Marked In The Dark

CHAPTER 3

The bathroom door opened without a knock. Lena walked in like she owned every room she entered, which she usually did, because no one had ever stopped her.

She was still glowing from last night. Fated mate. Of course she was glowing.

She looked at me. Then her eyes dropped to my neck.

Her expression ran through surprise, calculation, and amusement so quickly I almost missed the surprise.

"Nora." She breathed my name like she was tasting it. "Is that a mark?"

"Don't." I turned away from her and toward the mirror, pulling my hair forward to cover my neck.

"Who marked you?" She stepped closer. I could see her reflection behind mine, bright and sharp-eyed. "After everything last night, you ran out and found someone? That fast?"

"It's not what you're…"

"Does Uncle Gerald know?"

I spun around. "Lena. Please."

She looked at me for a long moment. We had not always been enemies. When we were small, before the hierarchies of pack life made cruelty logical, there had been a version of us that were friends. Cousins who stayed up too late and shared food and told each other small secrets.

I saw a flicker of that girl cross her face.

Then it was gone.

"Dad!" she called out, turning toward the hallway. "Uncle Gerald! Come up here!"

"Lena, stop…"

Heavy footsteps on the stairs. Gerald Cole, Gamma of Clearwater Pack, filled the bathroom doorway in his undershirt and the flat, dangerous expression he wore when his morning had been disturbed.

He looked at Lena. He looked at me. His eyes found my neck, the hair I had pulled forward not covering anything now that I had spun around.

The quiet that followed was the worst kind of quiet.

"Come here," he said.

I did not move.

"Come here, Nora."

I took one step forward. He crossed the distance in two and gripped my jaw in one hand, tilting my head sideways. He stared at the mark for a long time.

"Who," he said, "did this to you."

"I don't know his name."

The first impact was his open hand across my cheek. It knocked me sideways into the wall and I grabbed the towel rack to stay upright, my ears ringing.

"An unmarked female running loose in the forest on Mating Night," he said, his voice frighteningly controlled. "Getting herself marked by some stranger with no pack standing, no arrangement, no honor. Do you know what that looks like for this family?"

"Gerald…" My stepmother appeared in the doorway, saw the situation, and said nothing else.

"I took you in," he said. "I have carried you. Your mother left you and I gave you a home and this…" He stopped. Breathed. "This is what you give me back."

I thought about my mother. A low-ranking pack member who had died of fever when I was four. Gerald had taken me in because the old Alpha had asked him to. He reminded me of that fact the way other people reminded themselves to breathe.

"You will go to the Ironpeak gathering," he said. His voice had gone to something flat and final. "Every unmated woman in this pack is going. You will find a man who will take you, marked or not, and you will leave this house as a wife." He stepped back from me. "If you come home without a binding agreement, I will handle it myself. Do you understand what I mean when I say that?"

I looked at him. He held my eyes without blinking.

I understood.

"Yes," I said.

He left. My stepmother followed without speaking to me. Lena lingered in the doorway for a moment, and I saw something cross her face that might have been guilt.

She left too.

I sat down on the edge of the bathtub and pressed both hands over my mouth and held them there until the shaking in my chest slowed down.

Three days. The gathering was in three days.

I thought about the man by the river. His voice. The way he had walked out of the shadows like he was not afraid of anything. The mark on my neck that was now invisible to others but permanent against my skin.

He had said he was not a rogue.

He had said he was dangerous.

Both of those things I believed.

What I had not asked, what I had been too consumed by grief and heat and the reckless desire to not be careful for one night, was who he was.

And now I had three days to find a husband before my stepfather made good on a threat that I did not doubt for a single second.

Somewhere across the forest, in the packhouse of Ironpeak, Caden was already at his desk at 4:47 in the morning.

This was not unusual. He rarely slept past five. The pack ran on his schedule, and his schedule ran on discipline.

What was unusual was that he had been sitting in the same position for forty minutes, staring at the wall, doing nothing.

