Chapter 3: The Night They Forgot Me (3)

His voice cracked down the middle.

He swallowed and began again, louder, each word set down like a stone.

"I, Ronan Thorne, Alpha of the Thorne bloodline, reject Mira Veyne as my destined mate."

The world stopped.

Somebody gasped. Somewhere, a glass shattered on the floor.

I stared at him. For a moment the words meant nothing at all. They were sounds, shapes, noise in a language I had never learned.

Then the bond tore.

It didn't snap. It ripped, slowly, like silk pulled apart by two hands, and the pain rose through the center of my chest and spread outward until my fingertips burned with it. I staggered backward. The edge of the altar step caught my heel. I clutched at my chest as if I could hold the wound closed.

Lyra howled.

Not a sound anyone else could hear. A sound inside my skull, inside my bones, so loud and so wild that my vision whitened at the edges.

"No," I breathed.

Ronan stood motionless.

"No," I said again, louder. My voice shook. "You don't mean that. You don't."

He looked at me.

A single tear slid down his cheek.

"Forgive me," he whispered.

He lifted his right hand and turned the black ring on his finger.

He flinched as he did it, as though the metal had seared his skin.

A thin vein of darkness crept out across the silver altar, spreading like ink through water. The moonstones in the crown dimmed one by one. The crown itself began to rattle against the stone.

Seraphine stumbled backward. "Your Highness, what have you—"

The bells rang.

Not the clear, silver notes that had opened the ceremony. These were low and warped, like bells rung underwater. The second note began before the first had ended. Then the third. Then all twelve, crowding over one another, and I realized with a sick lurch that they were running backward.

The floating lanterns guttered. Their flames turned blue, then grey.

All around the hall, the white roses blackened from the stem upward, their petals curling and dropping to the floor like burned paper.

And inside me, the torn remains of the bond went silent.

Not faint. Not distant.

Gone, as if it had never existed at all.

Then something moved through the hall.

I felt it before I understood it: an invisible pressure rolling outward from the altar like a wave, passing over the benches and through the crowd and over me. It was cold. It smelled faintly of smoke and old paper. It went through my body without touching me, the way water flows around a stone.

But it didn't flow around anyone else.

I watched it pass through my mother.

She had been halfway up the altar steps, reaching for me. She stopped.

And I watched it happen in her face, in order, one thing after another. The pride went first. Then the fear for me. Then the love, the deep, steady, ordinary love that had been in her eyes every day of my life.

What was left behind was polite confusion.

She frowned.

"Excuse me?"

My knees nearly gave out. "Mother—"

"Who are you?" She stepped back, down one stair. "How did you get onto the ceremonial platform?"

A strange, broken laugh escaped my throat. "Mother, stop. Please."

Her face hardened into an expression I had only ever seen her turn on strangers.

"Do not call me that."

Daniel bounded up the steps behind her and caught her elbow. "What's happening? What was that? Did you feel—"

Relief hit me so hard it hurt.

"Daniel. Tell her. Tell her who I am."

My brother looked at me. A lifetime of shared secrets and stolen grapes and terrible jokes, and he looked at me the way you look at someone who has stopped you in the street to ask for directions.

"I'm sorry," he said. "Do I know you?"

My stomach dropped through the floor.

"Daniel, please."

He frowned. "How do you know my name?"

I reached for him.

He stepped back. My little brother stepped away from me as if I were a wild animal that might bite.

Across the hall, the whispers were rising.

"Who is she?"

"Was she even invited?"

"Why is she wearing ceremonial silver?"

"Is this an attack?"

I turned to Ronan.

He had to remember. He had to. He had turned the ring. Whatever had been done, his hand had done it, and he had looked at me with tears in his eyes while he did.

And only hours ago, he had kissed me among the cut roses and made me promise to keep fighting.

"Ronan."

He looked up.

For one heartbeat, something flickered across his face. Recognition, real and raw. His lips parted. His hand rose halfway toward me.

Then he gasped, and his ring hand jerked back to his chest as though someone had driven a nail through it. He doubled over, teeth clenched.

When he straightened, his eyes were empty.

"Who are you?"

The question hit harder than the rejection had. My legs nearly buckled beneath me.

"Ronan, please. You know me." My voice cracked. "Yesterday you told me you loved me."

A shocked murmur rippled through the crowd.

His expression closed like a door slamming shut.

"Enough." He raised his voice. "Guards."

Two of his warriors broke from their places at the foot of the altar and started up the steps toward me.

I looked desperately back at my mother.

She wasn't looking at my face anymore. She was staring at my dress, at the silver stars across my shoulder, and something was moving in her expression. Something uncertain.

Hope rose in me so fast it hurt.

"You recognize it," I whispered.

She reached out slowly and touched the embroidery with two fingers.

"These stars," she murmured.

"Yes. Yes. You made them. Two hundred and twelve of them. You made them for me."

Her eyes narrowed.

"That pattern belongs to my family. My grandmother designed it. No one outside our line has ever been allowed to wear it."

"I am your line."

"Don't you lie to me." She snatched her hand back as if the silk had burned her, and her voice began to shake. "Don't you dare stand there in that dress and lie to me."

"Mother—"

"My daughter died," she said, "when she was five years old."