The Night Everything Dies

"Hold still, Selene. You're shaking again."

Mira's voice pulled me back into the room. I had been somewhere else for the last hour, sitting at the dressing table while she did my hair, watching the mirror without seeing it.

"I'm not shaking."

"I've been weaving flowers into your hair for forty minutes. You've been shaking for thirty-eight of them."

"I'm cold."

"It's summer. The hottest summer in five years. You are not cold."

I closed my eyes. Her fingers separated another section of the braid, sliding a stem against my scalp. Small white flowers. I had grown them myself in the kitchen window because no one in the Voss pack would have grown them for me.

"You can tell me," Mira said. "If you don't want to do this."

"Mira."

"I'm serious. We can walk out the back of the house right now. Be at Cordova south by morning. My mom has wanted to take you for years."

"I can't run away from a fated bonding on the morning of the ceremony."

"You can if the bond doesn't want it either. Yours doesn't. I've watched you for a week. You haven't."

I opened my eyes and looked at her in the mirror. Mira Cordova lied poorly, and the things she would not lie about were the things she carried like stones in her pockets.

"It's not the bond. It's me. I've been afraid of this day for ten years."

"You haven't been afraid of it. You've been resigned to it. Those are different things."

I looked away.

She tied off the braid. Set the last white flower at the crown of my head. Her fingers paused there, the way a mother's fingers might pause on a child's forehead before letting her go.

"You look beautiful."

"Don't lie to me on my bonding day, Mira."

"I'm not lying. The dress is awful. Picked by a woman who hates you, and we both know it. But you look beautiful inside of it anyway, and that's its own kind of victory. Stand up."

I stood up.

The dress was cream silk. Diana Cole had picked it three weeks ago on a shopping trip Tyler had insisted she chaperone. The neckline was lower than I would have chosen. The fabric thinner. I had said nothing. I was saving my fights for the things that mattered.

"He loves you," Mira said. "Whatever he does today. He has loved you since we were thirteen. I want you to remember that."

"I'll remember it."

"Don't look at Diana when you walk in. She is going to want you to."

"Why?"

"Because she will. That is reason enough."

She squeezed my hand once. Let go.

The pack hall doors opened at the end of the corridor. The priestess began the blessing, low and old, and I walked toward the sound.

Wood smoke and cedar. Pack mothers had laid fresh cedar branches along the aisle. The green resin smell hit me in the throat. Two hundred faces turned. My father in the front row in his old pack-blue coat with the brass buttons that had been his own father's, his hands folded in his lap like a man who had been told where to sit and had sat. Mira sliding into the second row on the left, exactly where she had said. Diana in the third row in dark green silk, her hands folded, her eyes on me.

I didn't look at her.

I looked at Tyler.

His hands were perfectly still.

I noticed it before I noticed anything else. Tyler's hands had never been still in the entire time I had known him. He drummed his fingers on tables. He spun rings around his thumbs. His mother had been trying to break him of it for fifteen years.

His hands were folded one over the other at his waist, and they weren't moving.

I told myself I was imagining it.

The priestess sang. The pack sat. I stepped up onto the platform and turned to face him.

"Selene Voss. Do you accept this bonding?"

"I do."

My voice came out steady. I was proud of that.

"Tyler Voss. Do you accept this bonding?"

He didn't answer.

The pause was not long. To anyone in the back rows it would not have registered. But I was standing two feet from him and I felt it the way you feel a held breath in a room. His mouth opened. No sound. His eyes darted, fast, to the side of the hall where Diana was sitting. Then back to me.

That was when I knew something was wrong.

"Tyler," I said. Quietly. "Tyler, look at me."

He looked at me. His eyes were the eyes of the boy I had grown up beside, the boy who had held my hand when his father had died, and they were full of something I had never seen in them before. It looked like horror. It looked like a man watching himself do something from inside a body he could not stop.

He shook his head. Once. A movement only I could have seen, "I'm sorry, I can't, I can't do this,"

He opened his mouth anyway.

"I, Tyler Voss, reject you, Selene Voss, as my fated mate."

The bond snapped.

It snapped inside my chest, silver and hot, like a thread cut by a blade pulled from a fire. The scar on my collarbone lit up under the silk with a heat I felt in my teeth. I gasped. The sound carried in the silence of the hall, and somewhere in the second row Mira made a sound I had never heard her make before.

Deep in my chest, something stirred.

Not gone. Just somewhere else. Watching.

I didn't fall.

I had been afraid for one whole second of my life that my body would fold under the weight of what had just happened. Then my body didn't fold.

The tears came anyway. Two of them. A third. Sliding down my face faster than I could blink them away.