Rowan knocked twice and entered. His Beta took one look at him and said nothing, which was one of the things Caden appreciated most about Rowan. He knew when to speak and when to simply stand nearby and be present.

"She was gone when I woke up," Caden said.

Rowan set a mug of coffee on the desk. "I heard you come in. You came in alone."

"I marked her." He picked up the coffee. "She was already gone before I could…" He stopped. He was not a man who gave explanations easily, and the events of last night felt too large to hand someone else in pieces. "I marked my fated mate and she ran."

Rowan was quiet. Then: "How much did you know about her?"

"Nothing."

"Did you know her name?"

"No."

"Her pack?"

"No." Caden set down the mug. "I could not see her face clearly. The dark was complete and she was..." He stopped again. This was not how he talked. He did not narrate things. He assessed them. He decided what to do with them and moved. "She was in heat. Her wolf was responding to the bond. But there was something wrong with the signal."

Rowan's expression sharpened. "Wrong how?"

"Muted." Caden turned the mug in his hands. "A fated bond should produce a full signal from both sides. Her scent was there, the pull was there, everything that confirmed the bond was there. But it was like..." He looked for the word. He was precise about words. "Like a fire behind glass. Present. Real. But contained. Smaller than it should have been."

Rowan was quiet for a moment. "A suppressed wolf."

"That is what I think."

"You think she cannot shift."

"I think she cannot fully access her wolf," Caden said. "Which means the bond signal from her side is dampened. Incomplete." He paused. "Which means I cannot locate her through the bond the way I should be able to. I know she exists. I know the mark is sealed. But finding her..." He pressed two fingers to his temple. "Finding her is like trying to follow a sound you are not certain you heard."

Rowan sat down in the chair across the desk without being invited, which he also knew he was allowed to do. "How rare is that? A suppressed wolf with a fated bond?"

"Rare enough that I have never encountered it." Caden looked at the window. Outside, the forest was still dark. "There is a difference between dormant and suppressed, Rowan. A dormant wolf simply has not woken. A suppressed wolf has been held back. By trauma. By external force. By something that happened and buried itself so deeply the wolf cannot get through it." He paused. "A suppressed wolf is still alive underneath. Still fully there. Just, locked."

"And its bond signal?"

"Operates at a fraction of its capacity." He stood. Moved to the window. "I know she is real. I know what we are to each other. But from where I stand, trying to find her through the bond is like trying to navigate by a star that keeps moving behind cloud cover." He turned back to Rowan. "I need to find her another way."

"Before the gathering," Rowan said. Not a question.

"Before the gathering," Caden confirmed. "The tradition is not something I can walk away from. I have to appear and I have to select someone. But I will not mark a new woman. I will not dishonor what happened last night." He paused. "The woman I select will be a placeholder. A formal arrangement. Nothing more."

"And if we find her first?"

"Then I cancel the placeholder before it is made." He returned to his desk. Sat. The Alpha precision arriving in place of the man who had been standing at the window. "I need you to search. Every unmated female with a suppressed or dormant wolf within range of Clearwater's forest. Start tonight. I want reports by morning."

Rowan nodded once. "What will you be doing?"

Caden looked at the wall where he had been staring for forty minutes.

"Trying to remember every detail about a woman I could not see clearly," he said, "so I will know her when I find her."

Rowan left.

Caden did not move from his desk for a long time.

She was somewhere. Behind the static of a suppressed bond, behind a dark he could not see through from here, she was somewhere real and walking around with his mark on her skin and no knowledge of what it meant or who had placed it there.

He thought about her voice. The way she had said I know what my body wants. That's different. The honesty of it. The specific bravery of someone telling the truth in the middle of the worst night of their life.

He thought about the way she had turned her face into his palm.

He thought about waking up alone in the grass with the dawn light grey and cold and the space beside him holding nothing but the shape of where she had been.

He had been certain about everything for four years.

He was not certain about this.

Not yet.

But he was going to find her.

He meant it the way he meant everything.

Completely.