Eighty-seven days.

That is the number I whisper into my pillow every night while my husband's hand rests against my throat, warm and careful. He thinks the shiver is desire. I let him.

If he ever asks what I am counting, he dies.

But that was later. Before the contract, before the mark, before I learned what love costs when someone else is holding the bill, there was one morning, one white dress, and a girl who had finally been picked.

Mossgrave's Harvest Hall smelled of pine smoke and cut apples. Two hundred wolves crowded the benches, and the long table at the back held enough bread to feed a funeral. Rowan ribbons hung from every rafter. Mine was tied around my wrist, because Everett had tied it there himself.

I am a Null. Wolves like me are born with a blank where the other half of the soul should be. No fated mate exists for us. My mother used to say that made me free. My father said it made me leftover.

So when Everett Pell asked to choose me anyway, I said yes before he finished the question. Chosen, not destined. Picked on purpose by a boy with warm hands and a crooked smile, who said my name like it cost him something.

He had asked me beneath the orchard's last standing tree, with apple blossoms in his hair, and told me a blank was just a clean page. I believed him. I believed him for two whole years.

Today he would claim me in front of the whole pack.

He stood across the hall in his gray suit. When our eyes met, he looked at the floor.

I should have read that as a warning. I read it as nerves. Nerves, I told myself, were just what love looked like on a man who had practiced his vows in the mirror.

"Breathe," Tamsin whispered from the front bench. My half sister had braided my hair that morning, and her hands had shaken the whole time. I thought it was happiness.

Maren Voss, our oracle, lifted the silver bowl. On Mating Day she reads the bonds written in moonlight and names every fated pair. Fate goes first, choice second. That is the rule, so nobody's choice can be stolen.

"Everett Pell," she called. Her voice was too even. "Step forward."

He crossed the floor. His shoulders looked like they were holding up a roof.

Maren passed her palm over the water, and it turned gold, the way it does when a bond is near. She closed her eyes. When she opened them, she looked at every wall, every rafter, every stranger in the room.

She did not look at me.

"Everett Pell's fated mate," she said, "is Tamsin Fenwick."

I understood each word. They just refused to line up into a sentence about my life.

My sister rose from the front bench with a hand over her mouth. Her eyes found Everett's, his found hers, and I watched the thing I had wanted for two years happen to somebody else.

Wolves do not hesitate when they meet a fated mate. Everett crossed the hall in four strides and took her face in both hands, and the scent of their bond rolled through the room like a door opening onto summer. Someone started clapping. Someone started crying the happy kind.

Over Tamsin's shoulder, Everett finally looked at me. I expected guilt. What I saw was relief, the plain kind a man feels when a dreaded errand is over.

Everyone in Mossgrave knew what happened to a Null with no mate once Mating Day ended. We were tolerated, never kept. My place in this pack had been Everett, and he had just walked out of it.

Something in me went cold and quiet. Not heartbreak. Heartbreak is hot. This felt like arithmetic.

"Odalys." My father's voice came from the head table. "Sit down."

I had not realized I was standing.

Harlan Fenwick, Alpha of Mossgrave, lifted his glass toward the new couple. "A fated bond is a blessing on this pack," he told the hall. Then, through his teeth, to me: "Do not make this about you."

A small voice rose from somewhere near the bread.

"Mama, is she still getting married?"

Nobody laughed. Nobody had to.

"Well," an old woman murmured, "at least the cake is already paid for."

I had been dumped by a prophecy. There is no dignified way to survive that, so I did not try. I unwound Everett's rowan ribbon from my wrist and let it drop. Then I walked down the aisle and counted the steps to the doors. Twenty. No one reached for my arm.

Behind me, Tamsin said my name, and there was a sob in it. A strange sound for a girl who had just won. I did not turn around.

Outside, the cold struck my face like a slap. I made it to the oracle's table under the porch awning before my knees gave out. A reading card lay beside a second ceremonial bowl, cream paper and black ink, every name Maren announced written beforehand in her small neat hand.

I read the last line.

Everett Pell. Tamsin Fenwick.

In the corner, pressed into the paper like a fingerprint, was a tiny seal I did not recognize: a crescent moon cut through by a pine tree.

The ink was dry. I pressed my thumb against it and nothing smeared. Cracked at the edges of the letters, the way ink looks after days.

Maren had not read the water. She had read a note she wrote last week, and the gold in that bowl had been a performance.

Someone had decided my heartbreak before I ever put on the dress.

"Run," a voice breathed behind me.

Maren stood in the doorway, white-faced, one hand on the frame. The oracle who had never once missed a word looked like she might be sick.

"Not home," she whispered. "Anywhere but home. Before dark."

"Why?"

She flinched as if the question had teeth. Her eyes went past me to the dark line of the forest.

From deep in those trees, a howl rose, long and low and raw with fever.

I have no fated mate. The whole hall had spent the morning reminding me. Nothing in this world is supposed to call me.

I felt it behind my ribs, in the exact place where a mate bond is supposed to live.

So why did every part of me turn toward that sound, as if it had been waiting twenty-four years to say my name?