Rejected At The Altar, Claimed By The Alpha King

Aysel

Today was the ninth time I was supposed to marry Damon.

The hall was lit with candles again. The guests were dressed in their finest, the Elder stood at the altar, and I wore the ninth version of the same white gown.

Each of the first eight weddings had been called off for a different reason, and yet every one of those reasons was the same.

The first time, Damon smiled at me from the dais, and my heart fluttered like a girl's in a love song. Then my cousin Celestine, the widow of Damon's late brother, Kael, collapsed in the middle of the aisle. Damon carried her out of the hall in front of two hundred guests, and I stood there in white, alone.

The second time, Celestine vanished the night before. The pack searched until dawn and found her at Kael's grave, refusing to leave, until Damon sat down in the mud beside her.

The third time, Celestine stood up in the middle of the vows and called the groom a liar. The fourth time, she came down with a fever no physician could explain.

After that, she always found a new excuse. She saw Kael's ghost hanging from the chandelier. She locked herself in the Blackwood crypt. She sat down in the middle of the aisle, barefoot, and refused to move.

And every time, everyone understood. Sacrificing me was the best choice.

Because three years ago, Kael had died shielding Damon from a fatal blow, and on his deathbed he made Damon promise to look after her. Damon had Kael's dark hair, Kael's jawline, Kael's voice. When Celestine looked at him, she saw the husband she had buried.

Of course it broke her heart to watch that face marry someone else. Of course she wasn't well. Of course Damon couldn't bring himself to leave her. Of course, sacrificing me-someone who contributes nothing-was the best decision to make.

Whenever the wedding fell apart, Damon held both my hands and said, "Wait a little longer. I'll give you a perfect wedding. I promise."

My mother smoothed my hair and said, "Be understanding. He looks so much like Kael, and she's lost everything."

I had no right to say no. Because my wolf had never answered me-not once.

In a pack, a woman whose wolf never wakes is worth exactly one thing: the alliance she can be married into. I was lucky that the man was strong and gentle-Damon.

Only Skylar disagreed.

"That's not gentle," she'd said. "That's cowardice."

And all I could ever say was, "I don't have a choice, Skylar."

Now she stood beside me in her bridesmaid's dress, her bouquet clenched in one fist, and said in a low, flat voice, "This is the last time. If she pulls one more stunt today, I'll turn this entire hall upside down."

It was a threat. It was a threat to ruin my own wedding. And yet, somehow, a warmth welled up in my chest anyway. I watched her grit her teeth, completely serious, and I couldn't stop a smile from tugging at my lips.

The music began.

I walked down the aisle unescorted, and Skylar walked at my side like a wall that didn't argue. The guests' eyes slid over the gown, then my face: a little curiosity, a lot of long-practiced assessment.

In the front row, my mother's seat was empty. I didn't have to guess where she was. My father sat ramrod straight, his fingers rubbing the head of his cane, his gaze passing over me to land somewhere across the hall. My older brother, Theron, kept glancing back at the doors, distracted.

In all the hours before the ceremony, not one of them had offered to walk me down the aisle.

It's fine, I told myself.

At the far end, Damon waited in the Blackwood Alpha's ceremonial coat. It hung a little loosely on his shoulders. It had been tailored for his brother, and he'd never let anyone take it in.

He was looking right at me, with that gentle, apologetic, hopeful gaze that had made me forgive him time and time again.

I stopped in front of him and thought: One more time. I'll believe him one more time.

"Before the ancestors," the Elder said, raising his arms, his voice echoing off the stone walls, "if either soul would turn away from this union, let them speak now, or be bound until their last breath."

Eight times, I had let that silence stand.

I drew it across my palm in one clean line, and the blood welled up, warm and quick. Damon opened his own hand.

We raised our bleeding palms toward each other. Three inches. Two. One. One last moment before our hands clasped.

Bang!

The doors slammed open.

"Kael!"

Every candle flame bent sideways in the draft.

Celestine stumbled in, her white dress torn at the hem, her dark hair wild, her feet bare. My mother was right behind her, her bun collapsed, one shoe lost, half-carrying her niece down the aisle.

