THE CURSED MATE OF MY ENEMY

Chapter 2

Kane’s POV

“Say it again,” I said. “Tell me the mate bond locked on an Ashwood wolf, and tell me why you don’t look surprised.”

My father did not answer right away. That was answer enough.

We stood in his study an hour after the ceremony, the fire burned down to embers, and I could still smell her on my own skin, something like rain on warm stone, a scent that had rewritten every instinct I owned the second I walked through those doors and saw her standing at the top of that aisle in white. My father’s study had not changed since I was a boy waiting outside it, terrified of being called in for a lecture. It still smelled like old parchment and the particular kind of cold that came from a man who never let a fire burn hot enough to be comfortable. I used to think that was practical. Tonight it felt like a warning I had somehow never learned to read.

I had expected a stranger. Political theater. A name on a treaty I would be polite to twice a year at pack gatherings and otherwise ignore, because that was what Alphas did with arranged mates who were not truly chosen. I had not expected the floor to drop out from under me the moment Sera Voss looked at me across that room. I had not expected to feel like I had known her my whole life and only just gotten her back.

“The bond does not lie, Kane,” my father said finally. “But it also does not change what she is.”

“What she is,” I repeated. “She is my mate.”

“She is Magnus Voss’s daughter.” He said it like it was the only fact that mattered in the world. “Ashwood blood. Their pack killed your grandfather. Their pack broke the treaty that could have ended this feud before either of us was born.”

“Did they.” I kept my voice flat, though something under my ribs was starting to burn. “Because that’s not the story I grew up hearing from you. You told me the Ashwood pack broke it. You never told me how. You never told me who was standing closest when it happened.”

His eyes flicked to mine, sharp and fast, there and gone. “Watch your tone.”

“I am the heir to this pack,” I said. “I think I am allowed to ask why the man who raised me to hate a girl I had never met turns pale the second the bond locks on her instead of relieved that his war might actually be ending.”

He stood, and for a second I saw something in his face I had never seen before. Not anger. Fear.

“The mating is political,” he said. “It ends here. You will not act on the bond beyond what the treaty requires until both packs agree the peace is real. Is that understood?”

“And if it isn’t just political anymore?”

“Then you will be very careful, Kane.” His voice dropped low, the kind of low that used to make me flinch as a boy. “Because there are things about that treaty, and about her family, that are not settled yet. If this bond becomes real before I say it can, you will not be protecting her. You will be painting a target on her back that even I cannot talk the pack elders out of using.”

I left his study with my jaw locked so tight it ached and found Damon Ashe waiting outside the door like he’d been listening, which he probably had.

“You heard all that,” I said.

“Enough of it.” Damon fell into step beside me down the stone corridor, his voice pitched low enough that only wolf hearing would catch it. “Kane, if the bond is real, pack law says you’re obligated to protect her with your life. Above your father’s orders, above pack politics, above everything. That’s not a small thing to hand a man who’s been planning around your marriage being a formality for three years.”

“You think I don’t know that.”

“I think you should know I’m not the only one who noticed your eyes change color in front of two hundred witnesses tonight.” He stopped walking. “Elin was in that hall, Kane.”

I had forgotten, in the chaos of the ceremony, that Elin Marsh had been standing in the third row, the girl my father had quietly favored as my intended before the Voss treaty negotiations sped everything up. I had never loved her. We both knew it. But she had grown up believing she would stand where Sera stood tonight, and I doubted she had taken watching another woman claim that place with any grace at all.

“She’ll survive,” I said.

“That’s not what worries me.” Damon’s voice went quieter still. “What worries me is that the elders who wrote the terms of this mating built in an exit clause. If the bond doesn’t hold within one full moon cycle, the mating is dissolved and Sera Voss goes home. Which means somebody out there has thirty days to make sure it fails.”

I felt something cold settle behind my sternum.

“Who benefits from that?”

“Half this pack,” Damon said grimly. “Everyone who’s been quietly profiting off the border conflict for a decade. War is good business for the wolves who sell weapons and information to both sides, Kane. Peace puts them out of work.”

I thought of Sera’s face in the ceremony hall, the way she had looked at me like I was the last thing standing between her and a fall she couldn’t survive, and the way I had meant every word I whispered to her, that I would not let anyone in that room hurt her for this. I had not known, when I said it, that the danger might not come from a rival pack or an angry crowd. I had not known it might already be inside my own walls, counting down thirty days.

“Find out who wrote that clause,” I told Damon. “Quietly. Before she does.”

Damon studied me for a long moment, and something like understanding, or maybe pity, crossed his face. “You’re already protecting her over pack law,” he said. “One day in, Kane.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s the problem.”

Damon did not push further, which was its own kind of mercy from a man whose whole life was built around never letting anything slide. We had grown up together, sparred together, buried a mutual friend together during a border skirmish two winters ago, and in all that time I had never once seen him hesitate to tell me when I was making a mistake. He was not hesitating now because he agreed with me. He was hesitating because some part of him already understood that this particular mistake was not one I could be talked out of, bond or no bond.

Somewhere down the corridor, a door opened, and Sera’s voice carried through the stone, sharp with fear she was clearly trying to hide from whoever she was talking to.

“What do you mean the treaty file is missing,” she said. “Missing how?”