Bonded to the wrong heart

Chapter 2 — The Wrong Mate

Wren didn’t remember deciding to leave. One second she was in the corridor watching Kase’s back disappear around the corner, and the next she was outside, gravel under her shoes, the reception noise fading behind her into something distant and unimportant.

Her wolf hadn’t settled. If anything it had gotten worse the second he was out of sight, some instinct clawing at her to go after him that she had no intention of obeying. She pressed both hands flat against the cold stone of the courtyard wall and made herself breathe.

“Wren.”

She didn’t jump. She’d heard him coming — Ethan never bothered trying to be quiet around her, one of the thousand small things she loved about him, that he’d never once tried to sneak up on her like it was a game.

“I’m fine,” she said, before he could ask.

“You’ve said that twice now and you still look like you’re about to be sick.” He came to stand beside her, not touching, giving her the space he always gave her when something was wrong and he hadn’t figured out what yet. “What happened in there?”

She looked at him. Really looked — the furrow between his eyebrows, the patience in the set of his shoulders, the way he was already braced to hear something he wasn’t going to like and had decided in advance to handle it well. He deserved better than whatever half-answer she was about to give him.

“Something happened,” she said, which was at least honest. “With the Draven heir.”

Ethan’s expression didn’t change much. That was the thing about him; he didn’t perform his reactions. But something went very still behind his eyes, the way water goes still right before it’s about to do something.

“What kind of something.”

“I don’t know,” she said, and hated how true it was. “It felt like—” She stopped. There wasn’t a version of this sentence that didn’t sound insane. It felt like recognizing someone I’ve never met. It felt like my wolf deciding without asking me.

Ethan didn’t fill the silence. He waited, the way he always did, like her finishing the thought mattered more to him than getting an answer quickly.

“I need a minute,” she said instead.

He nodded slowly. “Okay.” He didn’t move to leave. “I’m not going anywhere, though. Just so you know.”

She managed something close to a smile. It wasn’t much, but it was real, and he took it for what it was worth and settled against the wall beside her, close enough that his shoulder brushed hers, not saying anything else, just being there while she tried to get her pulse to remember its normal rhythm.

She didn’t tell him the rest. Not yet. She told herself it was because she didn’t have the words for it. She suspected, somewhere underneath that, it was because saying it out loud to Ethan would make it something that had actually happened to both of them, and she wasn’t ready for that yet either.

Sable had seen it from across the room, and she hadn’t needed anyone to explain what she was looking at.

She’d grown up hearing about bonds the way children hear about weather — an abstract, distant thing that happened to other people, described secondhand by relatives who made it sound gentle, inevitable, soft as a held breath. She’d pictured, someday, something quiet. A recognition. Not this.

Kase had gone rigid beside her mid-sentence, color draining out of his face like something had reached into his chest and pulled. She’d followed his line of sight without meaning to and found the woman on the other side of the aisle, dark-haired, clearly late, clearly unprepared for whatever had just happened to her either, gripping the back of a chair like the floor had tilted.

Sable had touched his sleeve. He hadn’t felt it. She was fairly sure, in that moment, he wouldn’t have felt a fire alarm.

She’d stood beside him for eight years. She knew the particular quiet he went into when something mattered and he didn’t want it to show. This wasn’t that. This was something entirely outside his control, and the not-controlling-it seemed to frighten him more than whatever had actually happened.

She hadn’t said anything to him afterward. There hadn’t been a version of that conversation that wouldn’t have sounded like an accusation, and she refused to make this about her before she understood what this even was.

Instead, once the reception noise had swallowed most of the awkwardness the ceremony left behind, she found her way to one of her father’s aides — a woman who’d served three Alphas and forgotten more pack history than most people would ever learn — and asked, as lightly as she could manage, who the young woman across the aisle had been.

“Wren Calloway. Beta line, on the Calloway side.” The aide said it without looking up from the papers she was organizing. “Why do you ask?”

“No reason.” Sable watched Kase across the room, standing very still in a knot of men from his own pack, nodding at something being said to him without appearing to hear a word of it. “How long has he known her?”

The aide finally looked up. “Who?”

“Kase.” Sable kept her voice even. “How long has he known Wren Calloway?”

The aide’s expression did something complicated — confusion first, and then, a beat later, something closer to concern. “As far as I know, he’s never met her before today.”

Sable didn’t answer that. She didn’t need to. She’d already seen enough to know the aide’s answer and the truth in front of her didn’t line up, and that gap — the space between what should have happened and what clearly had — was going to be the thing she couldn’t stop turning over for the rest of the night.

Wren didn’t go back inside.

She sent Ethan in ahead of her with an excuse about needing to speak to her father, which wasn’t entirely a lie, and then she didn’t go find her father either. She stood in the courtyard until the cold stopped being uncomfortable and started being useful, something to focus on besides the ache low in her chest that hadn’t faded since the hall.

She told herself it would pass. Bonds — if that was even what this was, if she was even willing to call it that — were supposed to be gentle according to everything she’d ever been told. A quiet knowing. Not this insistent, physical thing sitting under her ribs like a held breath she couldn’t release.

Her phone buzzed. A message from her father: Where are you. We need to talk before the closing session.

She didn’t answer immediately. She looked up at the sky instead, half-lit by the lanterns strung along the courtyard wall, and tried to imagine what her father was going to say to her, and whether any version of it was going to make the feeling in her chest go away.

She doubted it.

The courtyard door opened behind her. She turned, half-expecting Ethan, already composing an apology for disappearing so long.

It wasn’t Ethan.

Kase stood in the doorway, one hand still on the frame, looking at her the way he had in the corridor — like he hadn’t planned to find her, and now that he had, he didn’t entirely know what to do about it either.

“You’re supposed to be inside,” she said, because it was easier than asking why he’d come looking.

“So are you.”

Neither of them moved.

“I talked to my father,” he said finally. “He wants to meet with your Alpha before the session ends.”

Something cold settled in her stomach, replacing the ache with a different, more practical kind of dread. “About what happened in the hall.”

“About what happened in the hall.” He said it carefully, like he was still deciding how much of it he believed himself. “He wants to handle it before it becomes something people talk about.”

“It already is something people talk about.” She’d heard the murmur in the crowd. She’d felt every eye in that room shift toward her and then toward him and then back again, cataloguing something neither of them had chosen. “You can’t undo three hundred witnesses.”

“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.”

Her phone buzzed again. She didn’t look at it.

“Wren.” Her father’s voice, from the doorway behind Kase, sharper now, urgent in a way she rarely heard from him. “Inside. Now.”

Kase stepped aside to let her father through, and whatever had been building in the space between them broke apart, replaced by the sudden, crowded reality of two Alphas converging on the same small courtyard with the same unspoken question written across both their faces.

Her father’s eyes moved from her, to Kase, to the six inches of space between them that felt, suddenly, like the most incriminating thing in the world.

“We need to talk,” he said. “All of us.”