Chapter 3: The Pack Square (Part One)

He never said a word to me.

Not one word. Not after the courtyard, not after Selena's hand unhooked from his arm, not after the whole pack had seen the three of us standing there with the truth sitting in the open air between us like something that had already been decided. Jason walked me to a side room off the main hall, told me there would be a full gathering tomorrow morning, that everything would be addressed then, and left.

The door closed behind him.

I stood there and listened to his footsteps go down the hall, and then I listened to a second set of footsteps, lighter, unhurried, following the same direction. Selena. Going wherever he was going.

I pressed both hands flat over my stomach.

"Okay," I said quietly. To myself. To the baby. To whoever was still listening in a world that had just shown me exactly how alone I was in it. "Okay. Tomorrow."

I did not sleep. I lay on the narrow bed in the east wing guest room, the one I had moved to because I could not bring myself to go back to the room Jason and I had shared, and I stared at the ceiling until the grey Canadian dawn started bleeding through the curtains. My wolf had been quiet for three days now, that awful still quiet, and I kept reaching for her the way you reach for something in the dark that you know should be there, and she kept being silent, and the silence kept being its own kind of answer.

By the time I heard the pack beginning to gather outside, I had already washed my face, changed my clothes, and had the same conversation with my own reflection three times.

He is your mate. The bond is real. Whatever this looks like right now, you know what you are to each other. Go out there and stand where you are supposed to stand and let him explain it. Let him see you. Let him remember.

My reflection looked back at me with red-rimmed eyes and said nothing.

I went outside anyway.

The pack square was full.

I smelled them before I saw them, hundreds of wolves packed into the open ground between the hall and the old stone monument at the center, pack scents layering over each other in the cold morning air, familiar and overwhelming and deeply, painfully home. Children on shoulders near the front. Elders in their formal row on the left. Warriors flanking the platform in two straight lines. Every face I had grown up looking at, every wolf who had watched me become who I was in this territory, gathered together in the grey winter light.

I stopped at the edge of the square.

Something was wrong. Not in a way I could name yet, just a pressure behind my sternum, my wolf lifting her head slowly in the dark for the first time in three days, scenting something she did not like.

I moved to the back of the crowd and found a space between two older pack families and stood there with my arms at my sides and told myself to breathe.

The platform was empty.

Then it was not.

Jason stepped up first, and my heart did the thing it always did when I saw him, that involuntary lurch, that pull through the mate bond like a rope tugging at something behind my ribs. He was in full Alpha grey, ceremonial, formal, and he looked exactly like the man I had loved for years. Broad shoulders. Jaw set. Eyes the color of winter bark scanning the crowd the way Alphas scan, reading the energy of their pack, checking exits, cataloguing everything at once.

His eyes found mine.

For one second, just one, something moved across his face. A flicker of something complicated and unfinished and almost, almost human.

Then it was gone.

He raised his hand and the crowd went quiet. That deep, unified pack-quiet that moves through the bond and settles in your chest whether you want it to or not. I felt it happen inside me and I hated myself for responding to it. Hated that my body still answered him. Hated that even now, even like this, the mate bond was pulling at me like it did not know what he had done.

"People of Blackthorn." His voice rolled across the square, Alpha resonance vibrating in the air and in the bond simultaneously. "This pack has suffered a devastating loss. The Alpha King and Luna Queen were taken from us three nights ago, and their deaths will not go unanswered. I give you my word that justice will be pursued."

A murmur of grief moved through the crowd. Someone near me pressed a fist to their chest.

My throat closed.

My parents. He was talking about my parents like they were a pack matter. Like they were a political event. Like the woman who had braided my hair and the man who had lifted me onto his shoulders so I could see above the crowd in this very square were a line item in an Alpha address.

I pressed my lips together and held it. Held all of it. The grief and the fury and the six weeks of secret growing inside me and the forty-eight hours of silence and all of it, just held it, because falling apart at the back of a crowd would not help anyone, least of all me.

"But a pack cannot live in grief alone," Jason continued. His voice did not waver. Not once. "A pack needs its future. So I am standing before you today to make an announcement."

He turned.

And Selena stepped up beside him.

She was wearing deep blue.

Luna blue.

The air left my body so completely and so suddenly that I actually swayed. One small, barely visible sway that I caught by locking my knees, and the woman standing to my left glanced at me and then away, and I was grateful for it, I was grateful she looked away because I needed one second, just one, to absorb what I was looking at.

My cousin. In Luna blue. On that platform. Beside my mate.

Three days after my parents were buried.

The mate bond exploded.

That is the only word for what happened inside me. It did not ache. It did not pull. It detonated, a wave of pain that started somewhere deep in my chest where the bond lived and tore outward in every direction at once, and my wolf, silent for three days, made a sound that I felt in my bones and my blood and the backs of my eyes and every single place a person can hurt without showing it on the outside.

I did not make a sound.

I pressed my hand to my mouth and I stood there and I did not make a sound.

"Selena Vale has agreed to stand beside me as the future Luna of Blackthorn Pack."

The square erupted.

Cheering. Real, wholehearted, pack-deep cheering, the kind that moves through the bond and carries everyone with it, and I felt that too, I felt my packmates' joy like it was happening inside my own chest alongside the thing that was destroying me, and I have never in my life felt anything as cruel as those two sensations existing in the same body at the same moment.

Elders nodded. A woman near the front burst into tears. Children clapped without knowing why, just catching the energy of the adults around them, just riding the wave of it.

And Selena stood on that platform in Luna blue and smiled.

She smiled the way someone smiles when they have been waiting a very long time for a moment and it has finally arrived exactly the way they planned it.

The tears came without permission.

I felt them before I could stop them, that burning pressure behind my eyes that I had been fighting for three days, and this time my body simply refused. One tear. Then another. Hot and furious and humiliating, tracking down my face in the cold morning air while the pack cheered for the woman wearing my future.

I blinked hard.

Pressed the back of my hand to my face.

Breathed.

My wolf pressed against my ribs from the inside, not raging, just present, just there, the way she had been on the floor beside my parents, the way she had been through every hour of those forty-eight silent hours, just there, just refusing to let me disappear completely.

I looked at Jason.

He was looking at the crowd. At the elders. At the platform beneath his feet. At everything except me.

Something shifted in my chest. Not broke, because breaking implies it was still whole. Something that had already been fracturing since the courtyard yesterday made one final quiet sound and came apart.

And what settled in its place was not grief.

It was not rage either.

It was something much simpler and much more dangerous than either of those things.

It was clarity.

I wiped my face with the back of my hand.

I straightened my spine.

And then I started moving forward through the crowd.

I did not know exactly what I was going to say. I did not have a speech prepared or a plan or anything except the bone-deep knowledge that I had stood at the back of this square for long enough, that my parents were three days dead and my mate was choosing my cousin and an entire pack was cheering and I was standing here silent like I had agreed to all of it, and I had not agreed to any of it, not one single part.

People shifted as I pressed through. Some of them turned to look.

I kept walking.

The crowd fell quiet around me.

And every single eye in the Blackthorn Pack turned to watch what happened next.