Marked In The Dark

CHAPTER 4

Three days moved both too fast and too slow.

I spent the first day hiding in my room, pressing my fingers against the mark on my neck that no one else could see anymore but I could still feel. A constant low warmth. Like something had been lit and was not going out.

I spent the second day helping my stepmother prepare because she told me to and I had learned a long time ago that picking battles with her was a waste of the limited energy I had.

The third day arrived like a verdict.

The Ironpeak gathering was a formal tradition, half political event, half mating ceremony. The Ironpeak Alpha would formally select a pack-wife from Clearwater every third generation, and the rest of the unmated wolves from both packs would mingle and potentially form bonds. It was old. It was binding. Our current Alpha, old Leon, had been pressing for it for two years because he wanted the alliance with Ironpeak to remain stable.

Everyone in Clearwater was terrified of Alpha Caden.

I had heard the stories. Three border packs that had violated their treaties with Ironpeak had simply ceased to exist. Not violently dismantled, which would have been something you could point to and call cruel. They had been absorbed, their Alphas formally stripped, their members redistributed or scattered. Clean. Cold. Total.

Caden did not make threats. He made decisions.

As I stood in front of the small mirror in my room getting ready, I told myself this was fine. No one like that was going to choose a dormant-wolf, marked-in-secret girl from Clearwater. I would stand in the lineup, be passed over, and then,

Then what?

I put the thought away.

Lillian knocked on my door while I was pinning my hair.

She came in and closed the door behind her with the careful quiet of someone who did not want to be heard from the hallway. Her eyes were wide and her hands were pressed together.

"Tell me what's going on," she said.

Lillian was the only person in this pack who had always treated me like a full person. She was small, quick, always warm, and she never made me feel like my dormant wolf made me less than her.

"Nothing you need to worry about," I said.

"Nora. You've had that look on your face for three days. That look where you've decided something terrible is probably going to happen and you're just going to walk toward it because you don't see another option."

She knew me too well.

"The gathering will be fine," I said. "I'll go, I'll stand there, and someone will agree to take me or they won't." I kept my voice light. "Either way, it'll be resolved."

"Take you? What does that…" Lillian stepped forward and gripped my arm. "Has Gerald threatened you? Nora…"

"I'm fine."

"You keep saying that."

I turned to face her. "I know. But I need you to let me handle this my way, okay? Stay close during the gathering. That's all I need from you right now."

She searched my face for a long moment. Then she nodded, slowly, and hugged me hard.

I let myself have that for ten seconds. Then I straightened up and finished pinning my hair.

The ceremony hall had been decorated to impress. Every surface had been cleaned, the pack's formal banners hung at the doors, and the women of every family were dressed in their best, which mostly meant whatever communicated status and availability in one look.

Lena looked beautiful, obviously. She stood beside Damien at the edge of the hall, his hand at her back, and if she felt any awareness of what she had taken from me she showed no sign of it.

I found my place in the lineup of unmated women. We were arranged by family rank, which put me near the back since I was Gerald's ward rather than his blood daughter. I was fine with that. Less visible.

The room shifted when Alpha Caden entered.

I do not know how to describe it precisely except to say that the air in the room changed. It got tighter. More careful. Every person in the hall oriented toward the door without consciously deciding to, the way iron filings orient toward a magnet. Even the people who were trying not to look were tracking him.

He was tall. Broader than I expected from the stories, which had made him sound cold and sharp, and he was both of those things, but he was also physical in a way I had not anticipated. The kind of presence that was not performed, just real, the way a storm is real.

He walked through the greetings. Spoke to old Alpha Leon briefly. His voice was low and I could not hear the words, but I heard the quality of it, even, clipped, patient in the way that people are patient when they have decided impatience would be inefficient.

The Gamma, my stepfather Gerald, stepped forward to begin the formal introductions of the eligible women.

I stared at the floor in front of me and breathed.

Don't pick me. Don't see me. Just let this end.

"I should mention," Caden said, loud enough to carry across the room, "before we continue, I will not be marking anyone I choose today." A pause. "I already have a marked mate. The woman I select will be a formal pack-wife under treaty. That is all."

The silence in the room was thick.

Old Alpha Leon looked like he had swallowed something sideways.

Gerald cleared his throat. "Of course, Alpha Caden. That is understood."

Caden walked along the line slowly. No one lifted their eyes to meet his. I kept mine low.

He stopped in front of me.

I felt him stop. I felt the pause stretch out. I slowly raised my eyes.

Grey. His eyes were grey. Steady and unreadable.

Something inside me, the sleeping, stubborn thing that had been quiet my entire life, lurched awake.

I know this.

I did not know how. It was not his face, which I had not seen clearly in the dark. But something. Something in the stillness of him, the particular quality of the air around him, the warmth that came off him like…

No.

"This one," he said.

I heard Lena laugh, somewhere to the right of me. Quietly, covered with her hand, but I heard it.

Gerald made a short, stiff noise of acknowledgment.

I stood there with my heart pounding and looked at the man who had just selected me and tried to hold very still so the feeling rising in my chest would not reach my face.

"Your name," he said.

"Nora," I said. "Nora Coles."

He looked at me for another moment. Something moved behind his eyes that I could not read.

"Nora," he repeated.

Like he was testing the sound of it.

Then he turned to speak with Gerald about the arrangements, and I was left standing in the same spot trying to remember how to breathe normally.

Because I had just realized something.

The scar. On his left forearm, where his sleeve was pushed back. The same curve, the same placement as what I had traced with my fingers in the grey pre-dawn dark three days ago.

I could be wrong.

I needed to be wrong.

But the warmth at my neck, the mark, had flared when he said my name.