I wasn't surprised. I'd only closed my eyes for a second.

Here she is. No doubt about it.

Damon pulled his hand back the very moment she appeared.

My hand remained raised in the air, and no one looked at it. The blood trickled between my fingers and fell onto the white marble, one drop after another, soft and steady, and no one noticed.

"Kael, you're alive! I knew it, I knew they lied to me!" Celestine threw herself at Damon and clutched his lapel. "I'm so scared without you. Please don't leave me again, please..."

Her eyes were full of tears. She was looking at Damon. She didn't look at me, not even once.

"It's all right. I'm here," Damon murmured to her, gathering her into his arms.

Over Damon's shoulder, her gaze met mine.

For a single heartbeat, the terror vanished from her face, and her mouth curved into a smooth, bright, satisfied smile.

Last night, in the rose garden at dusk. The same curve of her lips.

"Tomorrow," she'd said, plucking the petals from a bloom, "I'll call him Kael, and he'll come running. He always does."

The same smile. The same eyes. The only difference was the audience.

Then her lashes fluttered, and the tears returned.

My mother had already taken her from Damon, one hand cradling the back of Celestine's head, her voice trembling. "My darling, my poor darling, it's all right. Nobody is leaving you."

I recognized that gesture. She had held me exactly like that when I was five and burning with fever. I couldn't remember the last time she'd done it since.

She didn't look at the altar. She didn't look at the gown she'd never helped me try on, or the hand I'd cut open to marry the man she'd chosen for me.

Theron leaped over the bench to help her support Celestine, and he didn't glance at me either. My father remained seated, watching me from under his heavy brows, as though I'd knocked over something valuable. Then his gaze shifted to Damon, and to Celestine in Damon's arms, the way a man checks to make sure every piece is still on the board.

"...poor thing, she's never recovered from Kael's death..." someone whispered behind me.

"It's only natural," said a woman in the third row, not nearly quietly enough. "Damon looks just like his brother. How could she not think of him? Honestly, Lady Aysel should have known better than to press on with the ceremony."

A gray-bearded Alpha leaned toward his Beta. "Perhaps it's time she stepped aside. The girl's wolf has never even awakened. What use is she to Blackwood? Celestine was Kael's mate. By rights, the brother should take his place."

"It would settle everything," the Beta murmured. "The widow gets a man who looks just like her husband."

No one objected.

I stood where I was, my hand still hanging in the air. Blood ran down my wrist and soaked through the white sleeve.

At eleven, Celestine had lost her parents, and she had moved in with mine. Three years ago, she had lost her husband, and now she was taking the man who had been promised to me.

Everything she lost, she replaced with something of mine, and everyone called it kindness.

All of that hurt more than the cut on my palm.

It hurt so much that I felt nothing at all-until a hand clamped down hard over my wound, shaking with anger, and only then did I realize I'd been bleeding the whole time.

"Hold on," Skylar said, her voice low. Her eyes were red. "Don't let go."

"Skylar?"

"I can't do this anymore, Aysel."

She hurled the crushed bouquet to the floor and turned.

"Liar!" Her shout exploded across the hall. "Nine times! Nine! Are you all blind? She isn't sick! She ate three slices of test cake last night and asked if there was more!"

"Skylar!" I lunged to catch her, but it was too late.

Celestine's scream came at the same instant. "She's trying to kill me! Kael, make her stop!"

Damon moved.

His arm swept out and shoved Skylar backward, with far more force than necessary. Her heel caught the hem of her dress, and she fell, the back of her skull striking the sharp corner of a bronze plinth with a dull, sickening crack.

She slid down it and lay still.

No one else moved.

I dropped the vows, the altar, the gown. I ran. My knees hit the marble so hard my teeth rattled, and I pressed my bleeding hand against her head, where something warm and wet was already soaking through her hair. Without thinking, I wiped my other palm down my skirt, and a long red streak ran across the white silk like a wound.

"Skylar. Skylar!"

Her eyes opened, but they didn't focus. "I'm fine," she slurred. "Don't... don't make a scene. Don't embarrass your family."

