boundless

Chapter Four: The Mark

The mark had been there so long that Kian sometimes forgot it existed until someone else noticed it — until, lately, he found himself thinking about it constantly, aware of it under his shirt the way he was aware of his own pulse, a small pale reminder of a future he was starting to dread more with every day that passed.

It sat just below his left shoulder, a pale crescent scar with a single line through it, made the year he turned nine, in a ceremony he remembered mostly in fragments. The smell of sage burning too close to his face. His mother's hand gripping his shoulder, steadying him, though he hadn't understood yet that she was already sick by then, that she had maybe eighteen months left to live and had spent one of them standing beside him while an elder cut a mark into his skin to bind him to a boy he'd met exactly twice.

He was thinking about it because Aro had asked, without meaning to, in the middle of an otherwise unremarkable afternoon, and because the asking had sent something hot and unsteady through Kian's chest that had nothing to do with the mark itself and everything to do with the man who'd noticed it.

They were in the training yard, where Aro had started insisting Kian actually train instead of simply attending the sessions his father required of him, on the theory that a target who could fight back was a target who died less often. Kian had taken off his shirt to spar, more out of habit than immodesty, and Aro's eyes had caught on the mark for exactly one second too long before he looked away and pretended he hadn't — though Kian had felt that look land on his skin like a physical thing, warm and lingering, and had to work to keep his own breathing steady in response.

"You can ask," Kian said, lowering his guard.

"It's not my business."

"You're my guard. Everything about my body being a target is your business." Kian rolled his shoulder, feeling the old scar pull faintly the way it always did in cold weather, watching Aro's eyes track the motion with an attention that felt like anything but professional. "It's the mark. From the binding ceremony. Everyone gets one when the match is formalized, even if the bond hasn't woken yet."

"I know what it is." Aro's voice had gone carefully neutral, the way it did whenever the conversation touched anything close to bonds, fate, the machinery of a system that had decided, at birth, what he was worth. "I didn't realize it was done that young."

"Nine." Kian said it flatly, because he'd learned a long time ago that flat was the only way to say it without sounding like he was asking for pity he didn't want. "Rhett was eleven. It was supposed to be symbolic. A promise the bond would confirm later, once we were both grown."

"Has it."

The question landed harder than Aro probably meant it to, a direct hit to something Kian had spent years protecting from exactly this kind of scrutiny. He picked his guard back up, more to have something to do with his hands than because he intended to keep sparring.

"No," he said, and the single word carried more weight than he meant to give it, seventeen years of quiet grief compressed into one syllable.

Aro didn't press. That was, Kian was beginning to understand, one of the things about him: he asked exactly as much as he needed to and then let the silence do the rest of the work, patient in a way that made people fill the space themselves rather than being pushed into it — a patience Kian found himself wanting to fill, again and again, with things he'd never told anyone.

"I used to think it would," Kian said anyway, because apparently he wanted to fill the space, wanted, badly, for this particular person to understand exactly how much it had cost him. "Everyone says the bond takes time to wake up in matches made that young. That the mark is a promise and the feeling comes later, once you've grown into each other. I spent years waiting for it. Every time Rhett visited, I'd think, maybe this time. Maybe I'll feel something." He laughed, short and humorless. "I never did. I used to think that meant something was wrong with me."

"There's nothing wrong with you." Aro said it too fast, too certain, and then seemed to hear himself and go still, like he'd said more than he meant to, color rising faintly at his own unguarded honesty.

"You don't know that."

"I know you saved a servant girl from a collapsing scaffold two years ago and never told anyone, because Sable mentioned it once and you looked like you wanted the floor to open up." Aro's jaw was tight, his voice low and fierce in a way that made Kian's pulse stutter. "I know you argued for the Bondless enforcer in council instead of letting Voss make the decision uncontested, even though it cost you political capital you didn't have to spend. Whatever's wrong with you, it isn't that."

Kian didn't have an answer for that. He wasn't sure he'd ever been told, by anyone, that there was nothing wrong with him and had it sound like the person saying it actually believed it, rather than saying what comfort required — and something in his chest cracked open a little further, dangerously, wonderfully, toward a man he had absolutely no right to want the way he was starting to want him.

"You have one too," he said, before he could think better of it. "A mark, I mean. Not from a binding. I've seen it, when you train without your shirt. On your ribs."

Something closed in Aro's face immediately, a door shutting faster than Kian had seen it shut on anything else. "That's not the same kind of mark."

"What kind is it."

"The kind we're not discussing in a training yard." Aro stepped back, put distance between them that had nothing to do with sparring form, and Kian felt the loss of proximity like a small, physical ache. "Guard positions. We're wasting daylight."

Kian let it go, because he recognized the shape of a wall going up and had learned, over the past days, that walking straight into Aro's walls only made them go up faster. They ran through another hour of drills in near silence, Aro correcting his footwork with brief, clipped instructions that did nothing to disguise the charged current still running between them, neither of them returning to the conversation that had opened and shut so quickly it might not have happened at all.

