Marked by the Lycan King

The ceremonial hall floor has to be perfect by dawn. I know this because Aunt Mira has told me four times since midnight, each time louder than the last, as if volume is what I’m missing. The brush in my hand is raw from two hours of scrubbing. My knees ache from the stone. Above me, the banners of the Ashcroft Pack hang from iron rings: the silver wolf on black, gleaming and proud, and I’m on the ground beneath them, which feels about right. Tomorrow is the Mating Ceremony. I’ve been thinking about it for six months. Longer, if I’m honest. Every unmated wolf in the pack who has reached their twenty-first year will gather at dawn in this very hall. The Moon Goddess will do what she does. The bonds will pull. Mates will find each other. I let myself imagine it for exactly three seconds. A pull in my chest. A face I finally get to keep. Someone who chose me because the universe decided I was worth choosing, and there is nothing my aunt or uncle or this pack can do about it because the Moon Goddess does not consult them. I go back to scrubbing. ‘Lyra.’ My cousin’s voice from the doorway. Petra. She’s seventeen and has never held a cleaning brush in her life, and she says my name like it tastes bad in her mouth. There’s a streak near the east window. Mum says you missed it. I didn’t look up. ‘I’ll get to it. She said now. And she said to tell you if it’s not done by the time the moon sets, you’re not eating tomorrow. I keep my face still. It’s something I learned very young. If you react, they know they’ve landed. Tell her I heard. Petra lingers. She wants something to report back to. I give her nothing. After a moment, her footsteps retreat. I moved to the east window. The streak isn’t there. She made it up. I scrub anyway because arguing costs more than scrubbing, and I am very good at that math by now. I am the curse-born of the Ashcroft Pack. I have been doing this since I was nine years old and a rogue attacker followed my scent back to our borders and killed my parents and my infant brother while I stood in the trees and did not know what I had done. The pack named what I was before the bodies were cold. My aunt took me in because she is my father’s sister and the elders asked her to, and she has made sure, every day since, that I understand the weight of what I cost her. I understand it. I carry it. I just don’t believe I caused it anymore. That is the one small rebellion I allow myself. In my own head, alone, I do not believe I am what they say I am. I don’t know what I am instead. But I know it’s not a curse. The moon is low. I’m nearly done. I sit back on my heels and look at the hall, the long tables that will seat the pack elders tomorrow, the circular clearing where the ceremony will happen, the torches in their iron brackets. In a few hours, this hall will be full of something I have never been given: expectation. Hope. The clean, electric feeling of standing on the edge of something good. I let myself feel it for one more second. Then boots on the stone. Sera. She slides into the hall like she owns it, which she almost does; her father is the pack Beta, and Sera moves through every room as if she has already been welcomed. She drops cross-legged on the floor beside me, unconcerned about her dress, and hands me half of the bread she’s clearly stolen from the kitchen. You’ve been here for three hours, she says. Someone had to clean it. Someone should have been sleeping. You need to rest before tomorrow.’ I take the bread. I’m very hungry. ‘I’m fine. Sera gives me the look she has been giving me for eleven years, which is the look of someone who knows exactly how fine I am and chooses not to make me prove it. She sits with me while I eat. She doesn’t talk. This is one of the things I love most about her. After a while, she says: ‘Whatever happens tomorrow, I’m right here. Something tightens in my chest. Not the bad kind. I know. I mean it. Even if it’s, she stops. Starts again. Even if it’s not what you’re hoping for. I’m right here. I look at her. She’s looking at the floor. Sera. Do you know anything? No. Too fast. I don’t push. She’ll tell me if I need to know. She always does. I finish the bread. I finished the floor. I walk back to my room in the dark and I sit on the edge of my bed and think: tomorrow. The Moon Goddess doesn’t consult my aunt. She doesn’t care about my rank or my history or what this pack decided I was at nine years old. Tomorrow, I get a mate. Someone of my own. I slept for four hours and I dreamt of silver light. I am awake before the horn sounds, dressed before Petra bangs on my door to make sure I know I’m not allowed to be late, moving down the corridor toward the ceremonial hall before the sun clears the tree line. The hall is transformed. Someone who was not me has added flowers to the tables, lit the torches, arranged the older seats with embroidered cloth. It is beautiful. I cleaned the floor it stands on, and I will not be invited to sit at any of those tables, and I am fine with this. I stand at the back. The pack fills in. Elders first, then families, then the unmated. There are twenty-three of us this year. I can feel their nerves like a second heartbeat in the room everyone hoping, everyone pretending not to hope too hard. Then the doors at the far end open. The guest delegation enters. I feel him before I see him. Not the way you feel a presence. The way you feel a storm: the drop in pressure, the change in the air, something in your chest that says: pay attention. I look up from the floor I’ve been studying, and he is walking into the hall and every wolf in the room straightens without meaning to. King Jasper Vael. I know his name. Everyone knows his name. He is the Lycan King, ruler of the most powerful wolf bloodline on this continent, and he is here as guest of honor for the Ashcroft Mating Ceremony because our Alpha has been trying to build an alliance with the Vael Kingdom for five years. He is tall and cold and his eyes sweep the room the way a king’s eyes do: counting, measuring, unimpressed. Then his eyes find mine. The pull that hits me is not a feeling. It is a physical fact. It moves through my sternum and down my spine and into my feet and I think, distantly, that I should sit down. I think this is the mate bond. I have heard it described. I did not know it would feel like being chosen by gravity. I watch his face. I watch the moment he feels it too, and I watch what he does with it. He crosses the ceremonial circle. The crowd parts. He stops in front of me. I am looking up at him and his expression is not wondered; it is not warmth; it is the expression of a man who has just been handed something he did not order and intends to return it. He says, in a voice that fills the entire hall without effort: ‘I reject you, Lyra Voss of the Ashcroft Pack. Fully. Publicly. Permanently.’ The hall is completely silent. ‘An Omega cursed with the bloodline of destruction,’ he continues, ‘is not a mate. She is an insult to the Moon Goddess who made this bond, and I will not dishonor myself by accepting it.’ He steps back. He looks away from me. I didn’t move. I didn’t make a sound. I felt the bond snap, his rejection, severing the thread the universe just tied between us, and it was exactly like someone had reached into my chest and torn out something I’ve been keeping there my whole life, something I saved without knowing I was saving it, and crushed it in their fist. I still didn’t move. The pack murmured. Someone laughed. I heard my aunt’s voice, somewhere: ‘Of course. What did we expect?’ I turned around and walked toward the door. I could not run until I was outside.