Camila's POV
“Julian, you what? You married Vivienne Laurent? ”
Standing in the hallway of the Ravencrest packhouse, I was cradling a bottle of aged Bordeaux I'd driven two hours to buy. Five years ago tonight, Julian's wolf had recognized me as his mate. I'd come to surprise him. Yet I was the one to be shocked.
"Yesterday afternoon." Julian's voice came smugly. "Small ceremony. Her father insisted on keeping it quiet until the announcement."
Yesterday afternoon? I remembered how the left side of my neck suddenly flared at the same time.
"Julian." Austin again, lower now. "Tell me you didn't mark her." The pause that followed lasted three heartbeats. I felt my palms sweat.
"Of course I marked her." Julian chuckled. "What kind of marriage would it be otherwise?"
"Then how about Camilla?" Austin asked. "She's your mate and you've been together for five years. Everyone knows that."
"She'll understand," Julian said dismissively, and I could picture the casual way he flicked the ash from his cigarette. "After all, everyone knows it's already an honor that I'm willing to acknowledge her as my mate. No ambitious Alpha would choose a wolf-less Omega over an Alpha's daughter like Vivienne for their Luna."
That was enough for me to swing the door open. The laughter died so fast it left a ringing silence behind it. Eight of them sat around the long table and at the head of it, my mate, with a wine glass halfway to his mouth and the color draining from his face.
"Camila." Julian set the glass down carefully and stood. "Sweetheart. How long have you—"
"Long enough." I crossed the room without hurrying, and watched him decide, in real time, how he was going to play this.
He came around the table with both hands open, his voice dropping into the register he used to gentle me. "Whatever you heard, it isn't what you think. The marriage is politics—paperwork. Come outside, let me explain. You know you've never been good at understanding these things."
"Which things?" I asked. "The wedding, or the mark you put on her neck while your mate was two hours away, buying you this?"
I lifted the Bordeaux so he could read the label. Something flickered in his eyes, and then it hardened into what lived underneath, the thing I'd spent five years refusing to see.
"You want honesty?" His voice cooled. "Fine. Look at yourself, Camila. No wolf. No name. A pauper from a pack nobody can find on a map. The bond doesn't even work on you—you can't feel it, so what exactly did I take from you?" He stepped closer, wine on his breath. "Five years I kept you when any other male would've tossed
you back. You should be grateful. And if you're smart, you'll stay sweet, because what I said in there is still on the table. Nothing
about my marriage has to change what we—"
I swung the bottle. Two hours' drive and a hundred and eighty dollars of Bordeaux caught him across the temple and burst, wine and glass going everywhere, red sheeting down through his hair and into the collar of his crisp white shirt. The table erupted—chairs scraping, wolves surging up—and Julian staggered into the sideboard, clutching his head, roaring my name.
He came at me with one hand outstretched; whether to grab my wrist or my throat, I never found out, because I drove my knee up into his groin with every ounce of five wasted years behind it. The sound he made wasn't a roar. It was a whistle.
"Consider that a wedding gift," I said as he folded. "Vivienne can thank me later."
"You—" He was on his knees in the spreading wine, one hand braced on the floor, and even then, his eyes promised me consequences. "You wolf-less little—"
"I, Camila Hart," I said, "reject you, Julian Blackwell, as my mate." The words came out steadier than I had any right to expect, given what they cost. I'd read about rejection in the old texts Grandma kept—how the bond doesn't slip loose but tears, and pain both
ways.
I felt it start in my sternum, a white-hot wire pulling through the center of me, and under the moon-silver bracelet Mena took the worst of it and gave a single, terrible cry. I didn't move. I put my nails into my palms and I stood there and let it burn through, because I would swallow glass before I gave this room the satisfaction.
Julian wasn't given the choice. He'd betrayed our bond first—marked another wolf over a living mate—and the breaking came
down on him like a debt called in. The most ambitious male in Ravencrest, face-down in wine and broken glass at his own
celebration dinner. When he finally dragged his head up, there was something new underneath the fury. Confusion. "What are you? You have no wolf, this shouldn't work," he rasped.
I picked my clutch up off the floor and stepped over his outstretched hand. "Camila." His voice cracked behind me, fury and pain braided together. "Walk out that door and you're finished. Do you hear me? No pack takes in a rejected female with no wolf. No male will
touch my leavings. You'll be back—you'll crawl back, and when you do—" I let the door close on the rest.
***
The nightclub on the edge of Ravencrest was loud enough to think in, which is the only kind of loud worth paying for. I took a private booth in the back, ordered their strongest vodka, and waved off the glass when the waiter tried to pour.
'You should have let me kill him,' Mena said. Her voice was hoarse from the night's howling.
"You're sealed in a bracelet, my love." I drank. The burn went down and settled next to the other one. "You couldn't kill a rabbit."
'Take it off, then.'
"You know what I promised Grandma." Not until I walked back into the Whitmore world under my real name, on my own terms—and I would not let Julian Blackwell dictate the timing of that. He didn't get to matter that much.
Mena subsided into a low, grieving rumble, and the two of us drank. I was most of the way through a quarter bottle when a shadow fell across the table. I looked up, ready to send another hopeful stud on his way—and stopped. He set his whiskey down across from me and sat without being invited, the way men sit when no room has ever refused them.
Broad through the shoulders, dark coat, amber eyes that caught the
low light and held it. There was something of Julian in the line of his jaw, the way a rough sketch resembles the finished portrait.
Alpha Roman Blackwell. His brother's rival. The wolf Julian was mortgaging his mate to unseat. Inside me, Mena—who had grieved for twenty-four hours without stopping—went suddenly, perfectly silent.
"You're wearing my brother's pack on your skin," Roman said, in a voice like a struck cello, "and drinking like you're burying something. Who died?"
I looked at him for a long moment over the rim of the bottle. And an idea—reckless, vodka-warm, and sweet as cold revenge—began to take shape.