Knot My Luna

CHAPTER ONE — "Twenty-Two" I turned twenty-two between the fish course and the toast, which meant I found out I was the Alpha's mate while I was refilling his fiancée's wine. Before that, it was just a Thursday. Three hundred wolves in the long hall. Candles down the center of every table, because the Alpha's bride liked candles. Silver forks, because the pack liked reminding people like me what silver was for. I carried a bottle in each hand and kept my eyes at the level of people's collarbones, which is the exact height where nobody thinks you're looking at them. "Wren." Mrs. Pell caught my elbow by the kitchen doors. She had flour on her wrists and thirty years of the same apron. "Table four wants the white. Don't let them see the bottle's the cheap one." "They'll taste it." "They're four hours into a feast. They'd taste a boot." I almost smiled. Almost is what I do instead. The collar sat where it always sat, snug under my jaw, a band of dull silver two fingers wide. It doesn't choke you. That's not how they work. It just sits there and hums a low, cold hum through your throat, and somewhere underneath it whatever wolf I was born with lies down and stays down. Twenty-two years. I've never shifted. Not once. The whole pack had long ago decided that meant I couldn't. The other thing the collar does is burn. If I walked past the boundary stones it would heat up like a kettle and keep heating until I turned around or stopped being a problem. Bishop Grant told me that once, quietly, when I was nine and had been eyeing the tree line. "June," I said, passing the pot sink. My sister was up to her elbows in gray water, sixteen and stubborn about it. She had a smear of soap on her cheek like war paint. "You're late," she whispered. "For what?" She looked around, then pressed something into my palm. A sugar cube. Stolen off the coffee tray, definitely. "Happy birthday," she said. "It's almost midnight. That's a cake." "That's a crime." "It's a very small crime." She grinned at me with her whole face, the way she's done since she had no front teeth. "Twenty-two. You're ancient." "Wash the pots, ancient one's sister." "Eat your cake." I ate my cake. It took one second. It was the best thing that happened to me all year, and then I pushed back out through the swinging doors into the noise. The head table was raised three steps above the rest, and he sat in the center of it like a knife somebody had set down carelessly. Kade Whitlock. Alpha of Ridgeback. Twenty-seven years old and already the kind of man people lowered their voices around before they knew why. He hadn't touched his food. He hadn't touched his wine. He had one hand loose on the arm of his chair, and every few minutes his jaw moved like he was chewing on something that wasn't there. Beside him sat Cassidy Rourke, and I'll be honest with you, because there's no point being anything else this late in the story of my life: she was beautiful. Not in a mean way. She had a laugh she gave to everyone at the table equally, including the old ones nobody talks to, and when she caught me refilling her glass she said, "Thank you," and meant it, which was worse somehow. Her uncle stood up. Or somebody's uncle. He lifted his glass. "To the Alpha," he said, "and the Luna he's finally chosen—" I was pouring. That's the part I keep coming back to. My hand was steady. The wine was going in a clean thin rope into Cassidy's glass and the candle behind it made the red look like something living, and the clock over the doors had just started its first stroke of twelve. And then a door blew open inside my chest. I don't have a better way to say it. There was a room in me I had never once been in, and the door came off the hinges, and everything behind it came out at the same time. Heat down my spine. My knees went liquid. Sound peeled off the hall like paint. And a smell hit me — cedar smoke, rain on hot stone, the iron underside of a storm — and my whole body said mine in a voice that had never been mine. I looked up. He was already standing. The uncle's toast died in the middle. Three hundred wolves turned their heads at once, and the hall went so quiet I could hear the candles. Because they could smell it too. "That's—" someone said. "On the hybrid?" "No. No, look at her—" The bottle was still in my right hand. The glass was still in my left. Cassidy Rourke was looking up at me with her mouth slightly open, and to her enormous credit, the first thing on her face wasn't hate. It was math. She was doing the math, and she was arriving where I was arriving, and she was arriving there faster. "Kade," she said. Just his name. Very calm. The way you'd say a name to a man on a ledge. He came down the three steps. Somebody's chair went over. A woman near the front pulled her son behind her legs. Bishop Grant moved along the wall with his hand open at his side, and I understood, in a distant, floating way, that everyone in that room expected their Alpha to cross the floor and open my throat, and that nobody was going to stop him. I set the glass down. I didn't beg. I want that on the record. I've never begged and I didn't start at twenty-two. He stopped in front of me. Close. His eyes were doing something terrible — not rage. Rage I know. This was worse. This was a man watching a house burn down with someone still inside it. Then he reached up with both bare hands and took hold of my collar. Silver on an Alpha does exactly what you think. There was a sound like water hitting a hot pan, and then the smell — and he did not stop, and he did not make a single sound. His hands shook. The hall made a noise like everyone gasping into their sleeve at once. He found the catch with two fingers that were already blistering, and he opened it. The collar came off my throat. He dropped it on the stone floor. It rang. Air on my neck for the first time since I was six years old. He leaned in, close enough that his breath moved my hair, close enough that not even the front table heard, and he said one thing, low and fast, like a man handing you something under a table. "Whatever I say next — remember who took it off." Then he straightened. He turned to the hall. And when he spoke again it was in a completely different voice, a flat, public, Alpha voice with all the warmth burned out of it. "Rejection ceremony," he said. "Dawn." He walked away with his hands burning and I stood there in the wreck of my own life, and that was when I noticed it. The bond wasn't one thread. It was two. Somewhere in the dark, a second heart was beating against mine — and it wasn't his.