Knot My Luna

Chapter 5

CHAPTER FIVE — "Bare Your Throat"

The rope on my wrists was new. I remember thinking that. They'd bought new rope for me, or cut it fresh off a coil, and somebody had gone to the trouble of tying it neat, and out of everything that happened that night it's the neatness I still can't forgive.

I hadn't taken Cassidy's cart. That's the answer to the question, and I want it said plainly before the rest: I stood on that flat stone ground four nights ago with an open road and money and my sister on the other end of it, and I said no.

Not out of pride. Out of arithmetic. A cart goes out the east road and a cart gets stopped on the east road, and a hybrid without a collar and a girl with no papers get taken by whoever finds them first, and I have been in this world long enough to know how that ends.

So they voted instead. Rogue hybrid. Unlawful mark. Execution by pit.

And now it was the Blood Moon, and they walked me up the slope through a ring of three hundred people holding torches.

The moon was the wrong color. That's the part nobody warns you about. It came up over the ridge like a coin left in a fire, and it made every face in that ring look like it was already dead.

Behind me, the pit was open. They'd taken the boards off it that afternoon. I could feel the cold coming off it against the backs of my legs, twelve feet of stone and four rusted rings, and every single person in that ring knew what it was for and not one of them was looking at it.

They were looking at me.

"Kneel her," an elder said.

Hands on my shoulders. I went down on the stone on both knees and I put my chin up, because you can be pushed down and still refuse to be low, and that distinction has been most of my life.

Iris Vane stood at the eastern edge with the moon staff in both hands.

I looked at her. I gave her the whole weight of it, one long look, the woman who'd sat on a shelf beside me two nights ago and told me nine mates had died in nine forked bonds.

She looked back at me. And she did not say a word.

Something in me that had been holding on to someone will stop this let go quietly and went out.

Then Bishop Grant broke the ring.

He came through the crowd fast, and he got about nine feet, roaring, "She's had no trial—" before four of his own men took him off his feet, and there was a scuffle and a sound like a boot going into a body, and then Bishop was face-down on the stones with a knee in his back, still shouting into the dirt, and they didn't even bother to drag him away.

He'd fed me bread when I was nine. He was the only one who ever had.

"Stop," I said to him. Not loud. "Bishop. Stop it. It's not worth your family."

He stopped shouting. He turned his face on the stone so he could see me, and this enormous man started to cry, and I had to look somewhere else.

I looked at the Alpha's stone.

Kade Whitlock sat above the ring the way his father had sat and his father's father, and he had not moved since they brought me out. His hands were healing badly — I could see the raw shine of them from thirty feet — and his face had nothing in it at all. Not anger. Not grief. Off. Like a house with the shutters up.

Cassidy stood at his shoulder in Luna's white, and she was the only person on that stone whose hands were shaking.

"Alpha," the head elder called out. "The vote stands. Do you contest it?"

Kade said nothing.

"Does the Alpha contest it?"

Nothing.

"Then the pack acts by law," the elder said, and turned to the ring, and the whole hillside made a low sound, a sort of hungry murmur, and someone near the front actually shifted from foot to foot with excitement.

And I understood, with a clarity I'd never had before, that he was going to let it happen.

Of course he was. He'd rejected me at dawn in front of all of them. He'd burned his hands off my throat and then called me a rogue's daughter in a locked room and thrown me out of it. Whatever he was, he was a man who had chosen the pack over me twice already and he was about to do it a third time, and the second thread in my chest was screaming and the first one was sitting on a stone chair with its shutters up.

"Do it, then," an old woman called from the ring. "Before the moon's high."

They started to move.

Four of them, coming around behind me, toward the rope. Toward the pit.

I did not beg.

I want that written down somewhere permanent, because it's the only monument I'll ever have. Nine women went into forked bonds before me and every one of them died and I don't know what they did at the end and I hope somebody was kind to them. But I know what I did.

I didn't beg, and I didn't cry, and I didn't call on the Goddess, who has never once in twenty-two years given me anything but a locked collar and a sister to worry about.

I looked at the man on the stone chair.

