My Alpha's Prank Made Me His Stepbrother's Mate

Ravena Nightwolf had loved Zayden Darkfang since before she understood what the word meant. She was seven the first time she saw him shift, a scrawny boy tumbling out of the tree line behind the pack house, fur still patchy and uneven, yelping when he tripped over his own paws. She'd laughed so hard she fell into the creek, and instead of running off embarrassed, he'd waded in after her, soaked to the bone, grinning like she'd handed him the moon. That was Zayden before. Before his mother's illness. Before the funeral no one talked about afterward. Before the silence that crept into him like frost settling over a lake, slow enough that you didn't notice until the whole thing had gone hard and cold. Ravena remembered the night everything changed not just for him, but for both of them. She was twelve, sitting outside the infirmary wing with her knees pulled to her chest, listening to muffled voices behind a door she wasn't allowed past. Zayden's father hadn't cried. Not once, not that she saw. But Zayden had. Quietly, furiously, like he was ashamed of it, wiping his face with the back of his hand before anyone could catch him. She'd sat beside him on the cold stone steps and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that wouldn't sound small next to what he'd lost. He'd leaned his shoulder into hers anyway, just enough that she knew he needed her there, even if he'd never admit it out loud. That was the last time she saw him let his guard all the way down. Nine years later, Zayden Darkfang walked through the halls of Blackthorn University like he owned the ground beneath his boots because in every way that mattered to the pack, he would, eventually. Broad shouldered, sharp jawed, carrying himself with the kind of authority that didn't need to raise its voice to be obeyed. Wolves twice his age deferred to him without thinking twice. Girls went quiet when he passed. Even professors seemed to choose their words more carefully in his presence. Ravena told herself she was used to it. She told herself a lot of things. "You're staring again," said Briala, dropping into the seat beside her in the campus courtyard, tray balanced on one hip. "I'm not staring." Ravena didn't look away from the notebook in front of her, though her eyes had absolutely drifted toward the far end of the quad, where Zayden stood surrounded by his usual circle pack heirs, trial champions, boys who'd grown up being told they mattered. "You've been staring at that same paragraph for ten minutes and I know for a fact you already read that chapter last night." Ravena closed the notebook. "The ceremony's in three weeks." "I know." Briala's voice softened. "You nervous?" Nervous wasn't the right word. Ravena had spent years imagining this not the pageantry of it, not the pack elders or the crowd or the formal robes, but the moment itself. The moment the bond would settle over her like something ancient recognizing something it had always known. She and Zayden had circled each other for so long, careful and unspoken, two wolves too stubborn to say the thing that had been obvious to everyone else since they were children. She just wanted it to be real. She wanted the goddess to confirm what she already felt in her bones that whatever had cracked open in Zayden the night his mother died hadn't taken all of him. That some part of the boy who'd waded into that creek after her was still in there, waiting for a reason to come back. "I'm not nervous," she said. "I've wanted this since I was a kid." Briala's gaze flicked toward the courtyard, toward Zayden, and something crossed her face too fast for Ravena to read. "Yeah," she said. "I know you have." Across the quad, Zayden's laughter rang out sharp, easy, performed. Ravena watched him clap one of his friends on the shoulder, watched the group lean in like moths to something bright and dangerous. And just behind them, half a step removed the way he always was, stood a figure she rarely let herself look at too long. Axton Voss. He wasn't laughing. He never really laughed, not around Zayden's crowd. He stood with his hands in his pockets, jaw tight, dark eyes fixed on nothing in particular except, for one unguarded second, they weren't fixed on nothing. They were fixed on her. Ravena's stomach did something strange and unwelcome, a small twist she refused to name. She looked away first, gathering her books, telling herself it meant nothing, that it was just the ordinary discomfort of being watched by a boy who hated her intended mate with a passion that bordered on obsession. She didn't know yet that in three weeks, that stare would be the last thing standing between her and the rest of her life that whatever passed between them in this ordinary, sunlit courtyard was about to become the first crack in a bond that hadn't even been sealed yet. She had no idea how badly the moon was about to betray her.