She was lying on the floor with her head split open, and she was still keeping the promise I'd made her swear.

I started to shake.

It wasn't fear, and it wasn't rage. It felt as though something was hammering on a door deep inside me-a door that had never once opened-and it was about to break through. My fingertips burned. The air smelled faintly of a storm.

Skylar's pupils flickered, and she stared at me as though she were seeing me for the first time.

"Aysel," she rasped. "You smell... different."

I didn't understand, and I didn't have time to, because I looked up.

"Skylar shouldn't have provoked her," my mother said, still holding Celestine. "She knows how fragile Celestine is. She knows Damon looks like Kael."

"Let her calm down," Theron muttered, to no one in particular.

"Take your friend out of here." My father didn't raise his voice. He never needed to. "You've embarrassed this family enough for one day."

I stared at them. Not one of them had asked whether Skylar was breathing. They had watched my friend collapse in her own blood, and their first concern was the performer.

"I'm so scared," Celestine sobbed against my mother's shoulder, then tore herself free and pointed a trembling finger at me. "Kael, why did you bring her here? You promised me-you promised there would only ever be me!"

"Celestine, I'm not Kael." Damon gently caught her wrists. "Kael is gone. I'm Damon. Look at me."

His eyes finally found me over her head, filled with guilt, panic, and pleading. His lips parted. I think he wanted to say he was sorry. That he hadn't meant it.

"If you love me, prove it!" Celestine's voice rose to a thin, shaking shriek that carried to every corner of the hall. "Reject her! Right now, in front of everyone! Tell her you choose me!"

Damon's throat moved.

He looked at her, then at me, kneeling in my own blood and my friend's. The hall was in chaos. Everyone was watching him. His shoulders slumped, and once again he chose the easiest path.

"I," he said, his voice low and strained, "Kael Blackwood..."

Not Damon.

He was going to say it as a dead man.

He would speak the words in his brother's name, so Celestine would calm down, and afterward he could look at me with those pleading eyes and tell me he hadn't rejected anyone. A tenth wedding. An eleventh. A lifetime of "wait a little longer." He could soothe her and keep me and keep his own hands clean-all at once.

I looked down at myself, drenched in blood. I looked at Skylar, lying on the floor, too loyal to my dignity even to cry out. I looked at my family, watching with the cold, bored patience of people sitting through a play they'd seen too many times.

Something inside me went quiet.

It wasn't a breaking. It was a rope pulled taut for too many years, letting go of its last strand.

"Damon."

He stopped and turned.

I rose from the floor, my bloody hands hanging at my sides, and met his eyes, cold as the blade.

"I, Aysel, daughter of Moonvalley, reject you, Damon of Blackwood. You are no longer my mate."

Celestine's sobbing cut off mid-breath.

The whole hall was so silent I could hear my own blood falling to the floor.

The next moment, Damon clutched his head.

He doubled over, a ragged, wrenching groan tearing from his throat, his fingers digging into his hair, his knees slamming into the marble. Something invisible had been torn clean between us.

I stared at him.

By pack law, a rejection only takes effect if both wolves respond. My wolf had never responded to me. I had always assumed that these words were just words-the last small, weightless scrap of dignity I had left.

But it had worked.

And that force that had been pounding on the door deep in my chest went still, as if it had finally been given the answer it had been waiting for. Slowly, it opened its eyes.

Could it be...

Had my wolf finally come?

Aysel

The silence inside me was strange. It wasn't empty. It felt like a room where someone had just stopped speaking.

I stood in the middle of the hall and waited. For a voice. For a flare of heat.

For my wolf to say yes, it's me, I'm here.

My palm throbbed. Skylar's blood was drying stiff on my fingers. Nothing came.

Across the marble, Damon pushed himself up from the floor. He had one hand flat against his breastbone, and his face was the color of old ash.

He looked at me, and for the first time in all the years I had known him, there was no apology in his eyes. There was only raw disbelief.

He had felt it. The place where the bond had been, now cold and hollow, like a tooth pulled out.

No one else in that hall understood. The guests saw a groom stumbling and a bride standing over her bleeding friend, and they were already deciding what to whisper about it. Only the two of us knew it was done.

