Marked In The Dark

CHAPTER 2

The rogues stopped moving.

I turned toward the voice.

He stepped out from the trees upstream, tall, broad-shouldered, dressed in dark clothing that made him hard to separate from the shadows. The moon was behind him. I could not make out his face clearly, only the shape of him, and the shape was enough to understand why the five men ahead of me had all gone still.

He did not look like someone performing a threat. He looked like someone stating a fact.

"Who the hell are you?" the lean rogue called out, but there was something different in his voice now. A thin edge of uncertainty that had not been there thirty seconds ago.

The stranger did not answer. He just kept walking toward me, steady and unhurried, like the five men between us were scenery.

The scent hit me again, stronger now. So strong I had to press my lips together to keep quiet. Every nerve in my body pointed toward him like a compass that had finally found north.

This is dangerous, I thought. This is him. This is the source.

"Last chance," he said, still not looking at the rogues. He was looking at me. Even in the dark, across the water, I felt that look land somewhere underneath my ribs.

The rogues exchanged glances. The lean one spat to the side. Then he turned and walked away, and the others followed in a loose, uncomfortable hurry, crashing back through the undergrowth until the sound of them disappeared.

The stranger reached the bank.

Up close, the scent was almost unbearable. Not in a bad way. In a hold onto something way. My fingers curled at my sides.

"You're shaking," he said.

"I'm fine."

"You're not." He was not unkind about it. He said it the way you state weather. "Where is your pack?"

"I'm from Clearwater. I was just…" I stopped. What was I going to say? I was sitting by the river crying over a boy while my fated mate scent decided to wake up for the first time in my life? "I was just heading back."

"You're in heat."

I opened my mouth to argue. My body disagreed.

The heat had been building since I first caught his scent, and standing this close to him was turning it into something I could not think past. I understood, suddenly and completely, what every older pack member had meant when they said fated mate attraction was not something you chose. It was something that chose you.

"I know," I said. My voice came out smaller than I wanted.

He was quiet for a moment.

"You don't know me," he said. "You don't know anything about me."

"No."

"And you still want…"

"I don't know what I want." That was honest. "I know what my body wants. That's different."

He stepped closer. I did not step back.

"It is different," he said quietly.

I looked up at him. His face was still partly in shadow, but I could see the strong line of his jaw, the way he held himself with a stillness that felt like contained power, the scar along his left forearm where his sleeve had pushed up.

"Are you a rogue?" I asked.

Something shifted in his expression. "No."

"Are you dangerous?"

A pause. "Yes."

I should have left. I know that now, looking back. Every logical part of me that was still functioning was pointing toward the tree line and saying go home, Nora, go home.

But I had just watched the man I loved tell me he was in love with my cousin. I had just sat on a riverbank falling apart by myself. And this stranger was looking at me like I was something real, something worth stepping out of the shadows for.

I was twenty years old and I was tired of being careful.

He reached out and touched the side of my face with one hand, asking without asking. Giving me the chance to say no.

I turned my face into his palm.

That was my answer.

What followed was nothing like anything I had with Damien. With Damien, everything had been gentle and careful and slightly awkward, the way it is with someone you care about but have never fully trusted with all of yourself.

This was different.

This felt like being recognized.

He held me like he had been looking for me. He touched me like he already knew which places I was holding tension, which places needed softness. The heat between us was enormous and wordless and I stopped thinking somewhere in the middle of it, stopped managing, stopped performing calm, just, let go.

We lay together afterward in the grass. He held me against his chest and I could hear his heartbeat slowing down to something steady. The moon had shifted overhead. It was late.

Then I felt it.

A sharp, brief sting at my neck. And then warmth flooding outward from that spot, spreading through my whole body like something settling into place.

I went rigid.

"What did you…" I reached up and touched my neck.

He pressed a kiss to my hair. "Sleep."

And somehow, impossibly, I did.

I woke up to grey pre-dawn light and the sound of birds starting up in the trees.

His arm was around me. I could feel the rise and fall of his breathing.

I lay still for a moment, looking at the early sky, and let myself feel the weight of what I had done. What we had done.

Then I gently moved his arm, stood up, shook the grass from my dress, and looked down at him.

Even in the low light I could only make out pieces of him, the strong jaw, the short dark hair, the scar on his forearm. I did not know his name. I did not know his pack. I did not know anything except that some part of me felt permanently different, like something that had been closed for a long time had opened during the night, and I was not sure it would close again.

"Thank you," I whispered, though I was not entirely sure what I was thanking him for.

Then I walked home through the trees, fast and quiet, before he could wake up.

I made it back before the house stirred. Slipped off my shoes outside the door. Moved through the kitchen without a sound. Made it to my room.

I went to the bathroom to wash my face and caught myself in the mirror.

And I saw it.

A mark on the side of my neck. Not a bruise. Not a scratch. A mating mark, curved and deliberate, already beginning to seal at the edges the way a deep mark does when the wolf bond takes hold.

My hand went cold against my throat.

A marked female with no confirmed mate, no pack Alpha's blessing, no arranged bonding, that was not an embarrassment. That was a sentence. My stepfather Gerald made the rules in this house very clear. Pack honor above everything. Pack honor above me.

I had exactly no time to think about what to do before I heard footsteps in the hall.