REBORN: SHE RULES THE WORLD

CHAPTER 9: MY MATE

Damian Blackwood had walked into a hundred ballrooms and had never once been stopped by one. He was halfway across the marble, the mayor’s voice buzzing at his elbow like a gnat, when the scent reached him and every muscle in his body locked. It was snow and woodsmoke and something sweeter underneath, something so precisely and impossibly right that for a moment he forgot how to breathe. Mine. The word did not come from his mind. It came from the place beneath it, from the old wild thing that lived in his chest and had never in all his years spoken in anything but a growl. Kane surged against his ribs, enormous and ecstatic and furious all at once, and a howl went through Damian’s skull so loud that he nearly staggered.

Heat flooded behind his eyes. He knew without looking that they had gone red, that the crescent the elders called the moon’s seal had bloomed pale across his forehead, because the whole room drew a breath and somewhere a glass shattered on the floor. “Boss,” Greg hissed at his shoulder, gone gray as paper. “Boss, your eyes. Not here, please, not in front of the council.” Damian did not hear him. He was searching the crowd, two hundred bodies and two hundred scents, perfume and wine and wolf and fear, and through all of them, thin and clear as a thread of silver, only one. He found her by the line of her back. At the far side of the room, beside a marble pillar, a slender figure in midnight-blue silk was walking away from him, her bare back as pale as moonlight, a few loose dark strands curling against the nape of her neck. She had not turned around. He never saw her face.

“Move,” he said, and started forward, but the room closed ahead of him like a fist. The mayor stepped into his path with a grin and an outstretched hand. The council chairman appeared on the other side, murmuring about the evening’s program. And through them both sailed Diane Dawson in emerald satin, dragging a girl in white lace by the wrist. “Alpha Blackwood! What an honor! I am Diane Dawson, and this is my daughter Vanessa, the heiress of the Hart family.” Vanessa sank into a curtsy so graceful it might have been rehearsed, her lashes lowered, her hand extended. Damian looked through them as though they were windows. “Out of my way,” he growled, and Diane’s smile died on her face. It took him four minutes to cut his way across the ballroom. When he reached the marble pillar, it was empty.

* * *

Evelyn had heard the room gasp, and heard a glass shatter, and felt something move through the floor like a tremor, and she had kept walking. Behind her, Robert’s voice was rising, calling her name. She took the first door she came to, a plain one marked STAFF ONLY, and stepped into a corridor that smelled of bleach and fried onions, and had not gone ten paces when a hand closed around her wrist and spun her into an alcove behind a stack of folding chairs.

“Ev. There you are.” Tyler Brooks stood very close, handsome in a dark suit, his face flushed with exertion and sincerity. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. You were incredible out there. The whole room’s talking about you.” His eyes traveled over her, warm and admiring. “And you look beautiful. Why do you hide it?” Before she could answer he went on, in the low, tender voice that she now knew was reserved for wanting things. “Listen. I know what you said yesterday. But the doctor rang me tonight. Vanessa is getting worse, Ev. He says tomorrow is the last window for a match. It’s one small sample, one little vial, that’s all. For me. I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t life and death.” His thumb moved across her pulse. “Think how it would feel to be the one who saved her. Your family would finally see you. I’ll hold your hand the whole time, and afterward we’ll go straight to look at that flat by the river I love you Ev.”

Evelyn looked at his thumb until he took it away. “How generous,” she said. “A flat, and a hand to hold, and a family that would finally see me. And all it costs is a vial of my blood and my common sense.” She tilted her head. “Do you practice that voice, Tyler? The soft one? Or did you simply grow up speaking it to people you wanted things from?” “I just care about you,” he said, hurt. “You care about Vanessa’s heart and my vein. They happen to be in the same sentence.” His face tightened. “You’re being cruel, Ev.” His fingers closed hard around her wrist. “Don’t do this. Don’t make me” “Make you what?” She did not lower her voice. “The Blackwood guards are forty feet that way. Shall I scream and ask them whether the swimming captain makes a habit of dragging girls into corners at the Alpha’s banquet?” His fingers opened as though she had burned him. “Good night, Tyler,” Evelyn said, and stepped around him. “Give Vanessa my regards. And if she needs blood so badly, she’s welcome to try her own.”

She pushed through the staff door into the alley, flagged the first taxi in the row, and gave the address of the post office on Linden Street, because it was the only place in the city she could think of that felt like hers. She was settling against the seat when it happened. A pull, low behind her breastbone, quiet and unreasonable, as though someone had tied a thread around her ribs and drawn it taut across the dark city. She pressed her palm flat against her chest. She told herself it was hunger, or nerves, or the champagne she had not drunk. Beneath her collar the locket had gone hot, and the thing she had always taken for an empty room was turning over again, restless and awake, whispering a word she still could not catch.

* * *

Damian reached the staff corridor too late. He stood in the doorway with his hands clenched, nostrils flaring, and found it there: snow and woodsmoke, thin as a breath, tangled with a cheap, cloying cologne that made Kane peel back his lip and snarl. It led through the staff door into an alley where a row of taxis had been idling, and then it simply ended in a smear of exhaust. Gone. “Boss.” Greg arrived, panting, his tablet forgotten against his chest. “The mayor is asking whether you plan to give the opening address, and the council” “No.” “Boss, there are two hundred guests, you can’t just” “The girl in blue,” Damian said. His voice was gravel. “Find her.” “Which girl? I didn’t see” “Find her, Greg.”

He did not give the address. He sat in the back of the car with his jaw locked while the city slid past, and Kane paced inside him, snarling and whining by turns, find, find, ours, find. There was a pull in his chest like a hook set deep, drawing him in one direction and then another, and he could not tell which way it led. At home he took off his jacket and put it on again. He stood at the window of the dark study until the moon went down. Damian Blackwood had never wanted anything he could not simply take, and tonight, for the first time in his life, he did not know where to look. Somewhere in this city of over two million wolves, a girl with a pale bare back and dark hair was walking away from him, and he did not even know her name.