAEL

"You're staring," Seraphine said, without looking away from the window.

"I'm assessing."

"Assessing what?"

"Whether that dress will survive a council session." It wouldn't survive what I actually intended to say to Draven Cole, but that wasn't information she needed yet.

She didn't answer. Her hands stayed folded too tight in her lap, knuckles pale, and I let the silence sit between us, counting the mile markers of my own territory sliding past the window. Trade routes I'd built from nothing. Mines that fed three currencies. Shipping lanes that made half the twelve territories richer than kingdoms three times their size. 

None of it mattered in a room I couldn't hear properly, and none of it would matter tonight if Draven walked out of Crescent Hall believing I was as broken as he wanted the council to think.

Crescent Hall received us the way it always did. Cold stone slick with torchlight, the low collective growl of nine Alphas who did not want to breathe the same air. Two seats sat empty. One belonged to a wolf who hadn't survived his last challenge, and no one had filled it since.

Draven Cole rose to greet us. Broad, golden-eyed, a smile that showed a fraction too many teeth. Beside him, Alpha Renata of the Southern Fen sat with her claws already extended, drumming them against the table in a slow rhythm that made three junior Alphas flinch with every click. 

Further down, old Alpha Voss watched with his arms crossed and his eyes half-lidded, the posture of a man who'd seen enough council wars to know this one would end in blood or humiliation, and didn't much care which. The air smelled of ozone and something older beneath it, the copper memory of every fight this hall had ever hosted.

"Out of respect for the council, I am here," I said, and let a decade of conquest sit behind every syllable. "Do not start a war you cannot win. You know better than to contend with me."

Draven's smile didn't move. "Do I? You didn't attend the last four summits, Thorne. A deaf Alpha commanding twelve territories." A low chuckle rippled down the table. "Tell me, does the silence get lonely?"

Mohan's hands rose. He says he questions your fitness to hold the Eastern Reach.

Softer than what Draven's mouth had actually shaped, I could tell that much even without the words; the twist of his lip carried more venom than the sign suggested. I filed the gap away without understanding it yet.

"I hold what I've bled for," I said. "You'd know, if you'd ever bled for anything yourself."

Laughter rippled around the table, low and rough, more growl than sound. Draven's jaw ticked, and for a moment his shoulders shifted, the first ripple of a shift threatening beneath his skin before he forced it back down.

"That is not correct," Seraphine said.

The room went silent enough to hear the torches gutter. She leaned toward me, her voice pitched only for my ears, and repeated, word for word, what Draven had actually said.

He says the silence has made you weak enough to bring a pet to a war council. He says he wonders what else you can't hear coming.

Every Alpha at that table watched my face change as I heard it, clean and whole, while the rest of the room heard nothing but my silence.

Draven's smile split wider, delighted. "Well." He rose, crossing the floor with a speed no human eye could have tracked, a blur of motion that ended with his finger under Seraphine’s chin before I'd fully registered he'd moved. "A hearing aid, and a pretty one." His voice dropped low, hungry, his eyes dragging over her face like he was already deciding how he'd keep her. "I could end this whole dispute tonight, Thorne. Give her to me, and I forget the Eastern Reach entirely. I've wanted something like her for a long time. Something that looks at me the way she's about to look at you."

I don't remember crossing the room.

I remember his wrist in my grip, snapping up behind his spine hard enough to hear the joint protest. I remember the wall meeting his face, the crack of it silencing the last of the laughter. I remember my own voice, too loud, and not caring who flinched.

"Touch her again," I said, "and I will not stop at your wrist. I will tear the arm from the socket and make every wolf in this hall watch you bleed for it. She is mine. Say her name again with that hunger in your mouth, and find out exactly how little the word mate is holding me back tonight."

Mate.

I felt Seraphine go rigid behind me, her breath catching audibly in a room gone utterly still. I felt nine Alphas recalculate, in the space of one heartbeat, everything they thought they understood about Kael Thorne.

And beneath the fury still roaring through me, a colder thought surfaced, quiet and precise: Mohan had lied about what Draven said.

I intended to find out why.