"No." Damon's voice cracked. "No, I don't accept that. You can't..."

He came at me, hand outstretched to seize my arm.

I looked down at Skylar. She was propped against the plinth with her hand pressed to the back of her skull and her eyes half-lidded. She was staring at me with all the stubborn, unwavering love of someone who had watched me wait eight times and never once asked me to stop.

Her gaze said it plainly: Don't you dare let this be for nothing.

I would not disappoint the one person who loved me without conditions. Not again.

I lifted my hand and flicked my wrist, the way you'd brush a crumb off a table.

Damon left the floor.

He flew backward across the marble, skidded the last few feet, and slammed into the same bronze plinth that had split Skylar's head. It rang like a gong. He slid down it with a groan and did not get up.

This time, I wasn't even surprised. It felt like lifting my own arm.

"That's for Skylar," I said, quietly, into the silence. "She bled for your performance. Consider that the interest."

Nobody moved. Nobody breathed. The Betas along the wall had gone rigid, their eyes darting between me and the Alpha lying crumpled at the foot of the dais.

"Anyone else?" I asked.

No one.

The skirt of my gown was nine layers of tulle and a train that had once needed two women to carry. I gripped it at the waist and tore. The seams gave way like wet paper. I ripped a long strip of silk free, wound it around Skylar's head, and pulled it tight over the wound.

"Ow," Skylar muttered.

"Beauty is pain."

"You're the worst."

I hooked an arm beneath her shoulders and hauled her onto my back. She weighed almost nothing. Or maybe I had simply stopped feeling weight.

I walked out of the Blackwood hall with the torn skirt dragging behind me, and not one person stopped me.

"Aysel!" Damon's voice echoed from the hall behind me, hoarse, desperate. "Aysel, wait!"

Then Celestine's cry cut through it: "Kael! Don't leave me! Please, I need you, I need..."

His voice faltered and went quiet.

I laughed, short and bitter. Damon could chase after me, or he could stay and soothe her hysterics. He couldn't do both, and he would never choose me.

It didn't matter anymore.

I carried Skylar down the corridor, past the main building and into the strip of forest that bordered the Blackwood estate, until the sounds of the hall faded behind the trees.

Then my knees simply stopped working.

I went down hard. Skylar slid off my back and landed beside me with a grunt, and for a long moment we both lay there staring up through the green canopy, our breath loud in the quiet. Whatever had carried me this far had drained out of me all at once, as though someone had pulled a plug.

I turned my head.

Skylar was looking at me, with a wad of ruined wedding silk wrapped crookedly around her skull.

"You look like a very sad marshmallow," I said.

"Excuse you." She touched the bandage. "This is couture. Limited edition. Only nine attempts to make."

"It's the ugliest bandage in the history of Moonvalley."

"And you're wearing three yards of mud." She grinned at me, a little crooked, a little pale. "We are both a disaster, Aysel. You know that, right? We look like we lost a fight with a bridal shop."

I laughed. It cracked in the middle and turned into something else halfway out, and I pressed my wrist against my mouth until it stopped.

Skylar stopped smiling. She studied me. Her fingers came up as if to touch my arm, and I watched a question rise in her face.

What was that back there? How did you do that? Your scent, your eyes... She opened her mouth.

I only looked at her and gave the smallest nod.

Not yet.

She closed her mouth. She understood. People who have been disappointed too many times learn to keep something back, and Skylar had watched me learn it for years.

Instead she dragged herself upright and pulled me into her arms.

"Screw them," she whispered into my hair. "Every last one of those miserable bastards. Now that you've left, it's all going to get better. I swear on my own cracked skull."

I held on to her. Her arms were warm and solid and smelled of blood and bridal bouquet, and for the first time that day, something in my chest relaxed.

Then my nose caught something else.

It crept in beneath the blood and the crushed flowers: wet fur that hadn't been washed in weeks, stale sweat, and something sour and rotting beneath it all.

My sense of smell had been keener ever since the hall. I'd been too busy falling apart to notice.

Now every layer of the forest lay exposed to me, and one scent stood out as wrong among them all. Strays.

