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

Chapter Nine: The Night Before

The moon hung nearly full above the pack house gardens, one night shy of the shape it would take when everything changed. Ravena sat on the low stone wall at the edge of the rose beds, bare feet swinging above the grass, and tried to memorize the feeling of this, the last ordinary night of her old life, though she didn't know yet how true that would turn out to be.

She heard Zayden before she saw him, the particular unhurried crunch of his boots against gravel that she'd know blindfolded after eighteen years of knowing him. He dropped onto the wall beside her without asking, close enough that their shoulders brushed, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all.

"You're not sleeping," he said finally.

"Neither are you."

"Fair." He tipped his head back, studying the moon with an expression she couldn't quite read. The bruises from the trial had faded days ago, the scar on his brow healed to a thin pale line she suspected would never fully disappear. He'd been quieter since that night, less of the easy arrogance she'd grown used to, something more careful underneath it that she'd assumed was nerves. Everyone got nervous before a bonding. She'd told herself that a dozen times over the past week.

"Do you remember the creek?" she asked. "The first time I saw you shift?"

A real smile broke across his face, the boyish kind she rarely saw anymore, buried as it usually was under the weight of everything he was supposed to become. "You laughed at me. I tripped over my own paws and you laughed so hard you fell in the water."

"You followed me in."

"Someone had to make sure you didn't drown." He nudged her shoulder with his. "You've never let me live that down."

"Why would I? It's the best thing that ever happened to me." She meant it more than she'd intended to say out loud, and something in his expression shifted at the words, softened and cracked open in a way that made her chest ache with a tenderness she'd been chasing for years.

"Ravena." Her name in his mouth came out rougher than usual, weighted with something she couldn't name. "Whatever happens tomorrow...."

"Don't." She reached for his hand, laced her fingers through his before he could finish whatever nervous, doubting thing he'd been about to say. "Nothing's going to happen except exactly what we've both wanted since we were kids."

He looked down at their joined hands, and for a long moment he said nothing at all, his thumb tracing slow, absent circles over her knuckles like he was trying to memorize the shape of her hand before he lost the chance.

"I'm not good at this," he said eventually, quiet, almost embarrassed. "The soft stuff. Saying things out loud. My mother used to say I got that from my father that we love things by fighting for them instead of telling them so." His jaw tightened briefly at the mention of his mother, an old grief that never fully faded, and Ravena squeezed his hand in silent acknowledgment. "But I want you to know, before tomorrow, before any of it becomes official and formal and watched by the whole pack that I've loved you since we were seven years old, and every version of myself that existed between then and now was just waiting to be old enough to say it properly."

Ravena's eyes stung, sudden and unexpected. "Zayden...."

"Let me finish." His grip on her hand tightened, grounding. "I know I've been distant. Since my mother. I know there were years I let the anger take up more space than it should have, years I probably made you doubt whether any of this was real for me the way it's always been real for you. That wasn't fair to you. None of it was fair to you." He finally met her eyes, and whatever careful control he usually wore had slipped away entirely, leaving something raw and young and achingly sincere in its place. "Tomorrow night, when the goddess seals us together, I want it to mean something. Not just tradition. Not just the pack expecting it. I want it because it's you. It's always been you."

She kissed him before he could say anything else, before the moment could slip away into something less honest than what he'd just given her, and he kissed her back like he'd been waiting his whole life for permission to stop holding himself so carefully apart from everyone, including her.

When they finally broke apart, foreheads pressed together, breathing unsteady, Ravena let herself believe fully, completely, without the small cold doubt that had been trailing her since the trial ring ten days ago, that tomorrow night would be exactly as perfect as she'd always imagined.

"I have to go," Zayden murmured against her hair, reluctant. "Elders want me up early for the fasting rites."

"I know." She didn't want to let go of his hand. She did anyway.

He stood, and for a moment he lingered there in the moonlight, looking down at her with an expression so tender it nearly undid her all over again. "Tomorrow," he said.

"Tomorrow," she echoed.

She watched him walk back toward the pack house until the darkness swallowed his shape entirely, and she sat alone on the stone wall for a long while afterward, replaying every word he'd said, cataloguing it like something precious she wanted to keep forever.

She had no way of knowing that less than twenty hours later, the same mouth that had just poured out nine years of buried love would grin at a table full of drunk friends, grab his stepbrother by the arm in the shadowed tree line at the edge of the grove, and gamble every one of those tender words away for the sake of a bet he was already regretting and too proud to take back.