I loved him. That was the only thing I could think. I had spent ten years deciding to love him, and the love had become real, and he had just rejected me in front of two hundred people in a dress his lover had picked.

"Tyler. Why?"

"I don't know."

"Yes, you do."

"Selene. I don't. I don't know why my mouth did that. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

His hands had finally started shaking. The way a man's hands shake when he is coming back to himself after something has had hold of him.

I lifted my own hand. I think I had meant to touch his face. The boy I had grown up beside was crying, and I had meant, in the worst moment of my life, to comfort him.

I stopped before my hand reached him.

I turned my head and looked at Diana Cole in the third row.

Diana was smiling.

Not wide. Not public. A small, satisfied smile, the kind a woman smiles when a thing she has built for months has landed exactly where she meant it to.

I understood, looking at her, that the rejection had not been an accident.

I wiped my face with the back of my hand. Once. Hard.

"Goodbye, Tyler."

I walked off the platform.

Mira fell into step with me in the second row. She didn't speak. I didn't ask her to. Her hand at the small of my back, she walked me the length of the aisle, and the pack parted in front of us because no one had been prepared for the rejected omega to walk out on her own feet. They had been prepared for me to fall.

I didn't need the space.

My father was waiting in the hall outside the house.

He had crossed the courtyard ahead of us. I didn't know how, with his bad knee. He was standing under the lamp by the side door, his face the color of old paper.

I stopped six feet from him.

"How long?"

He looked at the floor.

"Hal. How long have you known?"

"Long enough."

The silver thing under my collarbone went cold.

I had not even noticed myself counting him as someone who could betray me. My father had stood in the front row in his father's coat and let me walk up an aisle toward a rejection he had known was coming.

"There is a man in the drive," he said. Still to the floor. "A car. Alpha King Kael Draeven has called in a blood debt against this house. Twenty-one years old. Your mother's. He is calling it in tonight."

"What is the debt?"

"You are."

Mira's hand left my back.

I heard her start to say something. I lifted one finger over my shoulder. She stopped.

"You sold me to the Alpha King?!"

"I did not sell you. The debt was already on you. I am letting them collect."

"Tonight."

"Tonight."

"While the dress is still on me."

He didn't answer.

I walked past him. Past Mira. Into the small sitting room where the bonding gifts were stacked, and stopped in front of them, and breathed in through my nose for four counts and out for six, the way Mira's mother had taught me when I was twelve.

Mira came in behind me. Closed the door.

"Selene."

"Don't."

"There's a bag. Under the floor of my room. I packed it the day the dress arrived. Money, papers, a knife. We can go through the south orchard before the car leaves."

"If I run, I'm the broken omega."

"You ARE the broken omega, Selene. He just made you the broken omega in front of two hundred people."

"If I run, that's all I will be for the rest of my life. The Voss girl who couldn't take it."

"So don't run away from this. Run TO Cordova south. To my mom."

"And then what, Mira? Hide in your kitchen until the Alpha King sends men to drag me out of it? You think a blood debt twenty-one years old is one your mother can talk her way out of?"

She didn't answer.

I looked at her. The girl who had taught me to fight when I was nine, to lie when I was eleven, to walk into rooms full of pack people who wanted me to be smaller than I was.

"If I go to the Alpha King," I said, "I am something else."

"You don't know what you'll be."

"No. But I know what I won't be. I won't be the broken omega."

Mira closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were wet, and she did not bother to wipe them.

"I hate that you're right."

"I know."

"I hate it specifically. With my whole chest."

A laugh came out of me before I could stop it. Small, ugly, half a sob. The first sound I had made since I had walked off the platform that hadn't been pulled out of me by grief.

"Noted," I said.

The black car was in the drive.

It was longer than any car I had seen in the Voss pack in my life. The driver was already standing by the rear door, in a coat too well cut to be a driver's coat, with the stillness of a man who had been a soldier before he had been anything else.

He looked up as I came down the front steps.

I had been told, on the walk through the house, that his name was Riven. That he was the Alpha King's right hand. That the Alpha King did not send his right hand for ordinary debts.

I met his eyes.

I didn't look away.

He inclined his head. Not a bow. An acknowledgment. The kind of acknowledgment you give a person you have not yet decided to underestimate.

"Lady Voss."

"Not anymore."

The corner of his mouth moved. Not a smile. A note taken.

"The ceremony is tonight," he said. "The King does not like to wait."

He opened the rear door of the car.

I stood at the top of the steps in a cream silk dress picked out by my husband's lover, with a rejection mark burning silver under the fabric, and the small white flowers Mira had braided into my hair shifting in the warm summer wind. I thought about how I had two hours.

Two hours, and by sunrise I would be the Alpha King's wife.

I walked down the steps.