Knot My Luna

Chapter 3

CHAPTER THREE — "Whose Heart Is That"

Iris Vane picked her lamp up off the floor and didn't apologize for dropping it.

"Sit up. Slowly."

"What is it?"

"Sit up, I said."

I got my elbow under me. The room swung once and settled. There was dried blood crusted along my jaw where it had come out of my ears, and the pain in my back had gone from a hand opening to a low dragging ache, like something heavy had been left inside me.

"Is it a Luna's mark?"

The old woman pulled my shirt closed over my shoulder herself, quickly, the way you'd throw a cloth over a fire.

"You will not show that to anyone," she said. "Not the healer. Not your sister. Not one living soul in this pack."

"Iris—"

"Not one," she said, and her hand was shaking on my collarbone. "Do you understand me, girl? They put people in the ground for less than what's on your shoulder."

Then the door opened and Bishop Grant filled it, and the noise from the corridor came in with him — a lot of voices, all going at once.

"He wants her," Bishop said.

"Now?"

"Now."

Iris straightened up like a woman pulling armor on. "Tell him she's bleeding from both ears."

"I did tell him."

"And?"

Bishop looked at me, and there was an apology all over his big flat face.

"He said now."

The Alpha's study is at the top of the east stair. I'd cleaned it maybe a hundred times and never once seen the door shut with someone inside.

Bishop walked me up. At the top he stopped, and he did something I've thought about a lot since: he took my hand, quickly, and pressed a heel of bread into it. Same as when I was nine. Same as when I was fourteen.

"Eat that," he said. "You're grey."

"Bishop."

"Yeah."

"Are you supposed to stay?"

"That's the thing," he said. "He told me to go."

He put me through the door, and he shut it behind me, and I heard him go down the stairs.

No Beta. No guards. Nobody outside a locked door with the Alpha and the hybrid he'd rejected eleven hours ago.

That's an admission, if you know how to read it. He didn't want a witness.

Kade was standing at the window with his back to me and his bandages off. His hands were a horror. Deep burns straight across both palms, blistered, weeping, and he'd wrapped nothing over them since dawn.

"Sit," he said.

I stayed by the door.

He turned around. Looked at me for a long moment.

"Who was your mother?"

"You know who my mother was."

"I know what's in the pack book. It says Calloway, rogue female, deceased. That's not a mother, that's a line of ink." He came off the window. "Where were you born?"

"Here."

"You weren't born here. You came here when you were six with a baby on your hip and no paperwork and my father collared you in a week, which he never did to any other hybrid in his life. Why you?"

"Ask him."

"He's dead."

"Then it's a short conversation."

He crossed half the room before he'd decided to. I watched him do it — I watched him take three steps and then realize he'd taken them and stop, and his jaw went hard, and I understood for the first time that this thing wasn't happening to only one of us.

Because that's what nobody tells you about the bond. In the songs it's warm. It's love at first sight and violins.

It isn't. It's gravity.

It doesn't ask either of you. It just tilts the floor, and every second you spend not touching costs you something, and you can hate the person on the other end of it with your entire heart and your feet will still walk you across the room.

"Your father," he said. "Who was he?"

"I don't know."

"Wren—"

"I don't know." My voice cracked and I hated it. "There was no father. There was a woman who ran with a baby and a toddler, and she got here, and she died of it, and I have been washing this pack's plates ever since. That's the whole story. That's everything I have."

"That's not everything you have."

"No," I agreed. "I had one other thing. I had my silence. You took that off me in the yard this morning in front of three hundred people, so forgive me if I'm careful with what's left."

That landed. I watched it land.

"You accepted," he said, low.

"You rejected."

"You weren't supposed to accept."

"You weren't supposed to burn your hands," I said. "Then you did, and you told me to remember it, and eleven hours later you called me a rogue's daughter in a locked room. So which one of us is lying, Alpha?"

He was close now. I don't know when that happened. The desk was behind him and the door was behind me and the air between us had gone thick and wrong.

I could smell the burn on his hands. Cedar smoke, rain on stone, and under it, scorched skin.

And I asked the only question I actually cared about.

"There are two heartbeats," I said.

He went very still.

"On my end of it. There are two." My hand had come up to the crossed mark on my shoulder without asking me. "One of them is yours. It's been beating in my chest since midnight and I know the shape of it already, God help me. The other one is—" I stopped. "It's further away. It's cold. It hurts."

"Wren."

"Whose is it?"

He moved.

I don't know which of us moved first, honestly. I put my hands flat on his chest to keep him off and he came anyway and my back hit the door hard enough to rattle it, and I shoved, and he let me shove, and neither of us got any further apart.

"You want to know whose heart that is." His hand came up and stopped an inch from my throat, and hung there, shaking. "Say it again."

"Whose heart is it, Alpha?"

He put his forehead against the door beside my head, and when he spoke his mouth was close enough that I felt every word land on my skin.

"My brother's," he said.

"You don't have a brother."

"I did." His hand closed around the double mark, and both of us made a sound neither of us meant to make. "He's been dead six years, Wren."

"Then why—"

"Because he's screaming."