The bond carries. That's a thing I'd learned in four days — that if you push a word into it, it lands on the other end like a hand on a shoulder, and only they can hear it.

"I'm not going to scream," I said to him. "So don't you dare look away."

His head came up.

I saw the exact second it went through him. Thirty feet away, in torchlight, I watched a man come apart behind his own eyes.

Then Kade Whitlock stood up.

The elder faltered. "Alpha—"

He came down off the stone. One step, two, three, down onto the ground where nobody's Alpha stands, and the ring peeled back from him without deciding to, and he crossed the flat stones toward me with the Blood Moon on his face.

The four men behind me stopped.

"Move," Kade said to them, and they moved.

He stopped in front of me. Close enough that I had to tip my head back to keep his eyes.

And then, in front of three hundred wolves, in front of the elders and the priestess and the woman in Luna's white, the Alpha of Ridgeback went down on one knee in front of a collared half-breed and tipped his head back.

The sound that came out of that crowd was not a human sound.

Because there is nothing lower. There is nothing lower an Alpha can do. Baring your throat isn't apology and it isn't romance — it's the oldest thing in pack law. It's submission, it's an invitation to mark, and it is legally a transfer of rank. The moment my teeth closed on that throat he'd be nothing and I'd be Luna, and every single person on that hillside knew it, and half of them sat straight down on the ground.

"Kade!" Cassidy was off the stone, white skirts in both fists. "Kade, get up — get up, you're giving them everything—"

He didn't get up.

"This is heresy," the head elder said. His voice had gone thin. "This is—"

"It's forked."

Iris Vane. Loud. Cracked open like a bell after eighty-one years of quiet, and she slammed the moon staff down on the stone once.

"The bond is forked," she said, "and every one of you knows what that means and not one of you has the spine to say it out loud, so I'll say it. That mark is two crescents crossed. This girl is not a rogue. This girl is a third in something that was made in this pack, by this pack, and if you put her in that hole tonight you will be burying the evidence."

Half the elders sat down.

Kade never looked at any of them. He stayed on his knee with his throat open and his ruined hands turned up on his thighs, and he looked at me.

"You want a rogue put down?" he said, and he said it loud, to the whole hill. "She's not a rogue. She's my Luna."

"Kade—"

"And I rejected her at dawn like a coward, because I knew what the second thread meant, and I wanted her to live."

The ring roared. Somebody threw a torch.

He didn't flinch. He leaned in until my bound hands came up between us, and his voice dropped for me alone, and I felt his throat move under my knuckles.

"Mark me or kill me, Wren." His breath was shaking. "But do it where every one of them can see."

Somebody cut the rope. I don't know who. I've asked and nobody will say.

My hands came free and I brought one up, and I put it flat on his throat.

The bond opened all the way.

I'd thought it was already open. Four days of it hammering in my chest, four days of a door blown off its hinges — I thought I'd felt everything there was.

I hadn't felt anything. That had been the sound of it through a wall.

It opened, and I got him: not thoughts, nothing so clean. I got a man who had not slept in four nights. I got the moment he'd heard my name on the wind at midnight while a toast was being made about someone else. I got his hands on the silver and the sound it made and the fact that he'd have kept his hands in it for an hour if the catch had been stiffer. I got dawn, and the words, and what saying them had cost, and it was so much worse from the inside than it had looked from the frost.

And under all of it — the second thread.

It wasn't distant anymore.

For four days it had been cold and far away, a heartbeat at the bottom of a well. Now it was hot. It was right there. It was fifty feet behind me and off to the left, past the ring, in the black line of the trees at the edge of the ceremonial ground.

It had been in the trees the entire time.

The far gate came off its hinges.

Both leaves at once, torn out of the stone posts with a c***k that went across the hillside, and every torch in the ring turned toward the sound.

The man who walked into the torchlight had Kade's face.

He had Kade's hands and Kade's height and the same scar through the same eyebrow, and he was filthy, and thin, and six years dead, and he was smiling at me like he'd been waiting his whole life to be introduced.

"Don't," Cole Whitlock said. "Sweetheart — if you mark him, you kill me."

My hand was already on his brother's throat.

"So," he said. "Choose."