The scream came before the

The sun did, tearing through the servants' corridor beneath Mount Ashkar an hour before dawn, and by the time it reached the guards stationed outside Kael Ashveyn's chambers, no one could say for certain whether it belonged to a woman or a wolf.

Kael was already awake. He had not slept properly in three nights, not since the bond-ache had first settled behind his ribs like a hook sunk into muscle, tightening a little more with every hour that passed. He rose from his bed without waiting for the guard to knock, pulling a robe over his shoulders, and was in the corridor before the second scream had even finished echoing off the stone.

It was nothing, in the end. A kitchen girl, startled awake by a rat in the pantry stores, embarrassed and apologetic once the guards found her. But Kael stood in that corridor long after the commotion settled, breathing hard, heart pounding for reasons that had nothing to do with rats or screaming girls, and understood, with a dread that curled low and unwelcome in his stomach, exactly what was happening to him.

The bond was close. Closer than it had ever been. And today, if the old omens held, it would finally settle.

He did not want it to.

He had known since childhood that this day would come, ever since his mother had sat him down at the age of ten and explained, with the careful, sorrowful honesty she'd shown him about few other things, that the alpha blood running through his veins came with a cost as well as a gift. *You will feel the pull of a bond someday,* she had told him, her voice soft with old memory, *and when you do, you will not be able to choose who answers it. The wolf in you does not care for thrones, or bloodlines, or what the court expects of a king. It only cares for what it needs.*

He had resented the warning even as a boy, some early, prideful part of him already certain that whomever the bond chose would be worthy of it, simply because the alpha blood itself was rare enough to guarantee value in whomever it selected. He understood now, twenty years later, standing in a dark corridor with his heart still hammering from a false alarm, how naive that certainty had been.

By midmorning, the entire court knew. Word moved through Mount Ashkar the way it always did, faster than any formal announcement, servants whispering to nobles, nobles whispering to each other over breakfast trays, until by the time Kael descended to the throne room for the day's council session, every eye in the hall was already tracking him with a particular, hungry curiosity.

"You look as though you slept in a briar patch," Torv observed, falling into step beside him as they crossed toward the dais, his uncle's voice carrying its usual dry precision. Torv Ashveyn was head of the dragon council, had been for longer than Kael had been alive, and wore his authority the way other men wore armor, comfortable and impenetrable. "The bond, I take it."

"It is not your concern," Kael said.

"Everything that touches this throne is my concern," Torv replied, unbothered by the rebuke, "particularly when it threatens to hand the crown's most important alliance to whatever unfortunate soul the fates decide to inflict on us. Have you considered, my king, that the bond might choose someone entirely unsuited to sit beside you? Some servant girl, some border wolf with no bloodline worth speaking of?"

"The bond does not consult bloodline," Kael said, though the words tasted uncomfortable even as he said them, an echo of arguments he'd had with himself a hundred times over the past three sleepless nights.

"No," Torv agreed. "It does not. Which is precisely why kings throughout our history have quietly ensured their mate bonds settled on someone appropriate, before the wolf-instinct had the chance to embarrass an entire kingdom by choosing otherwise."

Kael said nothing to that, because he had no good answer, and because some small, traitorous part of him had spent the last three nights hoping desperately that his uncle was right, that whatever the bond delivered to him today would be someone worthy of standing beside a Dragon King. Someone with fire in her blood, or wolf-strength enough to match his own. Someone the court would look at and see, immediately, why the fates had chosen her.

He did not know, as he took his seat upon the throne that afternoon, that four hundred miles to the south, in the lower wolf territories beneath the mountain, a nineteen-year-old omega girl was being shaken awake from an uneasy sleep by her sister's frantic hands, a summons already waiting at their pack elder's door, sealed with the crest of the Dragon King himself.

Sable Windmere read the summons twice before the words made any sense at all.

"They can't mean me," she said, voice barely above a whisper, the parchment trembling faintly in her hands. "There must be some mistake. I'm nobody, Rhea. I've never been anybody."

"The seal doesn't lie," Rhea said, her own face pale with a fear she was clearly trying to hide for her younger sister's sake. "The bond-callers only summon when the pull is confirmed on both ends. Sable, if they're calling for you specifically, it means the king already feels it too."

Sable's stomach turned to ice. She had spent nineteen years learning exactly how little her pack valued her, how thoroughly her own bloodline had written her off as too weak to matter, and some small, desperate part of her had always quietly hoped that meant she would be spared the burdens the strong were expected to carry. A king's mate was not spared anything. A king's mate stood in front of an entire court, to be measured, judged, and found wanting by people far crueler than her own pack had ever been.

"When do I have to leave?" she asked.

Rhea's hands tightened around hers, and outside their small window, the first of the mountain's messenger falcons could already be seen circling low over their village, waiting to confirm that the summons had been received and would not be refused.