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 she know about you?"

"Nothing."

"Did she know your name?"

"No."

Another pause. "So right now she's somewhere, marked, and doesn't know who did it or why."

Caden set down the mug. "I need to find her before the Ironpeak gathering. I need to…" He pressed two fingers to his temple. "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."

Rowan pulled out the chair across the desk and sat down without being invited, which he also knew he was allowed to do. "So we find her first."

"We find her first."

"And if we can't find her before the gathering?"

Caden looked at the window. Outside, the forest was still dark.

"Then I go to the gathering, I select someone nominal to satisfy the treaty, and I keep looking." He paused. "But Rowan. I will find her."

He meant it the way he meant everything. Completely.