Rogue wolves, with no pack scent to mask the stench. Three of them. Downwind.

Close enough that I should have heard them breathe.

A chill ran down my spine.

I shoved Skylar away so hard she tumbled backward against a tree trunk. Her eyes went wide, but I was already on my feet, my body moving on pure instinct.

"Run, Sky!"

Three figures stepped out from between the trees.

Shadowbane colors were stitched across their jackets.

What are they doing here?

The Blackwood estate was surrounded by sentries today, because a dozen packs were gathered under one roof.

No one should have gotten within a mile of that hall. And Shadowbane wolves didn't send strays to do their work, much less dress them in their own colors. None of it made sense.

I threw myself in front of Skylar. "Stay behind me!"

The first one lunged. I swung and caught him across the jaw, but he barely staggered. The second came from the side, and claws raked across my shoulder, shredding what was left of the silk and the skin beneath it.

I screamed and stumbled back into Skylar. She caught me, her hands clamped on my arms.

"Your shoulder!"

"Run! Skylar, please, just go!"

She didn't.

They closed in around us, three against two. Through the trees, I could just make out the chapel path-so close I could have thrown a stone at it.

I filled my lungs to scream for the sentries, for the guests, for anyone, and a hand clamped over my mouth.

I thrashed, my eyes wild, searching the path through the branches.

Damon was carrying Celestine out of the hall in his arms. My mother walked beside him with one hand on Celestine's shoulder, hurrying along the trail of blood Skylar and I had left on the stones.

She stepped right in it. She didn't look down. She was murmuring something to Celestine, her face creased with worry for her.

Two hundred people had stopped a wedding because of Celestine's tears. All I needed was for one of them to turn their head.

None of them did.

No, there was one.

Celestine kept looking back over Damon's shoulder, toward the bushes where we were. Again and again, never at Damon, only toward us.

Why would she do that? Did she know something was going to happen? Did she plan this?

I had no time to think it through.

"Your mate doesn't seem to care much about you," one of the attackers hissed in my ear.

The edges of my vision began to blur. Then I saw one of them turn toward Skylar.

"No!" I surged against the arms that held me, and they tightened. "Don't touch her! She has nothing to do with this!"

"Doesn't she?" The man laughed, and his claws slid out. "She seems very precious to you."

He reached for her.

Something deep in my chest snapped open.

Heat flooded through me, rolling out from my ribs to my fingertips. The pain in my shoulder faded away completely. A deep ache bloomed in my bones, and I heard them crack.

A low, guttural growl rose from my throat, and it wasn't entirely mine.

Mia.

The name rose from somewhere beneath my memory, as if I had always known it but had simply been forbidden to say it.

I didn't think. I shifted my weight and drove my elbow back into the ribs of the man holding me, and I felt bone give way.

His grip broke. I twisted out of his arms, and the world slowed to a crawl. I saw the claws on the man reaching for Skylar, the pulse hammering in his throat, the surprise just beginning to dawn on his face.

Then I was across the dirt before he could finish turning.

The three attackers stumbled back, their confidence evaporating in an instant. I was on the man who had reached for Skylar before he could draw a breath. My claws-and I had claws-slashed across his throat. His scream died there.

The other two fled into the forest.

I set off after them, my blood roaring, but something heavy and warm fell over my head.

It smelled of cedar and of earth just after rain. The scent wrapped around me and pressed down on the fire in my veins, like a hand laid gently over the head of something that had been about to bolt.

My claws slid back. The heat ebbed. I stopped dead in my tracks.

"Cover yourself," a voice said.

I tore the fabric off my face and whirled around. A man was already moving past me, chasing the fleeing attackers.

I caught only a glimpse: broad shoulders, dark hair, the glint of something metallic at his hip. Then the trees swallowed him.

He was gone before I could open my mouth.

I looked down. My wedding gown hung in ribbons from my shoulders. One sleeve was gone entirely. Beneath it, thank every star, was the skin-colored bodysuit Skylar had made me wear after wedding number three.

"Something with structural integrity," she'd said.

