THE WRONG BRIDE

CHAPTER FOUR: What the Moon Knows

It happened on the night of the border patrol. Kaelen didn't return from on schedule.

Marren wasn't supposed to know the schedule at all — she'd learned it from Hesper's habit of setting an extra place at the small table in the north hall precisely at the hour Kaelen usually returned, and clearing it, silent and grim, whenever he didn't. Tonight the place had sat untouched two hours past dark, and Hesper's silence had a different weight to it than usual, and Marren had found herself pacing the length of the library without any clear memory of walking there.

She told herself she wasn't worried about him specifically. She told herself it was the treaty, the alliance, the practical catastrophe of a war-alpha dying three weeks into a marriage that had barely stabilized three packs' worth of politics.

She was lying to herself, and some small, unbothered part of her knew it.

The pull started as pressure, low in her sternum, the same unnerving weight she'd felt at the altar — except this time, it didn't recede. It sharpened. It pointed, the way a compass needle points, toward the north border road, toward wherever Kaelen actually was, with a specificity that had no business existing in a woman who'd never shifted a day in her life.

She was out of the courtyard gate before she'd consciously decided to leave.

The guards at the wall — young, half-trained, clearly not expecting the Alpha's new bride to be sprinting past them in her nightclothes — shouted something she didn't stop to hear. The pull got stronger the closer she got to the tree line, until it wasn't pressure anymore but heat, spreading from her sternum out through her shoulders, down her spine, into bones that suddenly did not feel like they belonged to a fully human body.

She didn't decide to shift. It happened the way a held breath finally releases — involuntary, overdue, and enormous.

Marren went down on two legs and came up on four, silver-black fur she'd never owned, night vision so sudden and total the forest around her rearranged itself into something legible instead of dark. She had no memory of learning how a wolf's body worked, and somehow her body remembered anyway, muscle and instinct arriving together as if they'd simply been waiting, this whole time, for permission.

She ran. She'd never run like this in her life — no pain in it, no fear of her own furniture-shaped body failing her, just speed and breath and the pull, relentless, drawing her toward the fight she could now smell before she saw it: blood, and gunpowder-sharp fear-scent, and underneath both, unmistakably, him.

She broke the tree line into a clearing where six Drennan-marked wolves had Kaelen's small patrol pinned against a rock face, and she did not think, she did not plan, she simply put her body between the nearest attacking wolf and the guard captain bleeding out at Kaelen's feet, and snarled with a voice that came out of her chest sounding like nothing she'd ever heard herself make.

The Drennan wolves froze.

Not out of fear of her size — she was smaller than half of them, silver-black and unremarkable-looking by any measure a soldier would respect. They froze the way soldiers freeze when they see something they were specifically trained to recognize and specifically ordered not to engage.

One of them, older, scarred along the muzzle, went down onto its belly in something that looked disturbingly like a bow.

"Emberline," she heard one of them breathe, human enough in that moment to speak, and the others were already retreating, dragging their wounded, abandoning what should have been an easy kill against an outnumbered patrol.

Kaelen's gold eyes found her in the dark, and for the second time in their brief marriage, Marren watched him understand something a half-second too late to control his own face around it.

He knew that word. She could see that he knew it.

She didn't get the chance to ask him what it meant. The adrenaline that had carried her four miles and through a fight left her all at once, and the last thing Marren remembered before the dark took her under was the impossible, gentle weight of an Alpha's jaws closing carefully around the scruff of her neck, holding her up instead of down.