CHAPTER TWO: THE STRANGE FEELING
966 Words
He knew this face. He had known it since they were young. He knew the sound of her voice and the way she laughed and the exact quality of the silence she left in a room when she walked out of it.
His wolf said nothing.
Not one word.
"Vivienne," he said.
She smiled wider and closed the distance between them, one hand coming up to rest against his chest.
"Alpha Damien," she said warmly. "The Moon Goddess works in strange ways, doesn't she?"
He let her take his hand. He looked at the mark on her neck, his mark, his bite, sitting exactly where it should be.
And deep in his chest, where the bond should have been singing, there was only silence.
Something quiet and persistent and wrong.
Damien did not know what to do with this.
Vivienne stood in front of him with her hands folded and her smile soft and her platinum hair falling perfectly over one shoulder, and she looked at him the way she always had, like she had already calculated every variable in the room and found them all manageable. The mark sat on her neck exactly where it should. His bite. His shape.
He reached out and moved the edge of her collar aside, just enough to see it fully.
"You were there," he said. Not a question. More like a man reading something aloud to make sure he understood it.
"I was in the east wood last night," she said. "I heard something and went to look, and then…" She paused, touched the mark with two fingers, let the gesture speak for itself. "I didn't understand what was happening until it was already done."
"You should have come straight to me."
"I was frightened." Her eyes moved to his, steady and certain. "But I'm here now."
He let the collar fall back.
She stepped forward and put her arms around him, pressing her cheek to his chest, and he stood there with his hands at his sides for a moment before settling one palm against her back.
There it is, he told himself. Your mate. The mark is there. The bond will follow.
But it didn't.
He waited for the thing he had heard described his entire life, the snap of recognition, the deep animal certainty, the sense of a lock finding its key. He waited for his wolf to rise and claim what was in front of him.
His wolf was quiet.
Quiet in the particular way of something that was paying close attention to a problem it hadn't named yet.
Damien closed his eyes briefly and said nothing.
Behind his back, pressed against his chest where he could not see them, Vivienne's fingers curled once, tight, deliberate, then opened again.
Three Days Earlier
The room had no windows.
That was the first thing Vivienne had specified when she arranged the meeting, no windows, no candles near the door, nothing that could let light in or let sound out. The witch Mira sat cross-legged on a low wooden stool in the center of the room with her hands resting on her knees and her ember-red eyes tracking Vivienne's movement across the stone floor with the particular patience of someone who had already decided this was going to go badly.
"You understand what you're asking," Mira said.
"I understand exactly what I'm asking." Vivienne stopped moving and faced her. "I need the mark. On my neck. Damien's shape, Damien's depth. Real enough that he can't tell the difference by sight."
"There is no spell that creates a true mate bond. What you're describing is…"
"I know what it is."
Mira looked at her for a long moment. The stained tips of her fingers, black from old work, old debts, rested motionless against her knees.
"Damien Cross found his real mate last night," she said. "You know this."
"I know."
"If I put a false mark on you and dull his ability to sense the true bond, it will hold." Mira's voice was careful, precise, the voice of a woman laying out the terms of something that could not be untaken. "For a time. But if he gets close enough to the real mate, close enough that his wolf can smell her properly, hear her, feel her presence, the spell will fracture. And when it fractures, it will not fracture quietly."
Vivienne said nothing.
"I won't do it," Mira said.
The room was still for exactly two seconds.
Then Vivienne crossed it.
Her hand closed around Mira's throat, not squeezing, not yet, just present, just a reminder of what hands could do, and she crouched down until they were level, eye to eye, close enough that Mira could see the particular quality of cold that lived behind Vivienne's grey irises.
"I have been patient for four years," Vivienne said, very quietly. "I have managed, and waited, and positioned, and I am not going to let a true mate bond that he didn't even mean to start get in the way of what I have built." Her grip tightened by a fraction. "Do it. Or I will remind you what happened the last time someone in this pack decided their principles were worth more than my goodwill."
Mira held her gaze.
Then she looked away.
Her lips moved. The air in the room changed, colder, thicker, pressing against the skin like something old and unwilling had been woken up and put to work.
The mark appeared on Vivienne's neck in the dark like ink rising through water.
"If he gets too close to the real mate," Mira said again, her voice stripped of everything now except the warning, "it will fall apart."
Vivienne stood and smoothed her collar over the mark.
"Then I'll make sure he doesn't get close."
- Writer