I shoved my arms into the jacket and buttoned it all the way up to my throat. It was far too big-the sleeves hung past my fingertips-but it was warm.

I stood there with another man's blood cooling on my claws, and my wolf was still pacing somewhere beneath my ribs, awake and watching.

I had a wolf. I had a wolf. And whatever lived inside me wasn't the gentle, late-blooming creature the pack had spent twenty years waiting for.

Ordinary wolves don't fling Alphas across a hall with a flick of the wrist. Ordinary wolves don't make three armed rogues forget how to stand.

Whatever Mia was, she was not ordinary, and sooner or later someone would come asking what she was.

Preferably after I'd figured out the answer myself.

"Aysel." Skylar's voice was weak but steady. "What the hell just happened? Who was that?"

"I don't know," I said, staring into the darkness where he'd vanished. "He threw me his jacket and ran after them."

"One of the attackers?"

"I don't know." I forced myself to focus. "Go back to the pack. Get help. Get someone to check your head. I'll find out if he's one of them."

"Are you out of your mind?" She looked at me as if I'd grown a second head. "You're bleeding. You can barely stand."

"Whoever he is, he showed up awfully conveniently. And he ran toward them awfully fast. If he's working with them, I need to know."

"Aysel..."

"Go, Skylar."

She sighed in exasperation and glared at me. "If you're not back in an hour, I'm coming to find you."

I snorted, turned, and followed the broken branches and the smell of fresh blood until the trees gave way to a narrow stream.

The rogues lay motionless in the dirt. Neither had been given the chance to scream.

And in the middle of it all stood the stranger, his back to me, calmly wiping the blood from his knuckles.

I stopped at the edge of the woods, my pulse still pounding in my ears. The jacket hung heavy on my shoulders, and his scent clung to it.

I had too many questions.

Who had sent these men? Shadowbane colors, the stench of a stray, and not a single one left alive to explain why. The only ones who could have answered were lying in the dirt at this stranger's feet.

What had Celestine's look meant? Why had she kept watching that spot, as though she were waiting for something to happen?

And most of all: why had a single whiff of this man's scent calmed Mia in an instant?

When that scent of cedar and rain had settled over my head, she had gone still, as if a hand had gently rested on her neck and she had let it.

Wolves don't do that. Not with strangers. Not ever.

Who was he?

Magnus

Nine invitations. I had burned eight of them.

The ninth was tucked into my jacket, and I had accepted it for one reason only. Not for Damon Blackwood's wedding. For Kael.

Kael had fought alongside me in every war I had ever won. Three years ago, he'd died in battle, throwing himself in front of his younger brother Damon to take a fatal blow.

That was the official story.

His wife, Celestine, had fainted when she heard the news, and she had been "unwell" ever since, clinging to Damon like ivy to a dead tree. Everyone pitied her. Everyone said Damon was a good man for putting up with it.

But I never believed it was that simple.

I had told Kael not to marry that woman. I told him she smiled too sweetly and watched too closely. He laughed and said I distrusted everyone-which was true-and he married her anyway.

For five years, I had refused to set foot where he was buried. As long as I stayed away, he wasn't truly gone. Just somewhere I hadn't been yet.

Today I'd left Nathaniel and the escort at the border road and walked the rest of the way alone, past the music drifting from the Blackwood estate, to the lake where Blackwood's land met Moonvalley's. The flat rock at the water's edge was exactly as I remembered it.

Kael and I had claimed it as boys. I poured half my flask over the stone and drank the rest.

"I'm going to find out what really happened to you," I told the water. "Whatever it takes. Whoever I have to bring down."

The sun was low when I stood to leave, and a scent stopped me in my tracks.

Honey and lemon, sweet and sharp, wove through the pine smoke. It cut through my blood like a blade, and my wolf, Mael, awoke so violently I felt it in my ribs.

"THE KING BLOOD!"

Impossible. Nearly a century had passed since anyone had caught that scent.

The last bearer had died in the Great War, and the bloodline had scattered. No one knew the upper limit of a wolf king's power, but every wolf alive knew its floor.

When a king stood in a room, every wolf in it bowed, without exception. Not a courtesy. Blood answering blood.

