The Mark Before the Morning

Chapter 2: The Mark Before the Morning

Maren POV

The room was a suite. A long sofa, a desk buried in papers, a stone fireplace burning low, and a wall of glass with the storm behind it. A man stood at the window with one forearm braced against the pane. Black shirt open at the collar. Head down.

I shut the door behind me. The lock clicked, and the sound was far louder than it should have been.

"Get out." His voice was low and rough. He did not turn around. "Now."

"I'm sorry. I thought the room was empty." My knees went, and I caught the back of a chair. "Someone put something in my drink. I can't think. I only need somewhere to sit until it passes."

He turned.

The firelight gave me the edge of his jaw, a pale scar running from his left brow down to it, and eyes that were gold ringed with silver. They found me and stayed. I stopped breathing.

Linnet stopped pacing. All of her went still. Then she shoved forward against my ribs so hard that I took a step toward him before I knew I had moved.

"Stay where you are."

I stayed.

I knew that scar. Everyone in the territory knew it. It had been on every news feed and every pack newsletter since he took the throne at seventeen. Cassian Vale. The Lycan King.

"Your Majesty," I said.

"Don't." He said it through his teeth. His right hand had closed on the edge of the desk, and the wood creaked under it. "Someone put silver in my wine two hours ago. It's in my blood. My wolf is not under control, and whatever they gave you is making it worse." He breathed in, and his whole chest shook with it. "Go back down the hall. Find anyone with an earpiece. Tell them to send a doctor."

"I can't walk."

"Then sit."

"The room is spinning."

"Then sit down, and do it far away from me."

I lowered myself onto the floor against the wall by the door, because the chair was too close to the desk and the sofa was too close to him. My hands shook so badly I pressed them under my thighs. The heat in my stomach rose again. I put my head against the cold plaster and shut my eyes.

Something landed on the carpet beside my knee.

A bottle of water. The cap was sealed.

"Check the seal," he said. "I opened nothing in this room tonight. I wouldn't drink from anything I hadn't watched someone pour. Neither should you."

I cracked the seal. It broke with a click. I drank the whole bottle without stopping, and when I lowered it, his eyes had not left me. He still gripped the desk. His knuckles had gone white.

"Who gave it to you?" he asked.

"My stepsister."

"Why?"

"Because I walked in on her with my boyfriend." I laughed, and it cracked. "My mate. I guess I should say my mate."

He said nothing. But the fingers on the desk tightened until I heard the wood give.

"Your name," he said.

"Maren."

He did not offer his. He didn't need to.

We sat like that for a long time. I don't know how long. The fire dropped. The rain hit the glass in long gray sheets. Somewhere far below, a ballroom full of people was drinking champagne and talking about land rights and border patrols, and none of them knew where he was.

I noticed it slowly. He had been shaking when I came in. A tremor in the right hand, a sheen of sweat across his throat. Now the hand was still. The sweat had dried. He breathed in and out evenly, and he was looking at me with something that was not quite surprise.

"How far away are you?" he asked.

"Maybe ten feet."

"Come closer."

"You told me to stay far away."

"I know what I said." He dragged a hand down his face. "Humor me."

I got to my knees. Crawled a few feet. Stopped when Linnet pushed forward and pressed against my breastbone with a low, steady sound I had never heard from her. A hum. Not a whine. Not a cry. She sounded content.

He heard it. His head came up. Something in his face broke open and shut again just as fast.

"My wolf has been tearing at me for two days," he said slowly. "He stopped the second you walked in."

"Mine too," I said. "She's never done that."

"Done what?"

"Been quiet."

He crossed the room. Three strides. He stopped a full arm's length from me and lowered himself to the floor, one knee up, his back against the sofa. He did not touch me. I could feel the heat coming off his body.

"The drug," he said. "Tell me what it feels like."

"It's fading. Slowly." I pressed my palms to my eyes. "Everything was loud before. Everything was too close. Now it's just..." My voice caught. "Now I just feel everything."

"Everything."

"Grant. The cake. Sloane's face." I let my hands fall. "Do you know what I did tonight? I baked a lemon cake. At midnight. It's my birthday, and I baked a cake and carried it across the city so I could tell a man I was ready."

He went very still. "Today is your birthday."

"Technically it's yesterday. It's after midnight."

"How old?"

"Twenty-four."

"Happy birthday, Maren," he said quietly.

That did it. I had held it together through the bedroom, the glass, the elevator, the rain. A stranger's four words broke me open. I pulled my knees up and cried into them, silently, shoulders shaking, while the Lycan King sat an arm's length away and said nothing and did not look away.

When I stopped, the fire had burned down to embers. I wiped my face with the back of my wrist.

