Resisting My Brother’s Alpha

Chapter Three — Moonrise

I didn't sleep.

They'd put me in the old guest cabin on the north edge of the clearing — one room, a woodstove, a cot with a mattress that smelled like cedar and mice. I lay on it fully dressed with my boots on until the window went gray, and then I got up and washed my face in cold water and looked at myself in a mirror the size of a paperback.

I looked fine. That was the insult of it. Nine hours of lying rigid in the dark with my own blood roaring in my ears and I came out the other side looking well rested. Skin bright. Eyes clear. My body had spent the whole night doing something and it had apparently agreed with me.

Traitor, I told it.

Marta found me at noon with a dress over her arm.

"No," I said.

"It's your brother's mating."

"I brought clothes."

"You brought a sweater with a hole in the elbow and I've seen the rest of that bag, girl, don't lie to me in my own kitchen." She hung it on the door. Green, soft, older than me — it had that slight heaviness good old fabric gets. "It was your mother's."

I stopped breathing for a second.

"That's not fair," I said.

"No," Marta agreed. "Be ready by six."

They held it in the long meadow, the way they always did, in the hour when the sun was gone behind the ridge but the moon hadn't cleared the trees yet and the whole valley went blue.

Two hundred people. More than I expected — the Ironvale delegation had swelled overnight, and there were wolves from Craghollow and the river packs, and every last one of them had turned out to watch a middle-ranked Blackthorn enforcer mate a girl whose father had said no for four years.

That was Rhys's doing. I understood it the moment I saw the size of the crowd. He hadn't just permitted this. He'd made it enormous on purpose, turned my brother's stubborn love story into a public demonstration of what Blackthorn did for its own, and now Ironvale had to stand there and watch it and applaud.

Every single thing that man did had at least two uses.

Caleb was a wreck. Beautifully, completely a wreck — pacing behind the tree line in a shirt he'd already sweated through, hands shaking so badly he couldn't do his own collar.

"I can't get it," he said. "Wren, I can't get the — my hands won't—"

"Come here."

I did his collar. He stood there and let me, chin up, eyes closed, and for a second he was eight years old and I was doing his shoes before school because Mom had gone out and not come back yet.

"Do I look stupid?" he said.

"Profoundly."

"Wren."

"You look like Dad." His eyes came open. "You do. Around the mouth. You always did, you just didn't have the jaw for it yet."

Caleb looked at me for a long moment.

"I'm glad you came," he said. "I know what it cost you. I do know."

You don't, I thought. You will never know, if I'm careful, and I am going to be so careful.

"Go get mated," I said. "You're embarrassing me."

Here's how it goes.

The two of them stand in the center of the meadow facing each other. The Alpha stands at the north point with the pack fanned out behind him. Family stands to the sides — her people west, his people east, which meant me. Just me. One person on the east side of the meadow where a family should have been, and I felt the crowd notice it.

Then the moon clears the ridge, and the Alpha speaks, and the pack answers, and after that it's only words until the very end when it stops being words at all.

I stood twenty feet from Rhys Blackthorn for two hours.

Twenty feet. I measured it, at some point, because I had to put my mind on something — stride length across grass, eight paces to the point where he stood. Eight paces of blue grass and two hundred witnesses.

He never looked at me.

Not once. Not a flicker. He ran that ceremony the way he probably did everything, with total economy — voice pitched to carry to the treeline without effort, hands still, eyes moving over the crowd on that endless patrol. He named the bond. He named the obligations, his to them and theirs to him. When he spoke Caleb's name the whole meadow went quiet in a particular way and I understood, suddenly and unpleasantly, that these people loved him.

That was not what I'd been told about Rhys Blackthorn. In the city, in three years of not thinking about this place, the version of him I'd kept was the one everyone whispered — the cold one, the one who'd taken the pack at twenty-four with his father's blood not dry, the one who'd put down two challenges in the first month and never smiled since.

Nobody had mentioned that they loved him.

And I stood there at eight paces, breathing him in with every breath I took because the wind was coming from the north and there was nothing I could do about that, and my wolf lay down inside me and turned her face toward him like a plant toward a window.

