The Alpha's Funeral Was My Wedding Day

Chapter 18

I cut it.

I want that on the record before anything else, because for the rest of my life people will tell the story wrong, and I would rather the true version exist somewhere in my own hand.

I did not close the bond and keep him. I did not walk out and let the snow finish what he started. I put my palm flat over the tear in the Alpha of Blackridge and I severed the frayed thing clean, root and thread, unmade it entirely, and I felt it come apart under the gold like a knot finally cut instead of pulled.

Kane arched off the bed and made a sound I will not describe. Then he fell back, and breathed, once, deep, and the grey began, slowly, to leave his face.

"Why," he said, when he could speak. His eyes were wet. "You could have. If you'd closed it, I'd have been. We'd have been—"

"Bound. I know." I took my hand back. It was still glowing faintly, and it was steady, which surprised me. "That's why I didn't."

"You didn't want to be tied to me."

"I didn't want either of us tied to anything we didn't choose." I looked down at him, and I found, to my own surprise, that the thing I felt was not hatred and was not love and was not even the old grief. It was something cleaner. "You rejected me in front of the world, Kane, and it nearly killed us both. But it was still a chain. That tear had us roped together for five years and it was rotting you and it was the reason your face went grey every time I walked into a room. I didn't cut it to punish you. I cut it to free you." I turned for the door. "And to free me. I have spent five years not certain whether I ever chose a single thing I felt. I'm choosing this. We are unbound. Whatever either of us feels from this hour is ours, and no bond is writing it. That's the only gift I have left for you. It's the only one I wanted."

He was quiet for a long moment.

"You're a better wolf than I was," he said. "You always were. My father would have hated you." A pause. "I think that's the highest thing I know how to say."

"Get well, Kane." I opened the door. "You've a pack to save and a wife who held a stairwell for you last night. Go and deserve her."

***

The corridor outside was not empty.

Ravenna stood against the far wall, arms folded, bound forearm dark against the plain dark of her clothes, and she had clearly been there long enough to know it was done. She looked at my face and read the answer off it the way we both read everything.

"You cut it," she said.

"I cut it."

Something moved behind her eyes that I could not name. Relief, maybe. Or grief. With Ravenna they had always worn the same face.

"He's free of me now," I said. "Truly. Whatever's between the two of you from here is real, Ravenna. No bond, no rot, no arithmetic. Just a man and the woman who ran into an ambush for him." I met her eyes. "That's more than most people get. Don't waste it counting."

"I don't know how to be married to a man who isn't dying," she said, and it came out of her before she could stop it, and it was the most naked thing she had ever said to me, and we both pretended it hadn't happened, because that was the kindness available.

"You'll learn," I said. "You learn everything else."

She almost smiled. Then the mask came back down, smooth and practiced, and she pushed off the wall, and she was Ravenna again, sharp and useful and buying her way forward.

"Then let me pay the next installment," she said, "because you're going to need it before the summit reconvenes. You have the letter. You know what you are and what your line was for. But there's a piece even the letter doesn't hold, and I have spent five years assembling it, and you should have it before you walk back into that hall." She lowered her voice. "The two hidden signatures. The recorder is one. You know that now. But the letter your grandmother wrote was to my mother, Sera. Cordelia of Silver Moon. My mother. Have you asked yourself why?"

The corridor went very still.

"Because they were connected," I said slowly. "Your family and mine. Somehow."

"Because my mother was Gold Temple," Ravenna said.

I stared at her.

"Not by blood. By marriage, and then by murder." Her voice was flat and fast now, the voice of someone finally setting down a thing carried too long. "My mother, Cordelia, was born into a border family the temple used as a safe house. She grew up hiding gold girls the way your grandmother's beekeeper hid your grandmother. She loved one of them. She helped three of them escape the purge. And when my grandfather, Stellan's father, wanted a wife who would tie Silver Moon to the old bloodlines without anyone knowing why, he married his son to a temple safe-house girl and buried where she came from." Ravenna's jaw was tight. "My mother spent her whole marriage inside the pack that signed the order to erase the people she'd spent her girlhood saving. She died when I was nineteen. That's when I found the letter, and the vault, and the truth about who my father is."

"Ravenna." I could barely get it out. "What are you telling me."

"I'm telling you the second hidden signature isn't a mystery I've been hunting," Ravenna said. "I'm telling you I've known it since I was nineteen years old, and I have spent every day since deciding whether to say it aloud, because saying it aloud ends my family and possibly ends me." Her eyes were bright and hard. "The recorder signed to save nine people. He told you that himself and it's true. But the other one, the second seal, the one who signed because they wanted something. I know the something. I know the name." She glanced down the corridor, both ways, the old reflex of a woman who has spent her life making sure of the room. "And it is going to be the last thing you expect, and once you know it you cannot unknow it, and you will have to decide what to do with it in a hall full of wolves who will kill to keep it buried."

"Say it."

Ravenna opened her mouth.

And down the corridor, the door of the Alpha's chambers opened, and Kane stepped out, upright, color returning, alive, and he saw the two of us standing close in the half light with our heads bent together, and he said, warm and rough and painfully sincere, the newly living man crossing toward his wife:

"Ravenna. There you are."

And Ravenna of Silver Moon closed her mouth, and turned to her husband with a smile, and the name went back down inside her, and I understood that I was going to have to earn it out of her a second time, because the moon has a sense of humor and it is not a kind one.

But she looked back at me, once, over Kane's shoulder as he reached her. And she mouthed two words, silent, quick, meant only for me, and they were not the name.

They were worse.

*It's family.*