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be."

"I'm not usually..."

"I didn't ask what you usually are."

The room was quiet. The rain had softened. My head felt clear for the first time in hours, and my hands had stopped shaking. I counted what I knew. My name. My date of birth. My father's address. Sloane's perfume. The exact taste of the drink.

The drug was gone. Or nearly gone. And Linnet was awake and warm and pressed against the inside of my chest, reaching toward the man beside me with her whole weight.

"Cassian."

He flinched at the sound of his name. He looked at me.

"Ask me anything," I said. "My full name. Where I live. What my sister put in that glass."

"Why?"

"Because I need you to know I'm clear."

His jaw tightened. Slowly, as if each word cost him, he said, "Maren, listen to me. I'm a Lycan. When I touch a woman my wolf wants, I don't stop at touching. I mark. The mark doesn't come off. It doesn't fade. It will tie you to me for the rest of your life, and I have two dead fiancées who found out what that means." He held my eyes. "I won't do it to a woman who is drugged and heartbroken at three in the morning."

"I'm not drugged anymore."

"You don't know that."

"I know my name. I know what day it is. I know my mate is in a penthouse across town with my stepsister. I know my father's voicemail. I know I want to be in this room." My voice stayed steady, and I was surprised by that. "Nobody has asked me what I want in two years. You asked me my name."

He closed his eyes. His hand, resting on his knee, was trembling again. Not from the silver.

"If you say stop," he said, "I stop. Even in the middle of it. Even if it kills me."

"I won't."

"Say it anyway. So I know you can."

"Stop," I said.

He went still.

"Now say the other word."

I took his hand in both of mine. It was hot and large and shaking. "Stay."

His eyes opened. Gold, silver, and something I couldn't name. He lifted his free hand and touched my face, very lightly, with the backs of his fingers. As if I were something he had been told not to break.

"Last chance," he said.

I kissed him.

The rest happened in the dark and the last of the firelight, and I will not describe all of it, because some things I want to keep for myself. I will say that he asked, over and over, in a voice rubbed raw. I will say I answered every time. I will say that for a few hours I was not the girl everyone pitied. I was wanted, and I was sure of it.

At the end, his mouth found the curve of my shoulder.

"Mine," he said. It came out more growl than word.

His teeth broke the skin.

Pain went through me white and absolute, a line of heat carved straight across my shoulder blade. I cried out. Something burned itself into me and kept burning, and as my vision narrowed, I felt his arms close around me and hold on.

I woke alone.

Gray light came through the glass. The fire was dead. A folded white shirt lay on the pillow beside me, and the sheets on his side were cold. He had gone hours ago.

I sat up too fast, and my shoulder blade lit up. I made it to the bathroom with the sheet around me and turned my back to the mirror.

A crescent. Raised, red at the edges, with a silver sheen running through the center that caught the light when I moved. I touched it with two fingers. It pulsed once under my fingertips, as if something inside it recognized me.

Linnet was awake. She was no longer quiet. She was calling for him.

I pulled on his shirt. I pressed the collar to my face. Smoke and cold winter pine. Linnet leaned into my ribs and made a sound I had no word for. I sat on the edge of the tub and tried to think. He had left no note. No name, no number. Only the shirt. Only the mark.

Then the suite door opened.

A key card. The beep. Footsteps on the carpet, unhurried, and the smell reached me before the voice did.

Vanilla and amber.

"Good morning, Mare."

Sloane stood in the bathroom doorway in a cream coat, her hair perfectly done, her phone held loosely in one hand. Behind her, in the bedroom, I could see Grant. He would not look at me.

"I watched you go in through the service door last night," Sloane said pleasantly. "I waited in the car. All night, actually. It was very educational." She turned the phone around so I could see the screen. Photographs. The service door. The hallway. The room number. A time stamp.

"How did you get in here?" My voice came out flat.

"The front desk was very helpful once I mentioned Dad's title." She tilted her head. "Do you know what pack law calls an unmated woman marked by an unknown Alpha, Mare?"

I said nothing.

"Tainted. Exile for you. And Dad loses the Beta seat he has spent thirty years holding." She swiped to the next photograph. "Dad is downstairs. So is the Pack Council."

Grant stepped into the doorway beside her. His eyes went to my shoulder, to the collar of the white shirt, and away. He cleared his throat and spoke to the floor.

"Maren Hale, I reject you as my mate."

The bond tore. It did not scream this time. It simply stopped, and the silence where it had been was so complete that I pressed my hand flat against my chest to check that my heart was still going.

Sloane slid the phone into her pocket.

"Good," she said. "Now we can talk about what you're going to do for me."