Hunted Mate

Chapter 1

NYRA

The dagger missed by eight inches and nobody let her forget it.

Nyra did not look at the laughter. She picked the dagger off the mat, walked back to the line, and reset her grip. Ten feet to the target. She had been hitting it at ten feet for two weeks. Today something in her hand was wrong, too tight, overcorrecting, and the result was scattered throws and Talia's voice carrying across the entire training hall.

She threw again.

Outer ring. The laughter peaked.

Nyra breathed through her nose and looked only at the center of the target. Around her the hall smelled of metal and sweat and the particular tension of wolves who trained together and liked each other and had agreed without saying so to make her feel the distance between herself and the rest of them. She had learned to exist inside that distance. It was safer than pretending it wasn't there.

The word came from somewhere to her left. Damaged. Said quietly, not quietly enough.

Ember stirred beneath her skin at that word. Not with hurt. With something that had no clean name, old and heavy and connected to a specific room, a specific smell, a specific sound of a lock turning that she spent most of her waking hours not thinking about.

She stepped back from the line before her hands could shake.

Rowan appeared at the side doors. The laughter stopped. Not because he said anything. Because he was Rowan, and his presence held the unique weight of someone who would not feel uncomfortable in a conflict and had no desire to act otherwise. The hall reorganised itself around him without his knowledge.

He crossed to Nyra and looked at her palm, at the thin line of blood from where a piece of something had caught her, and looked at her face with eyes that found exactly what she was managing to keep off it.

She took her hand back before he could hold it.

His mouth tightened. He had more to say. When she did this, when she narrowed the gap between them just enough to prevent him from worrying beyond a certain point while maintaining enough of it to prevent him from reaching the object she was genuinely defending, he always had more to say. She had been doing this for three years, and neither of them had ever said clearly what the gap was about. He had continued to try to reduce the gap, and she had continued to prevent it.

He told her dinner was tonight. She told him no. He told her she was coming. The exchange had lost most of its energy after occurring in various forms enough times. Before the talk could turn into the other one, the one about loneliness and panic and the question she could see building behind his eyes each time she reacted at something she shouldn't have flinched at, she picked up the dagger, sheathed it, and left through the eastern doors.

The courtyard outside was deep into Moonfall Ball preparation. Silver ribbons along the paths to the main manor. Crystal lights strung between every tree. Pack members moving between tasks with the specific buzzing energy of an event that the entire territory had been waiting for since the last one.

Nyra leaned against the marble railing and closed her eyes briefly.

Moonfall Ball meant every major pack in the region. Alphas. Betas. Political alliances conducted through expensive clothes and careful conversation. And this year it meant Nightfang. It meant Zayden Draven, whose reputation arrived in rooms before he did and whose pack's presence on Silver Moon territory always made older wolves speak more carefully and move more quietly.

It also meant Cassius Vane.

Zayden's head elder. His closest advisor.The man who had stood at a Nightfang border crossing three years ago and handed a folder of pack intelligence to two hunters while Nyra crouched in the grass twenty feet away, understanding exactly what she was seeing and unable to move for the entire two minutes before they parted and she fled.

She pressed her palms flat against the stone railing.

Nobody had believed her. She had been fourteen, small, known for being anxious and difficult and prone to seeing problems. Her father had listened and gone quiet in the way he went quiet when something worried him and then nothing happened. No investigation. No confrontation. And two weeks later a Silver Moon wolf with loose connections to Nightfang turned up dead on the border, and her father told her to stop talking about what she thought she saw.

She had never stopped knowing what she saw.

For three years she had been invisible inside Silver Moon, quiet and unremarkable, safe because Cassius Vane had no reason to think about a fourteen-year-old wolf who might have been in the wrong place. Tonight he was going to be standing inside Silver Moon's gates.

Mira came around the corner at speed, dark curls loose, green dress already on, and grabbed Nyra's arm with both hands.

She had the expression she wore when something had happened that she needed to tell Nyra before someone else did.

Nyra read it and felt the first cold drop of dread move through her chest.

The iron gates at the far end of the courtyard swung open.

Black vehicles came through slow and polished and perfectly spaced, and wolves near the entrance dropped their heads before the first car fully stopped. The last vehicle halted in the centre of the courtyard. The door opened.

Zayden Draven stepped out.

The courtyard did not go quiet gradually. It went quiet the way a light switch worked. Everyone in mid-motion simply stopped, and the evening settled into something heavier, and Nyra felt the pressure of it even from the railing twenty feet back, a specific compression in the air, the specific weight of an Alpha whose authority was not performed but physical.

She had never been near him before.

She had not needed to be afraid of him before.

His entourage followed. Dark coats. Blank faces. They moved with the economy of wolves who had stopped wasting effort on anything not necessary.

Then she saw the grey-haired figure at the rear of the group.

Cassius Vane. Sixty years old. Silver-streaked hair. Reading glasses on a chain around his neck, the specific domestic detail that had made her hesitate for one second three years ago, wondering if she had misread the scene, before she heard the word hunters and all hesitation ended.

He was forty feet away.

He was looking at the manor.

Nyra turned her back to the courtyard and pressed both hands against the stone railing and breathed through the spike of cold that moved from her chest into her throat.

He had not seen her face yet.

She had until the end of tonight to decide what to do about that.

Mira's hand found her arm.

She had seen it too.

And when Mira looked at Nyra her face said: I am sorry I did not tell you sooner and I do not know if we get out of tonight without him seeing you clearly.