THE CURSED MATE OF MY ENEMY

Sera’s POV “You will smile at my enemy’s son tonight, Sera, or you will watch our pack burn because you would not.” My father’s voice did not shake when he said it. Alphas do not shake. I stood in the middle of the war room with my mother’s old shawl around my shoulders and felt the floor tilt under me anyway. “You are giving me away,” I said. “Say it like that. Don’t call it peace.” “I am saving four hundred lives,” he said. “Yours included.” Three generations ago, the Draven pack and the Ashwood pack signed a treaty that was supposed to end a war neither side could remember starting anymore. It lasted eleven years before it broke, and nobody ever told me the whole truth of how. All I knew growing up was the shorthand every pup in Ashwood territory learns before they learn to shift: Draven wolves cannot be trusted, Draven wolves killed our kin, Draven wolves smile with knives behind their teeth. Now my father wanted me to marry one. “Kane Draven,” he said, like the name alone should mean something to me. “Alpha Roran’s heir. The mating will bind our packs the way the old treaty should have. You will be respected. You will be safe.” “I will be a hostage with a ring.” His jaw worked. For one second I saw the father who used to carry me on his shoulders through the training yard, before he became an Alpha who measured his daughter’s worth in the lives she could save. “The alternative is war, Sera. Real war. Not border skirmishes. Not a fight we can win. I have seen the numbers. I have seen what Roran’s pack has been building on our southern line. If this mating does not happen, I will be sending boys your age to die by winter.” I did not cry. I had promised myself years ago I would not cry in front of him again. “When.” “Tonight.” I did not have hours to grieve the life I had imagined for myself, the ordinary one where I chose my own mate the way my mother once told me she had chosen my father, before the war made choosing feel like a luxury our pack could no longer afford. I had three hours to become someone’s wife, and I spent most of them sitting very still while two women I barely knew pinned my hair and told me, in low, careful voices, how lucky I was that the Alpha had picked me for something so important. I did not feel lucky. I felt like a treaty clause with a heartbeat. The ceremony hall smelled like woodsmoke and crushed hemlock, the old wards our pack burns to keep enemy scent from carrying. I stood at the top of the aisle in a white dress that was not mine, stitched overnight by women who would not meet my eyes, and I thought about running. I thought about it seriously, calculated the distance to the tree line, the time it would take Damon Ashe’s wolves to catch me. I did not run. Lira found my hand at the last second and squeezed it so hard it hurt. “You don’t have to smile,” she whispered. “Just don’t cry. Give them that much.” The doors on the far end of the hall opened, and the Draven pack walked in like a blade unsheathing, silent, controlled, dangerous in the specific way of wolves who have never had to raise their voices to be obeyed. And then I saw him. Kane Draven did not look like the monster I had built in my head since I was six years old. He looked like a wall. Tall enough that the room seemed to rearrange itself around him, dark haired, jaw set like he was bracing for a blow that hadn’t landed yet. His eyes found mine across the hall and something in my chest slammed shut and then wrenched open at the same time, a snap of heat that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with a word I had heard about my whole life and never believed in. Mate. I heard the low, involuntary sound he made from all the way across the room, a growl he swallowed before it fully escaped, and I watched his hands curl into fists at his sides like he was fighting the urge to close the distance between us right there in front of both packs. “No,” I whispered, so quiet only Lira could hear. “Not him. Anyone but him.” “Sera.” Lira’s fingers tightened on mine. “Sera, look at his eyes.” They had gone from brown to a burning amber, wolf close to the surface, and every wolf in that hall who knew what that meant went utterly still. My father did not look surprised. That was the part that scared me most. He had known this could happen. He had gambled my whole future on it and never told me the stakes. I walked down that aisle because the alternative was war, and because Lira’s hand in mine was the only thing keeping my knees from buckling, and because somewhere underneath the terror was a pull so strong it felt like drowning and breathing at the same time. Kane Draven watched me come toward him like he was watching something he had already lost once and could not bear to lose twice, though we had never met in our lives. When I reached him, close enough to smell cedar and something colder underneath, like frost on stone, he leaned down, close enough that only I could hear him. “I didn’t ask for this either,” he said. His voice was low, rough at the edges, nothing like the cold command I had braced for. “But I am not going to let anyone in this room hurt you for it. Not my father. Not yours.” I looked up at the wolf my whole life had taught me to hate, and felt the bond settle into my bones like something ancient waking up, and I understood, with a cold, sinking certainty, that the easiest thing my father had ever asked of me was going to be the most dangerous choice I would ever make. The elder began the binding words. Somewhere behind me, I heard Damon Ashe murmur something to another Draven wolf, too low for most ears, but not for mine. “If the bond is real,” he said, “the Alpha will have to be told everything. Even the part he doesn’t know yet.” My whole body went cold. I turned my head just enough to catch Damon’s profile in the corner of my eye, and he was not looking at Kane at all. He was looking at me, the way a soldier looks at a door he has already been told to guard. Everything about what.