The Alpha's Scentless Bride

He had his mouth in my throat in front of four hundred people, and I was going to let him. That is the part nobody warned me about. Not the ceremony, not the witnesses, not the old women standing in a half circle behind us with their hands folded. Nobody warned me that when it finally came, I would want it. "Hold still," Marek Thorne said against my skin, and it was not an order. His voice had gone somewhere it does not go in a council room. "You are shaking." "I know." "Are you frightened?" "No." It was the first entirely true thing I had said to him in nineteen weeks. xxx The hall smelled of pine smoke and hot wax and four hundred people who had been drinking since noon, and under all of it, for the first time in my life, of me. I cannot explain what that was like. I had spent eighteen years giving off nothing at all. A room, a stone, a coat on a hook. And now there was something coming off my own skin in that hall, warm and strange and mine, and every wolf near the front had turned their head toward it in the last hour without knowing why they were doing it. Including him. He had not stopped looking at me since I came through the doors. Not the way he used to look at me, which was the way you look at a delivery. This was the look of a man who has come into a room he has been in a thousand times and found the furniture moved. His hand was at the small of my back. It had been there for eleven minutes. Through the vows, through the water, through the old woman's hand on my forehead, and it had not moved once, and I had felt every single second of it in the soles of my feet. There is a thing that happens between two wolves who are meant for each other. Everybody in the Riven South knows about it. It is in the songs. It is the whole reason my sister was supposed to be standing here instead of me. I had never felt it. Not once, in nineteen weeks of standing close enough to touch this man. I was feeling it now. It had come up in me some time around the third day, quietly, like water finding a c***k, and it had not stopped since, and by the time I walked into that hall it was standing behind my ribs with both hands on the bars. Him. That is all it said. It did not have any other words. It had been saying it for six days and it had not once got tired. xxx "Kneel," said the old woman. Mama Oyin has a voice you can hear at the back of a hall without her raising it. She had watched me for nineteen weeks from a chair by the side door, and she had never once said a word to me that was not about food, and she was the only person in that room who did not look pleased. We knelt. Marek took my hair and moved it forward over my shoulder. The hall made a sound. Four hundred people breathing in at slightly different times. I had worn my hair down every day of my life. Every single day since I was four years old. There is a stripe at the back of my neck three fingers wide where the fine hair has never grown, and nobody in Ashvale had ever seen it, and now every wolf in that hall was looking at it. His thumb went across it. Once. Slow. He did not ask me what it was. He had stopped asking me things about a month ago, which I had been grateful for, and which I understood in that moment had never once meant he had stopped wanting to know. "Alpha," said Mama Oyin, "name her." xxx Here is what I want you to understand, before the rest of it. My name is not Cassia Duvarr. Cassia Duvarr is twenty years old and four hundred miles south of that hall, carrying a human boy's child in a house with a stone in the yard that has my name cut into it. My father buried me on a Tuesday, in an empty box, in the rain, and then he put me in her clothes and poured six months of her out of a laundry basket and onto my throat with his thumbs, and told me to hold still while he did it. Substituting an alliance bride is not an insult to an Alpha. It is fraud against the pack. Halden Marr read it to me out of a folder on my first night in that house, kindly, the way you read out the terms of a lease. The penalty is my life and my father's territory, and it is not Marek Thorne's to forgive, and I had known that for nineteen weeks and knelt down anyway. I had a road. I had four hundred miles. Every Sunday night I counted what was left in a box under a loose board and every Sunday night I stayed. Not because I was brave. Because on the fortieth day he came into the kitchen at two in the morning and found me mending a chair nobody had asked me to mend, and sat down on the floor with his back against the wall and talked to me about his mother for an hour, and never once looked at my face while he did it. Because he had never used his voice on me. Not the Alpha voice. Not when he was angry, and he was often angry, and I have watched that man put four hundred people on their knees with it and then turn to me and ask. I stayed because I wanted this, knowing exactly what it cost, and if you think that makes me a fool then you have never in your life been wanted by anybody. "Cassia Duvarr," Marek said. And his teeth went into my neck. xxx It is not like being bitten. I had braced for pain the way you brace for a needle, and what came instead went up through me like a struck bell. Every nerve I own rang at once. My hands opened. Somewhere very far away I heard myself make a sound I have never made before and have not made since, and his arm came round my waist and took my whole weight, because my legs had stopped. His mouth was hot. His hand was in my hair. And the thing behind my ribs threw itself against the bars and howled, and for about two seconds I was closer to another living person than I have ever been to anybody in my entire life. Then it stopped. Not faded. Stopped. Like a door shutting in a corridor. The heat went out of my neck. The ringing went out of my body. The thing behind my ribs went quiet in a way that felt exactly like a hand being taken off a shoulder. And I knelt there on the stone with a man's arm around my waist and blood in my mouth from where I had bitten my own lip, and I understood, several seconds before anybody else in that hall did, that nothing had happened. xxx Marek drew back. I felt him look, because I felt his breath change. A mate's mark is not subtle. It comes up dark and clean inside a heartbeat and every wolf in a room can see it from twenty feet, and half of them will smell it before they see it. It is the single most public thing that can happen to two people. There was nothing on my neck but a bite. Blood, and a ring of teeth, and the bare stripe underneath it where my hair has not grown since I was four years old. Nobody said anything. Four hundred people, and not one of them made a sound, and I have been in exactly one other silence like that in my life, and it was in the same room with the same man on the night I arrived. Mama Oyin closed her eyes. Then, from near the front, clear enough for the back of the hall: "I told you. Nineteen weeks I have been telling you. Look at her. Look at her." Renna Brant has never once been wrong about me and has never once been kind about it either. Somebody hushed her. Nobody hushed her twice. xxx I want to tell you that I thought about the law then. About Halden's folder, and the word life, and the word territory. I did not. What I thought about was my father's hands going along that row of nineteen jars until the row was straight. How steady they were. How he had put his thumbs on my throat an hour earlier and taken his time and been gentle, and how he had already read the folder by then, and known the penalty, and known it was not survivable, and done it anyway. Marek Thorne took my chin and turned me toward him. There was blood on his mouth. Mine. He did not wipe it away. He looked at me the way he had looked at me across that hall nineteen weeks earlier, when I was a delivery he had not yet decided how to feel about, and then he looked a great deal more carefully than that. "Cassia," he said. I did not answer. That was the mistake. Nineteen weeks of answering to it, every hour of every day, and the one time it counted, my mouth would not do it. Something went out of his face. "What are you?" he said.