The scent of crushed pine needles fills my lungs, and I nearly choke on it.
“Smile,” my sister Wren hisses beside me, her fingers digging into my wrist hard enough to
bruise. “Everyone is watching you, Vesper. Don't give them a reason to whisper.”
They're already whispering. I can hear it—the low murmur rippling through the pack like wind
through dead leaves, hundreds of voices dropping to hushed tones every time someone's eyes
flick toward me and then toward the dais. Toward him.
Alpha Kael Ashgrove stands beneath an arch woven from white lilies and black thorns, dressed
in ceremonial gray, his jaw carved from granite, his eyes the color of a winter storm. He does
not look at me. He has not looked at me once since I walked into this hall.
My chest is on fire.
Not metaphorically—I mean my ribs feel like they are cracking from the inside, like something
enormous and starving is trying to claw its way out through my sternum. The mate bond. Our
bond.
It has been screaming since the moment he stepped onto that platform, and now, as the
priestess lifts the ceremonial cord to bind his wrist to another woman's, the scream turns into
something closer to a shriek.
“Breathe,” Wren whispers. “Please, Vesper, just breathe.”
I don't know how. I have known Kael since I was seven years old and he was the skinny boy
who pulled my braid and then cried when I punched him for it.
I have known him as my Alpha,
my friend, and—three moons ago, when our wolves finally recognized each other in the training
yard, both of us frozen mid-motion, breath stolen, hearts hammering in perfect unison—as my
true mate.
Celestial law does not lie. The bond does not make mistakes.
But Kael does.
“People of Ashgrove,” the priestess intones, her voice rolling out over the crowd like distant
thunder, “we gather beneath moon and star to witness the union of Alpha Kael Ashgrove and
Lady Serath Veyne of the Ironfang pack, sealing not merely two hearts, but two kingdoms.”
Two kingdoms.
Not two souls. Not two fated wolves screaming for each other across a crowded
room. Two kingdoms, bartered like cattle, sealed like a trade agreement written in blood and lily
petals.
Serath is beautiful in the way that knives are beautiful—sharp, gleaming, dangerous to touch.
She wears Ironfang crimson beneath a veil of silver lace, and when she looks at Kael, there is
nothing in her eyes but calculation. She does not love him.
She does not need to. She only needs
the alliance his name will buy her father, and he only needs the three hundred warriors her pack
will lend him when the Vaelgard wolves finish crossing the northern border.
I understand the politics. I have always understood the politics.
I was raised in this pack; I know
exactly what it costs to keep four thousand wolves fed and safe when the whole world is baring
its teeth at your throat.
Understanding does not stop the pain.
The bond in my chest twists again, a physical wrenching, like unseen hands are trying to rip two
halves of the same heart apart. My knees buckle.
Wren catches my elbow, holds me upright, her
nails cutting crescents into my skin to keep me grounded, to keep me from making a sound.
“You promised me you could do this,” she breathes.
“I lied,” I whisper back.
Kael turns his head, just slightly, and for one suspended heartbeat, his eyes finally find mine
across the crowded hall.
There is nothing there.
No apology. No grief.
No flicker of the boy who once carved my initials into the oak tree
behind the training grounds, no trace of the man who three moons ago pressed his forehead to
mine and said I have never felt anything like this in my life.
His face is a locked door, bolted
from the inside, and I realize with a cold, sinking horror that he has trained himself to look at
me and see nothing.
He looks away first.
“Do you, Kael Ashgrove,” the priestess says, “accept this mate, this alliance, this future, before
moon and pack and blood?”
“I do.” His voice does not shake. It does not so much as waver. Two words, flat and final,
driven into my chest like nails into a coffin lid.
The crowd erupts into hushed approval, into rustling silk and low murmurs of at last, at last, the
packs are joined.
I stand very still in the middle of it, a girl made of glass in a room full of
hammers, waiting to see which blow will finally shatter me.
“And do you, Serath Veyne, accept—”
“I do,” she says before the priestess even finishes, sharp and eager, and the crowd laughs
warmly at her impatience, and nobody—nobody—looks at me, standing three rows back with
my whole soul unraveling in my rib cage.
The priestess lifts her hands. “Then let the bond be sealed.”
Kael reaches for Serath's face.
Time slows.
I feel it slow, feel the world thicken like honey around me as his fingers curve
along her jaw, as he tilts her chin up, as he leans down toward her mouth with the same
tenderness I dreamed—stupidly, foolishly dreamed—he might one day show me.
The bond in my chest does not just scream this time.
It snaps.
I feel it go, feel the invisible thread that has connected my heart to his for three moons stretch
past its final breaking point and tear clean through, and the pain of it is so total, so annihilating,
that for one whole second I cannot see, cannot hear, cannot feel my own body at all.
Then the air pressure drops.
I know it drops because every candle flame in the hall bends sideways at once, guttering low,
and three hundred people gasp in unison as their ears pop like they've descended a mountain in
an instant. The great chandelier overhead begins to sway though no wind moves through the
room.
Beneath my feet, the ancient stone floor—floor that has stood unmoved for four hundred
years—trembles, a deep groaning shudder that rattles up through my bones.
Wren's hand falls away from my arm. She's staring at me, not at the dais, her face draining of
color.
“Vesper,” she breathes. “Your eyes.”
I don't understand.
I don't understand any of it—the way the pine-and-lily air suddenly tastes
like ozone and lightning, the way frost is spreading in a perfect white circle out from beneath
my boots across warm stone, the way my own hands have begun to glow with a faint, silvery,
impossible light.
Kael's lips are a single inch from Serath's when he freezes.
His head turns. His storm-gray eyes find me again—but this time there is no locked door, no
careful blankness.
This time there is raw, naked shock, and beneath it, dawning horror, as he
realizes, one heartbeat too late, exactly what he has broken.
And exactly what he has just unleashed.