Bonded to the wrong heart

The relic wasn’t in the third vault. Wren swore under her breath and moved to the fourth, dragging her fingers along a shelf of unmarked boxes until she found it wrapped in cloth gone soft with age, tucked in a crate labeled linens — because of course it was. She didn’t have time to be annoyed about it. She had six minutes to get to the hall. She made it with one to spare, slipping past a young guard too startled to stop her, easing the door open just wide enough to fit through. The hall was full. Both packs sat in careful, deliberate symmetry, her people on one side and the Draven pack on the other, a narrow aisle of neutral ground between them like a scar that hadn’t finished healing. Her father stood at the front beside the visiting Alpha, mid-sentence, something about years of peace and continued cooperation. She kept to the wall, moving toward her seat, and handed the relic off to an aide without looking at where she was going. Which was, in hindsight, a mistake. The air went thin before she understood why — pressure behind her sternum like she’d stood up too fast, except she was standing still. Her wolf, usually a quiet background presence, surged forward so hard she staggered and had to catch herself on a chair. She looked up because her body made her look up. He was across the aisle. Dark-haired, dressed the way men dressed when they didn’t have to think about it because someone else had already decided for them, and beside him, close enough that the placement meant something, stood a woman in pale blue with her hand resting on his sleeve like it belonged there. A woman who was clearly his, in whatever formal, arranged way people belonged to each other at a treaty ceremony. He was looking at Wren the same way she was looking at him — not the polite glance of a stranger across a crowded room, but like something in him had also just been shoved off its axis. Her wolf didn’t just notice him. It recognized him, the way it recognized her own reflection, the way it recognized home. That recognition should not have existed. She had never seen this man in her life, and she already had someone. She didn’t need whatever this was. She resented it on principle before she’d even worked out what it was. “Wren.” Her father’s voice, low, close. “Sit down.” She didn’t move. Her legs had opinions about that. Across the aisle, an older man beside Kase leaned in and murmured something, sharp-eyed, watching the exchange with the stillness of someone doing fast, unhappy arithmetic. “Wren Calloway,” he said, just loud enough to carry — not to her, to Kase. Kase’s eyes dropped, briefly, to her hand. To the ring on it. “She’s engaged?” “To Ethan Vale.” Kase looked at the woman beside him — the one whose hand was still on his sleeve, who this whole ceremony existed partly to formalize — and then back at Wren, like he needed to check whether the first look had been real. “So am I.” The words landed in the space between them and didn’t go anywhere. Her father’s hand closed around her arm, steering her toward her seat, and she let herself be moved because she genuinely wasn’t sure her legs would do anything else useful. Around her, the room had gone quiet in a way rooms only go quiet when everyone in them has just witnessed something they aren’t sure they’re allowed to discuss yet. She sat. She didn’t hear whatever her father resumed saying. She made herself look forward instead of across the aisle. It didn’t help. She could still feel him there, the way you can feel a doorway you’re standing near with your eyes closed — not wanted, just present, refusing to be ignored. Someone slid into the seat beside her a few minutes later. She recognized the shoulder before she turned her head. “Sorry. Traffic near the west gate.” Ethan looked at her properly, the way he always did, checking a reading against a baseline only he had access to. Whatever he saw made his expression shift. “You okay?” “Fine.” He didn’t push. That was Ethan — he’d file it away and ask again later, when there weren’t three hundred witnesses. He reached over and took her hand, the one without the ring on it, and she let him, grateful for something solid that didn’t come with a pull she couldn’t name. She made it through the rest of the ceremony without hearing a word of it. What stuck was the awareness, constant and unwelcome, of exactly where he was standing, as if her body had assigned itself a job she hadn’t agreed to. When the room finally broke into the loose, milling reception that followed, she stood too fast, told Ethan she needed air, and didn’t wait for him to offer to come with her. She made it as far as the side corridor before her legs stopped cooperating, and she had to put a hand against the wall. “You felt it too.” She didn’t need to turn around to know the voice. She turned around anyway. Kase stood a few feet back, none of the composure from the hall left on him. Up close he looked younger, and more unsettled, which she found oddly satisfying — at least she wasn’t the only one falling apart quietly in a hallway. “I don’t know what I felt,” she said. It wasn’t strictly true. She knew exactly what it felt like. She refused to say the word out loud in case saying it made it real, made it hers in some way she hadn’t agreed to. “I’ve never—” He stopped, started again. “This isn’t what I was told it’s supposed to feel like.” “You don’t know that. You’ve never had it happen before.” “Neither have you.” She didn’t have an answer for that, because he was right, and because some small, unwelcome part of her recognized the accuracy of it before her mind could catch up to argue. “This doesn’t change anything,” she said, more to herself than to him. “I didn’t say it did.” “Good. Because it doesn’t. I’m marrying Ethan in six weeks.” Something flickered across his face — not hurt, exactly, more like he was filing the information the same way she’d just filed hers. “I’m not free either. Whatever this is, it doesn’t get a vote.” Voices approached from the reception — her father’s, and another she recognized as belonging to Kase’s side of the treaty — and Kase’s expression closed over fast, like a door swinging shut. “We can’t do this here,” he said. “We’re not doing anything,” she said, too quickly, and meant it as a fact, not a promise she was sure she could keep. He held her gaze one more second, then turned and walked back toward the noise. Wren pressed her spine against the wall and made herself breathe, furious at her own pulse for refusing to slow down, furious at a stranger for existing, furious most of all that some traitorous, animal part of her had already decided something about him that the rest of her hadn’t agreed to. Her phone buzzed. A message from her father: My study. Now. Alone. She pushed off the wall, straightened her dress, and went — telling herself, the whole way there, that whatever her father wanted to say couldn’t possibly be worse than what had already happened. She was wrong. Her father was waiting behind his desk, and he wasn’t alone. Kase’s father stood beside him, and between the two men, spread open on the desk where she couldn’t avoid seeing it, was a copy of the treaty — the marriage clause circled in red ink, and beneath it, a single handwritten line that made her stomach drop before either of them said a word.