I was elbow deep in a sink full of greasy pans when Tessa came running in and grabbed me by the wrist.
"Leave that. Maren, leave it, come on."
"Mrs. Odell said these have to be done before—"
"It's midnight. You're eighteen. Come on."
She didn't give me time to dry my hands. I left wet footprints all the way down the back hall, and my feet were bare because I'd kicked my shoes off under the table hours ago. The stone was freezing. I remember being annoyed about that. Out of everything that happened that night, I was annoyed about cold feet.
Then we pushed through the side door into the courtyard and the wind turned.
Smoke. Pine. Rain on hot pavement. And under that, something I had no name for, something that hit the back of my knees so hard I grabbed the doorframe.
Mate.
My heart went off like it was trying to leave without me. I looked up and he was already there, standing on the top step of the pack house with his sleeves pushed to the elbow, and I'll be honest, I smiled. Big, stupid, wide open. Ten years of scrubbing floors in that house and I thought, oh. So this is what it was for.
"Maren Hollis," Dante said. "Step forward."
He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at a point somewhere past my ear.
Three hundred people had come out for this. I knew most of them by their dishes, who took sugar, who sent the soup back. Not one of them was smiling at me.
I walked. Gravel dug into my heels. Somebody coughed. Somebody else said "wolfless" under their breath, not even quietly, and a woman near the front laughed into her scarf.
Victor Voss sat behind his son in the big carved chair, both hands stacked on top of his cane. Next to Dante, with her shoulder touching his arm, stood Celeste Marlowe in a white dress.
White. At my ceremony.
She saw me notice and gave me this tiny little smile. Like we shared a secret. Like she was sorry for me.
"Dante." My voice came out too thin. "You can feel it. The bond. I know you can, I felt you from the door, I—"
"I don't feel anything."
"Don't say that."
"Maren."
"No, look at me. Say it to my face."
He looked.
Maybe two seconds. His eyes were gray, they'd always been gray, and for those two seconds there was something so wrecked in them that I almost took a step toward him. His fists were shut tight enough that the skin over his knuckles had gone yellow. His jaw kept jumping.
He's scared, I thought. Why is he scared? What is going on?
Then he blinked and it was gone and he turned to the crowd.
"The Blackthorn pack needs a Luna. A real one. Strong, with a wolf." He paused. "Maren is eighteen. She has never shifted. Not once, not even a flicker. She's a kitchen girl. The Goddess made a mistake."
"She doesn't make mistakes," I said.
"She did tonight."
Celeste actually giggled. Covered her mouth and everything.
I dug my thumbnail into the inside of my wrist. It's a thing I do. Hard, until it hurts more than whatever's behind my eyes. I held them open so wide they stung, and the torches blurred a little and I made myself stop that too.
"Then say it," I told him. "Go on. Don't stand there working up to it. Just do it."
His throat moved when he swallowed. Nothing else.
"Go on, son," Victor said.
And that was when I knew he would. Not because of Victor's voice. Because of the way Dante's shoulders went down, just a little, like a dog that's been told.
"I, Dante Voss, Alpha of the Blackthorn pack, reject you, Maren Hollis, as my mate and my Luna."
It didn't hurt right away.
I want people to know that, because everyone assumes it does. There was one dumb second where I just stood there thinking, huh. He actually did it. Quiet. Almost polite.
Then something inside my chest tore loose.
I didn't know there was anything in there to tear. It had just been there, my whole life, humming away under my ribs, and now there was a hole where it used to be and cold air was rushing in. My knees went. I hit the flagstones on both of them and felt the skin split. I tried to pull in a breath and it came out as a noise I didn't recognize.
"The law gives you a choice, girl," Victor said, and he sounded bored. "Accept the rejection, or deny it and challenge my son. Alpha's right."
Everybody knew what that meant. I'd have been dead in under a minute. They were all waiting to see if the kitchen girl was stupid enough.
I lifted my head. I was crying by then, openly, snot and everything, and I'd stopped caring.
"I won't beg," I said.
"Maren—" Dante started.
"I accept."
The second half of it ripped.
I screamed. That's the only word for it. It tore out of my throat and echoed off the walls and I folded forward until my forehead was on the stone, nails scraping, tasting blood where I'd bitten through my tongue. I was hot and freezing at once. I could hear my own pulse in my ears like somebody pounding a door.
And over me, quiet, one sound from Dante. Short and cracked. Like he'd been hit.
Heels clicked down the steps and stopped near my face. Vanilla perfume, thick and sweet and a little sour underneath. Celeste crouched down so her dress pooled on the ground, and she said, low enough that nobody else could hear:
"Happy birthday. I did want to get you something. But I think you've got what you came for."
"Tessa," I said. I don't know why. It was just the name that came out.
"Maren! Maren, let go of me, you assholes, she's hurt, let go—" Tessa was fighting two guards at the edge of the crowd, braid half undone, mascara down to her chin.
"Take the girl back to the kitchens," Victor said. "She's no longer under this pack's protection. Nobody helps her. If she wants to stay and work, she can stay and work. If she wants to leave, there's the road."
"Father." Dante's voice was ragged. "That isn't what we—"
"Is there a problem?"
A long, bad pause. I held my breath through it. God help me, I still hoped.
"No," Dante said.
Two guards got me under the arms and yanked me up. My legs didn't feel like they belonged to me. The torches smeared into long orange strings and the laughing went all wobbly, like I was hearing it from the bottom of the lake behind the pack house.
I thought, I'm going to remember every single one of you.
Something burned against my collarbone.
Just a small spot at first, right above my breastbone. My mother's locket. Cheap tin, green at the edges, the only thing I owned that nobody had given me out of pity. It had never been anything but cold.
It was glowing.
A soft, pale light, seeping up through my wet shirt. The guard on my left yelped and let go like I'd put a hot pan in his hands.
"What the hell," he said.
And then a voice spoke inside my head.
Not mine. I know my own thoughts, I've had enough time alone with them. This was older, and calm, and extremely angry underneath the calm.
Get up, little one. They've just cut the last rope.
I stopped breathing.
Under my skin, down low in my ribs where the bond had been, something shifted. Slow and heavy. A big animal turning over after a very long sleep.
"What's she doing?" a woman whispered in the crowd. "What is that? Why is she—"
Dante's head snapped toward me. I watched the color go out of his face, all of it, like somebody had pulled a plug. His nostrils flared. The gray in his eyes drowned in black. He came down one step, then another, and people shuffled out of his way without being told to.
"That's not possible," he said. Barely a sound.
Behind him, Victor Voss, who in ten years had never looked surprised by anything, put both hands on the arms of his chair and stood up.