Stop it.

He's right there.

Stop it.

His hand was wrapped. White gauze, clean, across the palm. Nobody else in that meadow would have known why.

Around the ninety-minute mark I started to feel strange.

It came on slow. A warmth at the sternum, low and steady, like I'd swallowed something too hot and it hadn't finished going down. Then a kind of pressure behind the eyes. My hearing did something — sharpened and then narrowed, two hundred voices falling away until all I had was the wind, and the grass, and one man's heartbeat.

I could hear his heartbeat. From eight paces, through a crowd, over the wind.

It was fast.

He was standing there in front of his entire pack with his voice as flat as a table and his hands perfectly still, and his heart was going like he'd just come up a hill at a run.

Something in my chest cracked wide open.

Oh, I thought. Oh, no.

Because up until that exact moment I had been managing it as a problem of chemistry. A thing my body was doing. An inconvenience of biology, survivable, like a fever you sweat out in a bad week. And chemistry I could hate. Chemistry I could fight.

But that fast heartbeat was not chemistry. That was a man standing very still and paying for it.

He knew I was eight paces away. He'd known the whole time. He hadn't looked at me because he couldn't, and he was doing it anyway, for two hours, in front of two hundred people.

I got a breath in. Then another one.

And at exactly that moment, across the meadow, the Ironvale Alpha's daughter turned her head and looked at me.

Not at the ceremony. Not at the couple. At me, standing alone on the east side, and she held it a beat too long.

Her name was Sable Ironvale. I'd learned that much over breakfast from three different people who all wanted me to know she was beautiful, which she was, in a cold clean way — tall, that red-gold hair braided back off a face that gave away exactly nothing. Twenty-six. The Ironvale Alpha's only living child. Which meant that in twenty-seven days she wasn't just marrying into Blackthorn, she was merging two territories into the largest pack west of the divide.

She looked at me for three full seconds.

Then she looked at Rhys's bandaged hand.

Then she looked back at me, and something moved at the corner of her mouth that was not a smile, and she turned to the ceremony like nothing had happened at all.

My stomach went to ice.

She knows.

She can't know.

She knows something.

The moon cleared the trees.

The crowd went silent all at once — two hundred people, one breath — and my brother took his mate's hands, and Rhys said the last words in the old tongue, and then it stopped being words.

I'd seen it as a kid and it had bored me. It did not bore me now. They dropped down into the grass together and the shift took them, and two wolves came up out of the place where two people had been, and the sound that went through that meadow raised every hair on my body. Two hundred throats. The whole valley ringing with it.

And underneath all of them, one voice, low and enormous, and my knees nearly went.

I did not howl. I stood there with my jaw locked and my nails in my palms and my mother's dress hanging on me and I did not make a sound, because if I opened my mouth in that meadow with him eight paces away I did not trust one single thing that would come out of it.

When it was over, when the crowd broke and surged and the fires went up and somebody started a drum, I turned to go.

And Rhys Blackthorn was gone from the north point. Already walking. Already halfway to the tree line with two enforcers falling in behind him, leaving his own pack's celebration before the first cup was poured.

I won't be at the feast after, he'd said.

He'd meant it.

I stood in the noise and watched him disappear into the dark, and the strangest, stupidest, most dangerous thought I have ever had came up in me clean and whole:

He's alone tonight too.

I turned around, hard, and went to find my brother.

I found him an hour later, human again, flushed and drunk on nothing and so happy he looked slightly unwell.

"There she is." He caught my arm. "You're not leaving."

"Caleb—"

"One more night." He wasn't asking. "You said one night and you got two ceremonies out of it, so that's a technicality, so one more. Just — it's Sunday tomorrow. Nobody drives Sunday."

"That is not a real thing."

"It's a Blackthorn thing. I invented it." He grinned at me and it broke my heart in about four places. "Please."

Three times in three days. He was going to run out of that word eventually.

"One more night," I said.

And somewhere in the dark up the hill, I swear on everything, I felt something go very still and start listening.