Every Alpha who had ever lived dreamed of holding that bloodline. Whoever stood beside the king would never lose another power struggle.

I had more reason than most.

My uncle Connor still held half my pack in his fist, and old Bastien played his games of balance and restraint to keep the other half from ever closing mine around the throne.

A king at my side would end both of them without a fight.

Without further hesitation, I followed the scent along the edge of the forest, past the chapel, and the blood in the air grew thicker as I went.

I reached the tree line just in time to see the end of it. A woman in tattered white, covered in blood, standing in front of another woman. Three rogues in Shadowbane colors, backing off half a step from something they couldn't name.

Her claws. One clean stroke. Two men running.

I didn't intervene. I couldn't have explained why. I stood there with my pulse pounding in my ears and the scent filling my lungs.

Then she set off after the fleeing men, and what remained of her clothes was little more than torn rags, and something stirred within me that had nothing to do with strategy.

No one sees that.

It was hot and primal and sudden, and it said, "Mine."

I was no longer a boy. I'd been an Alpha for too many years to mistake what that instinct was-or what it could become. Ambition, I understood.

This was something else, and it was far more dangerous.

I found my jacket in my hand. I came up behind her and draped it over her head.

"Cover yourself."

I didn't wait to see her face. I took the path the rogues had taken.

Shadowbane colors on stray backs. I couldn't forgive that. I caught the first one at the stream and finished him off with a single blow. The second was faster, but not fast enough. By the time I finished wiping my hands, I could smell her behind me: honey and lemon, drawing closer with every step. She had stood at the edge of the trees for a long moment, and I'd let her.

I turned around.

She had buttoned my jacket all the way up to her throat. The sleeves swallowed her hands. Brown curls had come loose around a pale face, and her eyes-green and sharp-were fixed on me with no trace of gratitude.

"Who are you?" she demanded. "What are you doing here? Are you with them?"

I raised an eyebrow. She hadn't asked me to save her.

My gaze slid over the torn fabric at her shoulder. The claw marks there had been deep enough to see from the trees. Now they were thin pink lines, fading as I watched. Wolves heal fast. Not like that.

And her breath had caught, just slightly, when I stepped closer. Her nostrils flared. The tension in her shoulders eased half an inch, the way a wolf's does when it scents something that settles it. She hadn't noticed she was doing it.

Mael, damn him, was pacing.

"If I were with them," I said, "I'd hardly have killed them. And those strays could never afford a suit like that."

She looked down at the jacket, then back at me. Her guard dropped a fraction.

"Magnus Ashford. Alpha of Shadowbane. And yes, those were my pack's colors on their backs. No, they weren't my wolves." I nodded at the jacket. "I was invited to a wedding at the Blackwood estate. I never made it past the lake. The invitation's in the inside pocket."

She reached in and pulled it out, and went very still.

Something flashed across her face too quickly to name. Loss. Humiliation. Something older beneath it all. It was gone almost before it began.

She had stood in front of three killers, half-naked and bleeding, and been afraid of nothing-and a piece of printed paper had been the thing that got through to her.

I wanted to know why. Desperately.

"You should leave," she said, her voice perfectly even, and held the invitation out to me. "This place isn't safe for you."

"It isn't safe for you either."

She smiled, a small, bitter smile. "I know."

She turned and walked away among the trees, and the twilight swallowed her. My jacket went with her.

Nathaniel found me twenty minutes later, with two warriors behind him and his nose wrinkled against the smell of blood.

"Alpha. Are you injured?"

"I'm fine. There was a woman here." I kept my eyes fixed on the darkness. "Brown curls, green eyes, wearing what was left of a white dress. She came from the direction of the Blackwood chapel. I want to know who she is. Everything."

Nathaniel frowned. "Who..."

"That's what I'm asking you. And I want to know who sent three rogues wearing our colors to kill her."

"To kill her?"

"Or to test her." The scent lingered in the air, fainter now, but not gone. "Whoever it was, they didn't expect her to win."

A dozen packs had gathered for that wedding. If her scent had reached me, it would reach them.

There was no way I would let anyone else have her-in any sense of the word.