I Died at My Mate's Command

The Man Who Kills Me

The great hall was packed wall to wall with people, and I felt him the instant I crossed the threshold, like a flat warm hand pressing hard against the center of my chest. My wolf, who had been small and quiet inside me all morning, came awake all at once and lunged toward the front of the room so violently that I actually stumbled on the stone.

"Stand up straight," my father hissed, catching my elbow in a hard grip. "What in the moon's name is wrong with you?"

I couldn't answer him, because I was using everything I had to hold my own wolf down. No, I told her, fighting her with every breath. Not him. We do not want him. She didn't listen, of course. She never once listened to me. She threw herself against the inside of my ribs again and again, clawing toward the pull, and it took everything in me to keep my face smooth and my feet moving and my claws tucked safely inside my own hands where they belonged.

Then the crowd shifted in front of me, and I saw him.

Kael Blackthorne stood at the head of the hall with two of his men, and he was exactly the way I remembered him, which was the thing that nearly broke me where I stood. Three whole years and an entire death lay between us, and he had not changed at all. The same black coat. The same still, certain way he held himself, as though he knew the whole room would come to him and he need not move a single step toward it. The same beautiful face that gave away absolutely nothing.

He was scanning the hall slowly, his cold gray eyes sliding over the crowd and the people went silent wherever his gaze happened to land. I had once found that stillness magnificent. Now it made my skin crawl, even while the bond purred low and hungry in my chest at the nearness of him, the two feelings tangling together until I couldn't tell my hatred from my longing.

My father shoved me forward into the line of candidates with the other girls, and a tall man in Blackthorn gray stepped out and unrolled a scroll.

"His Majesty Alpha King Kael Blackthorne thanks House Ashwood for its hospitality," the man announced. "The King will now greet the Luna candidates. You will give your name when he reaches you, and you will not speak otherwise."

The girls beside me were trembling head to foot. One of them was crying a little, the happy, overwhelmed kind of crying. In my old life I would have been crying right along with her. I would have been so honored, so desperate to please, so completely certain that being looked at by the Alpha King was the very best thing that could ever happen to a girl like me. Now I simply stood and watched him come.

He moved down the line without any hurry, stopping in front of each girl for exactly as long as politeness demanded and not one heartbeat longer. The girl two places down from me whispered her name in a shaking voice, and he didn't even look at her properly, his gaze already sliding past her toward the next.

Then he reached me, and the bond went off like a struck match.

I felt it slam through both of us at the very same instant. I know that it hit him too, because I saw it land. I saw his broad shoulders go tight under the coat. I saw his head turn toward me a fraction of a second too fast, and I saw something flare to life behind those cold gray eyes that had not been there for any of the other girls. The pull in my chest yanked toward him so hard that my wolf nearly tore my body right out from under me. My vision narrowed to a tunnel with only his face at the end of it, and my claws pricked sharp against the insides of my fingers, half out.

Hold, I begged her, fighting for control. Hold, hold, hold.

And somehow I held.

I did the one thing the old Selena could never in a thousand years have done. I lifted my chin and I looked Kael Blackthorne dead in the eyes, and I did not blush, and I did not glance away, and I did not shrink down small. I stared at the man who was going to kill me as though I were already bored to tears of the sight of him.

Something moved across his face. Surprise, I think. He was not used to it, because every other girl in that long line had dropped her eyes to the floor the moment he reached her. I looked straight into the eyes that had once watched the life drain out of me, and I gave him back nothing at all, the same flat nothing he had given me on the platform.

"Your name," he said.

His voice went straight through me and lit up every nerve I had. The bond loved his voice, and I hated, with everything in me, that it did.

"Selena Ashwood," I said. Flat and cold with no single tremor in it. I stayed proud of that for the rest of my life.

He didn't move on.

That was wrong. He was supposed to nod and move down the line the way he had with all the others. Instead he stood there in front of me a heartbeat too long, then two, then three, and the whole hall noticed because the whole hall went still around us.

"Ashwood," he said slowly, as though he were tasting the word on his tongue.

"That's right."

"You don't seem at all pleased to be here, Lady Ashwood."

A few of the girls sucked in sharp little breaths. A king did not usually speak to a candidate at all, and he most certainly did not stop to point out when one of them was failing to fawn over him.

In my old life I would have crumbled into dust. I would have stammered out an apology, gone scarlet to the ears, tripped over myself trying to fix it.

"Should I be?" I said.

Behind me, my father made a small choking sound in his throat.

The corner of Kael's mouth moved. It was not a smile, but something far more interested than a smile. He took half a step closer to me, close enough that the bond howled aloud inside my chest, close enough that I caught the scent of him, pine and cold mountain air and something underneath it that my wolf knew at once as mine, ours, his, a scent I wanted to claw straight out of my own head.

"Most people would be," he said quietly, for me alone. "Standing exactly where you're standing right now."

"Most people don't know what they're standing in front of," I said.

The words were out of my mouth before I could catch them. Too true. Far, far too true. I felt the danger of it the very second it left my lips.

His eyes narrowed, just slightly. The interested look sharpened into something else, something that read me up and down like a page he had opened to the wrong chapter and could not quite make sense of.

For one terrible moment I was certain he was going to ask me what I meant.

Instead he straightened back up to his full height. The mask came down over his face again, smooth and gray, and he turned to the man holding the scroll. "That's all of them?"

"That's all of them, Your Majesty."

"Good." He started toward the side door of the hall, his men falling into step behind him, and the candidates around me let out the breaths they had been holding. My father grabbed my arm and started whispering furious things into my ear about embarrassment and disrespect and throwing away the best chance this family had ever—

Kael stopped.

He had gone perhaps ten steps. He stopped dead in his tracks with his back still turned to me, and the whole hall held its breath all over again, because kings simply do not stop like that.

He turned around.

He looked straight back down the entire length of the hall, over the heads of the crowd, past every other living person in that room, and he found my face. And the look on him now was not cold, and it was not merely interested. It was confused.

"Have we met before?" he asked.

The hall went dead silent.

My father's hand froze on my arm. The candidates stared. Somewhere off to the side a cup clinked once against a tray and then went still.

I stood there with the bond roaring in my chest and the whole truth screaming up the back of my throat. Yes, you've met me. You've held my eyes in your hand while you killed me. You've watched the light go out of me and then turned your back and walked away.

He had felt it.

A face his body knew that his mind could not place. The bond had reached out for him too, and some buried animal part of him had reached right back, and now he was standing in a stranger's hall asking a girl he had never met whether they'd met before, in front of a hundred witnesses, with that lost and searching look on his face.

This was not supposed to happen. He never asked me that the first time. I had been back from the dead for less than a single day, and already the man who killed me was looking at me as though he could almost, almost remember.

"No, Your Majesty," I said. My voice came out perfectly steady, and I would never in my life understand how. "We have never met."

He didn't believe me. I could see that he didn't. He stood there another long moment, frowning at me like a word he couldn't quite recall. Then his beta murmured something low at his shoulder, and Kael Blackthorne turned away at last, and walked out of the hall.

I let out a breath I felt like I'd been holding since the doors first opened.

And that was when I noticed the old man standing at the very edge of the crowd, watching me. Watching me, with a small, gentle, knowing smile on his kind old face.