Elaris‘s Cruelest Gift

What Elaris promised

# Chapter 2 — What Elaris Promised

I was seven days old when my father held me up to the pack and told them I'd already been shown her face.

That's the story, anyway — the one every Blackthorn Alpha gets told about himself before he's old enough to ask questions about it. Elaris comes to every true heir in the first week of life, in a dream too vivid to be a dream, and shows him the woman he'll spend his adult years hunting for: the most beautiful bride any wolf has ever claimed, marked so unmistakably that when he finally finds her, there won't be a shred of doubt in him.

I don't remember my dream. Nobody remembers theirs. But I've spent thirty-one years being told, by everyone from my mother to the pack elders to Maren herself, that when it happened, I'd know — the scent, the pull, the unmistakable certainty of a promise finally collecting on itself.

I'd started to wonder if it was a story adults told Alpha heirs to keep them patient. Ten years of searching does that to a man. Ten years of walking into cities and packs and gatherings, testing every unfamiliar scent against a memory I don't actually have, will make a man start doubting a god.

Then I walked into a run-down bar in a city that had never heard of the Blackthorn name, and every doubt I'd built over a decade evaporated in under four seconds.

She wasn't posed for me. That was the first thing that struck me — every fantasy I'd half-built about this moment involved some kind of recognition, mutual and instant, the two of us understanding at the same time what we were to each other. Instead I got a woman with a rag in her hand and zero interest in being impressed by me, sizing me up like I was a liability she hadn't decided how to handle yet.

I have never, in my entire life, wanted anything the way I wanted her to keep talking.

"Ronan," Garrick said, the next morning, when I called to report back what I'd already told Maren an hour earlier. "You're certain."

"I've never been more certain of anything."

"You said that about the woman in Portland."

"I was wrong about the woman in Portland."

"You said the same thing about—"

"Garrick." I rubbed a hand over my face, sitting in a hotel room three states from the pack lands, replaying a whiskey order and a joke about poetry like they were sacred text. "I know what wrong feels like. I've had ten years of wrong. This isn't that."

There was a pause on the line, the particular weighted silence of a man choosing his words with more care than usual. Garrick has been my father's advisor and then mine since before I could walk, and in thirty-one years I have never once heard him sound uncertain about anything. He sounded uncertain now.

"Send me her full name," he said. "I want Maren to run a lineage check before you do anything else."

"That's standard procedure for every candidate. You know that."

"I know." Another pause. "Humor me anyway."

I didn't think much of it at the time. Lineage checks were routine — every promising candidate got one, a formality to confirm there wasn't some complication in her bloodline that would make the bonding legally or politically messy within the pack structure. I'd had a dozen of these run over the years on women who turned out to be false alarms, ordinary humans with no more connection to the prophecy than the color of their hair matching some vague half-memory I'd talked myself into.

I texted Garrick her name that night — *Ivy Calloway* — and went back to the bar three days later because I could not, physically could not, make myself wait any longer than that to see her again.

She was different the second time. Sharper, if anything, like she'd used the three days to build better defenses instead of lowering them. I liked that more than I probably should have. Every version of this moment I'd imagined over a decade involved a woman softening toward me, grateful, already half in love with a destiny she hadn't earned yet. Ivy Calloway looked at me like I was a problem she hadn't solved, and something in my chest, some old arrogant certainty about what this was supposed to feel like, quietly reorganized itself around the much better reality of a woman who made me work for every inch of her attention.

"You're back," she said, when I sat down at the same stool, and there was something almost like reluctant pleasure under the flat delivery. "Here to find whatever you were looking for again?"

"Already found it," I said. "Now I'm just seeing if it's as good as I remember."

"That's a terrible answer."

"Give me a better one and I'll use it next time."

She didn't smile, exactly, but something around her eyes did, and I would have sat in that bar until it closed just to keep watching it happen.

I didn't tell her what I was. I didn't tell her about Elaris, about the promise, about ten years of hunting that had ended the moment she opened her mouth and refused to be impressed by me. There would be time for that — there had to be time for that, an entire courtship's worth of time, the kind every prophecy candidate before her had gotten before the truth landed on them all at once.

My phone buzzed against my hip an hour later, mid-conversation, and I ignored it. It buzzed again ten minutes after that. By the time I finally checked it, walking back to my car well past midnight with the taste of her laugh still doing something unreasonable to my chest, there were four missed calls from Garrick and a single text message that took the whole night and rearranged it into something colder.

**Garrick:** Call me. Now. Maren found something in the Calloway lineage. It's not what you think it is.

I stood in an empty parking lot at one in the morning, staring at that message, and felt, for the first time in ten years of certainty, the specific cold drop of a man realizing the ground under him has never once been as solid as he thought it was.