The Alpha's Unwilling Mate

The Silver Binding

Chapter 13: The Silver Binding

POV: Lina Hale

The crown was heavy. But that was the least of my problems.

I stood at the threshold of the Great Hall and breathed in what was waiting behind those doors. Hundreds of wolves packed into one space. Musk and old stone and something electric underneath it all. Every one of them was waiting for a performance they didn't know was fake.

"Remember," Mira said quietly, adjusting my train. "Walk to the centre of the dais. Stop before the Alpha King. Wait for the howl to settle before you offer your hand. If you lose your place, breathe. The amnesia covers a moment's hesitation."

"I know," I said.

The doors opened.

The silence that followed was immediate and total. Hundreds of eyes, amber and blue and gold, locked onto me all at once. I didn't look at them. I picked a point at the far end of the hall where Kael stood on a raised stone platform dressed in charcoal furs and silver armor, and I walked toward it.

I used the stride I had studied. Slow and even, chin level, eyes forward. Every wolf I passed lowered their head. The movement rippled outward from me like something in water. I could feel the heat coming off them, the weight of that many bodies focused on one point. I was still learning this language, but I knew enough to keep moving without flinching.

I reached the dais and climbed the three steps.

Kael didn't move. He stood exactly where he had been standing, his scent filling the air around me as I got close. Cedar and cold rain and something underneath that was harder to name. He wasn't looking at a bride. He was looking at a problem he hadn't solved yet.

"Selene Virel." His voice came out low and resonant, moving through the floor and up through my feet. "Do you come before the Silver Moon to bind your spirit to the crown?"

"I do," I said. My voice carried better than I expected. I let a small flicker of uncertainty cross my face, just enough to remind anyone to watch about the fog. "Though the path is unclear, my duty is not."

The ritual that followed was long. Archaic words in a language that sounded more like growls and sharp tones than anything I had heard before. I followed every instruction Varis had given me. Bowed when the Elders bowed. Knelt when the fire was lit. I watched myself from a distance, moving through steps I had memorized without understanding what any of them meant.

Then came the marking.

"The bond of the pack is not in the blood we shed," Kael said, stepping closer until the space between us was almost nothing. "But in the pulse, we share."

He took my right hand. His skin was hot. I hadn't noticed how cold I was until that contact. He turned my wrist over and held it palm up, the inside of my wrist exposed.

He pushed back the silver cuff on his own wrist and held the bare skin over his pulse point above mine.

Skin to skin. A symbolic press. A formality, Varis had said. A gesture of unity with no real consequence.

Kael pressed his wrist to mine.

The world cracked open.

A jolt of something white hot shot up my arm and hit my chest hard. Not warmth. Not a spark. Something violent and old, like being connected to a current that had been running for centuries without anything to land on. Images came fast and without order. Snow-covered forest. The taste of something raw. A throne and the specific loneliness that came with it. A hunger I had no word for.

I gasped. My knees almost went.

Kael's hand locked around mine, grip hard enough to bruise. I looked up and caught his face in the half second before he controlled it. Pupils wide. Body gone rigid. His scent spiked sharp and metallic over the cedar.

He felt it, too.

The connection broke when he pulled his wrist back. His breathing had changed. He looked at me with something I hadn't seen from him before. Not suspicion. Not duty. Something rawer than either of those. Something close to fear.

I filed it immediately. The bond is real. It goes both ways. He didn't expect that.

Neither did I.

He recovered faster than I did. His face went back to stone, though I could see a slight tremor in his fingers as he raised my hand high above us.

"Witness your Luna!"

The sound that came back was enormous. Every wolf in the hall lifted their head and howled, the noise layering and building until it was a physical thing pressing against my skin. My teeth rattled. And underneath that, something in my blood responded to it, a pull I hadn't felt before, like a string being plucked.

I stood next to him and felt it. The room. All of it. A faint collective hum running just below hearing, telling me where the warriors were standing, what the mood in the crowd was, who was calm and who was not. The pack. I could feel the edges of it like something newly attached.

I was the Luna of the Silver Moon.

I kept my posture square, my eyes moving across the rows of bowed heads. Every wolf in the room was waiting on me. To lead, to bless, to hold something together that I didn't fully understand yet.

I was deeper in this than I had planned to be. The amnesia cover would buy me time, but the bond I had just felt with Kael was not symbolic. It was a real connection running in both directions, and that made him dangerous in a way none of the others were.

I held onto my skirts and kept my eyes on the room.

I am the Luna, I thought. Now, I just have to make sure none of you find out who I actually am.

Kael's gaze sat heavy on the side of my face. Questioning. Restless.

I didn't look at him.

The game had started.