Chapter 2: The Night They Forgot Me (2)

"I'm not fidgeting."

"You're breathing too much."

"Mother, that's generally encouraged."

She gave me the look that had terrified me as a child and made me laugh as an adult, and I felt my shoulders loosen a little.

Then I made the mistake of looking around the hall.

Every face was turned toward the altar. Pack Alphas and their Lunas. Elders with silver in their beards. Children perched on their fathers' shoulders for a better view. The archivists from my department, crammed together in a back row, grinning and waving at me like idiots. Old Master Halloran, who had taught me to read Old Northern, dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief.

And near the eastern pillars, apart from everyone, was a man I didn't recognize.

He wore the black of the High King's royal guard, a heavy fur cloak thrown over his shoulders and pinned with a gold wolf's-head brooch, but none of the silks or jewels the pack wolves favored. He was tall and broad, his dark hair falling in loose, untidy waves, his jaw shadowed with stubble, his face all hard angles and stillness. A sword hung at his hip, in a hall where weapons were forbidden to everyone but the Alpha's own guards.

He wasn't watching the doors like everyone else.

He was watching me.

Not the way men sometimes looked at women. Not admiration, not curiosity. He was studying me the way a hunter studies tracks in the snow: measuring, calculating, deciding.

When our eyes met, he didn't look away.

I did.

"Who is that?" I murmured. "By the eastern pillar."

Daniel craned his neck. "The scary one? Royal envoy. Arrived this morning. The kitchen girls say he's the High King's personal blade."

"What's he doing here?"

"Attending a royal wedding, presumably." Daniel shrugged. "Or murdering someone. Hard to tell with that face."

"Daniel," Mother hissed.

The ceremonial bells rang.

Twelve clear, silver notes, each one hanging in the air until the next replaced it. The conversations faded. The children were lifted down. Silence spread through the hall like water.

At the far end, the great doors swung open.

Alpha Ronan Thorne entered in the black and silver uniform of his ancestors. His dark hair was swept back from the sharp features I had memorized years ago, and the wolves lining the aisle lowered their heads as he passed. He walked the length of the hall without hurrying and without looking left or right.

He looked every inch the ruler he had been born to become.

He also looked terrified.

I knew Ronan better than anyone alive. I knew how his jaw tightened when he was angry, how he rubbed his thumb against his ring finger when he was worried, how he glanced toward the nearest exit whenever his mother began discussing politics at dinner.

Tonight, his face was perfectly still. Smooth and cold as the altar stone.

Only his hands betrayed him.

They were trembling.

Inside me, my wolf stirred.

Lyra rarely spoke during formal occasions. She found them dull. But now she rose to her feet in the back of my mind, ears flat, and the hair on my arms lifted.

Something is wrong.

He's nervous, I told her. So am I.

No. She was staring at him through my eyes. He's afraid.

Ronan climbed the altar steps and stopped beside the crown.

High Seer Seraphine stepped forward to meet him, ancient and straight-backed in her white robes, her blind eyes filmed with silver. She raised her hands, and the last whispers in the hall died away.

"The Moon has chosen," she announced. Her voice was thin, but it carried to every corner. "And tonight, the chosen pair shall confirm their bond before the seven packs."

A murmur of approval rolled through the benches.

My mother squeezed my hand once and let go.

I climbed the steps and stopped in front of Ronan. I waited for him to take my hand the way we had practiced: palm to palm, fingers laced, the oldest gesture of mated wolves.

He didn't move.

My smile faltered.

"Ronan?"

His eyes met mine, and for an instant the mask slipped. There was pain beneath it. Not nerves, not doubt. A terrible, helpless kind of pain, like a man watching his house burn with his hands tied behind his back.

Then his gaze flicked upward, toward the royal gallery.

I followed it.

Lady Victoria Thorne stood at the carved stone railing above us, elegant in dark blue, her silver hair coiled at the nape of her neck. She wasn't smiling. Two guards flanked her, and they were watching the altar with an attention that had nothing to do with ceremony.

Ronan's mother had never liked me. An archivist from a minor family, with no fortune and no allies, was not what she had wanted for her son. But she had always been coldly polite about it.

She did not look polite now.

She looked like a woman waiting for a signal.

Seraphine turned her blind face toward Ronan. "Alpha Ronan Thorne, do you accept Mira Veyne as your destined mate and Luna?"

Silence.

It stretched. Someone on the benches coughed. A few people exchanged uncertain glances.

"Ronan," I whispered.

He closed his eyes.

Beneath my ribs, the mate bond pulsed, warm and alive, the golden thread that had tied us together since the night we were nineteen and first caught each other's scent. I felt his wolf reach for mine across it, the way it always did, and Lyra pressed toward him by instinct.

Then Ronan spoke.

"I, Ronan Thorne—"