But that night, lying awake in his room with the mark on his shoulder aching faintly the way it did in cold weather, Kian found himself turning over a thought he'd never let himself finish before: that he had spent seventeen years waiting for a bond to arrive and confirm that Rhett Ashgrove was the person he was meant to love, and in less than a week, without any bond at all, he had thought more about Aro Kestrel than he had thought about Rhett in the better part of a year. The realization frightened him with its size, with how completely it had already taken root.

He didn't know what to do with that thought. He wasn't sure yet that he wanted to.

He found out what kind of mark Aro carried three days later, and not because Aro told him.

It happened during a night patrol Kian wasn't supposed to be on, one he'd insisted on joining after weeks of being managed and handled and kept at arm's length from anything resembling his own protection. Aro had argued against it for twenty minutes before losing, mostly because Sable had sided with Kian out of what she called "morbid curiosity about how this ends," and Dorian had been too tired to fight both of them.

They were checking the northern fence line, the one closest to where the shooter had reportedly fled after the ceremony attack, the autumn night sharp and cold around them, when Aro shed his shirt to shift partway and check a scent trail more closely, and Kian saw it properly for the first time: a mark on his ribs, the same pale crescent-and-line shape as the binding scar on Kian's own shoulder, except this one wasn't a promise. It was old, and it was healed wrong, jagged at the edges in a way that suggested it hadn't been made carefully, the way ceremonial marks were made — and something about seeing it, about seeing this proof of pain Aro had carried silently for years, hit Kian harder than he expected, a fierce, protective ache blooming in his chest.

"That's a binding mark," Kian said, before he could stop himself.

Aro froze for half a second, then finished checking the trail like he hadn't heard the question at all.

"Aro."

"It's old." Aro pulled his shirt back on, movements sharper than they needed to be. "It doesn't matter."

"It's a binding mark. You told me Bondless wolves don't get bound, because there's nothing to bind."

"There isn't." Aro's voice had an edge in it now, something raw underneath the flatness. "That mark isn't mine. It's my father's. I have it because I have his blood, and apparently that's enough to inherit the shape of it even without the bond underneath. A cruel little joke my body plays on me. I carry the mark of a bond I was never given the capacity to feel." He said it like something he'd recited to himself many times, in the dark, until the words stopped hurting quite as much. "It doesn't matter."

"It matters to me." Kian's voice came out fierce, unguarded, more revealing than he'd intended.

"It shouldn't." Aro turned to face him fully then, and there was something almost desperate underneath the anger, like a man defending a wall he badly needed to hold, his eyes bright with a feeling he was clearly fighting with everything he had. "You're marked to someone. In a month you'll be bound to him properly, in front of the whole territory, and whatever this is," he gestured, vaguely, at the space between them, at the last several days, at the thing neither of them had named, "it doesn't get to matter. It can't. I won't survive being something you regret."

The words hit harder than Kian expected, mostly because they weren't wrong, and because the raw vulnerability in Aro's voice undid something in him completely. He had a wedding in a month. He had a mark on his shoulder that promised him to someone else, made when he was nine years old by people who had never once asked what he wanted.

"What if I don't marry him," Kian said.

He hadn't meant to say it. It came out of him the way the truth sometimes did, faster than his better judgment could stop it, and once it was in the air between them, he couldn't call it back.

Aro went very still. "You don't mean that."

"I don't know what I mean." Kian's voice shook, just slightly, and he hated that it did. "I've spent seventeen years being told a mark means something is coming. That if I'm patient, the bond will show up and make sense of all of it. It never has. And in less than two weeks, you've made me feel more like I matter to someone than seventeen years of waiting for Rhett Ashgrove ever did, and I don't know what to do with that except tell you the truth, which is that I don't want to marry him, and I don't know how to fix that, and I am asking you, if you have any theory at all, to help me figure it out."

Aro didn't answer right away. Whatever was moving behind his eyes looked less like refusal now and more like fear, the particular fear of a man being handed something he'd trained himself for years not to want, his whole body tense with the effort of holding back something enormous.

"There's no fixing an alliance," he said finally, quiet. "Not without breaking something. Probably several somethings, at once, including your father's trust and half the peace this pack has built for fifteen years."

"That's not you telling me no."

"No," Aro admitted, and something in his voice cracked open, just slightly, just enough, his eyes finding Kian's in the dark with an intensity that stole the breath from Kian's lungs. "It isn't."

For one suspended moment, the space between them felt impossibly small, charged with everything neither of them had said yet, and Kian thought, with a certainty that terrified him, that he might close that final distance right there against the cold fence posts and the dark treeline.

Behind them, somewhere in the dark past the fence line, a branch snapped, sharp and deliberate in a way the wind didn't cause, and both of them turned toward it at once, the moment between them collapsing instantly back into the discipline of two people trained to notice threats before they noticed each other.

"Stay behind me," Aro said, already moving, already a soldier again, and Kian followed him into the treeline with his heart still pounding from an entirely different kind of danger than the one waiting in the dark ahead of them — though he suspected, as he ran, that both kinds of danger were about to become impossible to separate from each other.