My Mate Chose My Sister (Savage & Fated #13)

CHAPTER ONE

The Night She Was Supposed to Be Chosen

Lyra

Lyra had worn hope like a borrowed dress all day—careful with it, afraid to crease it, aware at every moment that it didn't quite belong to her.

She'd told herself that was just nerves.

That every wolf felt this way on the night of their Blood Moon Ceremony.

That the particular tightness in her chest when she thought about Danek Voros — the pull, the warmth, the resonance she had no proper word for but had been living with for six weeks like a second heartbeat — was simply what a mate bond felt like before it was declared.

She'd had nothing to compare it to. She was an Omega healer's assistant from the lower wards of Pack Voros's great house.

Mate bonds weren't something she had much occasion to study up close.

She studied the mirror instead. Dark hair pinned at the nape of her neck.

The deep red dress her mother had pressed and hung on the door without a word, which was as close to blessing as her mother ever came.

Her own face looking back at her—sharp-eyed, quiet, carrying the particular stillness of someone who had learned early that being noticed was a complicated thing.

'You look fine,' she told her reflection.

Her reflection looked unconvinced.

The Blood Moon Ceremony was Pack Voros's oldest tradition.

Once per year, under the full moon's red-tinged light, the Alpha could formally declare a mate bond before the assembled pack—sealing a Luna pairing that the pack would recognize as law.

It was theater as much as ritual; everyone knew that.

Most declared bonds were politically arranged weeks in advance.

The ceremony was the performance of a decision already made.

But true bonds were different. True bonds didn't care about politics or timing or what was convenient for the Alpha Council's alliance schedules. True bonds announced themselves in the blood, in the bone, in that low resonant pull that said "there" when the right wolf crossed the room.

Lyra had felt it for six weeks.

She had not told anyone.

The great hall of Pack Voros was dressed for ceremony the way it only ever was for Blood Moon nights—every torch lit, the high stone walls hung with pack banners in deep burgundy and gold, the wolf crest watching from every surface with its carved silver eyes.

The assembled pack filled the floor in ranked order: Alphas and Betas in the inner ring closest to the dais, Omegas at the outer edges, where they'd always stood, useful and peripheral in equal measure.

Lyra stood with the other Omega healers near the eastern wall, close enough to see the dais clearly and far enough that she was invisible in the crowd. This was her usual position in any room. She had perfected it over twenty-four years.

She watched Mira across the hall without meaning to.

Her sister stood in the Beta ring—Mira had maneuvered herself there somehow, as she maneuvered herself everywhere she wanted to be, with a social precision that Lyra had always privately marveled at and publicly said nothing about.

Mira was luminous tonight. She always was, but tonight she had clearly made an effort: golden-brown hair swept up and threaded with small white flowers, a gown the color of winter moonlight that made her look like something out of a ceremonial painting.

She was laughing at something the Beta beside her had said, one hand resting lightly on his arm, and the gesture was so perfectly calibrated—warm without being forward, beautiful without trying—that Lyra felt the familiar old ache of comparison settle between her shoulder blades like a stone she'd been carrying so long she'd stopped noticing the weight.

Mira had always been the one people looked at.

Lyra had always been the one who watched.

She pulled her eyes away. Looked at the dais. Looked at Danek.

Alpha Danek Voros was twenty-eight years old and had been the most powerful Alpha in three pack generations since the day he'd claimed the title at twenty-three.

He was tall and dark-featured, built with the particular economy of someone whose strength had never needed to announce itself, and he stood at the center of the dais with the stillness of a man entirely accustomed to rooms organizing themselves around him.

He wasn't looking at anything specific yet.

His gaze moved across the assembled pack with the slow deliberateness of ceremony.

And then it stopped.

Lyra felt it before she understood it—that pull in her chest, that resonance, spiking sharp and warm and undeniable.

She had felt it every time she'd been in the same room as him for six weeks, always from a distance, always with the careful buffer of crowd and rank between them.

This was different. This was direct. His gaze had found her in the outer ring, in the shadows near the eastern wall, and for one suspended moment Lyra felt entirely and terrifyingly visible.

There, her blood said.

There, she thought.

She watched him look at her. She watched something move across his expression—recognition, something urgent, something that in another man she might have called conflict.

And then she watched him look away.

The ceremony unfolded with the formal precision of a thing that had been performed the same way for a hundred years.

The pack elder spoke the ritual words. The torches were dimmed to let the red moonlight through the high windows.

The hall went quiet in the particular way that halls went quiet when something significant was about to happen and everyone present understood it.

Danek descended from the dais.

The inner ring parted for him. The crowd shifted, a slow ripple of anticipation moving outward from his path like water from a stone.

Lyra's heart was doing something unsteady in her chest. She pressed her hands flat against her sides and kept her face still and reminded herself that she was an Omega healer's assistant from the lower wards and that whatever she'd felt for six weeks was her own private foolishness and that this moment had nothing to do with her.

He was moving in her direction.

The crowd parted between them. The eastern wall seemed to get closer—or she was imagining it.

The pull in her chest was a roar now, a steady crescendo of "there, there, there" that she couldn't quiet no matter how hard she tried.

The wolf in her blood was certain in a way that she, Lyra, the careful and overlooked and peripheral, had never been certain of anything.

He was ten feet away.

Five.

She couldn't breathe.

He walked past her.

The crowd closed behind him like water, and he kept moving—past the Omega healers, past the eastern wall, past Lyra as though she were part of the stonework—and the pull in her chest didn't stop; it stretched and strained like something tearing slowly, and she turned without deciding to turn and watched him cross to the Beta ring where Mira stood with her white flowers and her moonlight dress and her perfectly calibrated smile.

She watched him offer his hand.

She watched Mira take it.

She watched her sister look up at Danek Voros with an expression that was not surprise, that was not overwhelmed, that was the expression of someone receiving exactly what they had been expecting, and she felt the bottom fall out of something she hadn't known was holding her up.

The pack elder's voice filled the hall. Alpha Danek Voros declares before the full Blood Moon, "Mira Vael of Pack Voros, will you stand as my Luna?"

Mira said yes. Of course she did. Mira's yes was probably the most beautiful yes the hall had ever heard.

The assembled pack began to cheer.

Lyra wasn't sure how long she stood there.

Long enough for the cheering to swell and peak and settle into the warm communal roar of a pack celebrating something they believed in.

Long enough for the torches to come back up and the mead to start circulating and the musicians to begin.

Long enough for several of the other Omega healers to subtly shift away from her, sensing something off in her stillness, not wanting to be adjacent to whatever was happening in her face.

She became aware, at some point, that her hands were shaking.

She pressed them together. The shaking moved up her arms instead.

Don't, she told herself. Not here. Not now. You are in the middle of this hall and there are five hundred wolves around you and you will not—

The fire came from nowhere and everywhere at once.

It started in her palms—a heat that had nothing to do with temperature, a pressure that had been building for six weeks without her understanding what it was, compressed now by grief and humiliation and the particular agony of watching the bond in her blood strain toward a man who was currently placing a formal chain of Luna office around her sister's neck.

It burst out of her hands in a flare of violet-white light that scorched the stone floor in a perfect circle around her feet and sent every wolf within ten feet stumbling backward and lit the eastern wall briefly, brilliantly, in a color that had no business existing in a Pack Voros ceremony.

The hall went silent.

Lyra stood in the middle of the scorch mark and looked at her hands.

Her hands looked back at her, faintly luminous, faintly trembling, entirely themselves and entirely not.

She looked up. Five hundred wolves were looking at her. The pack elder was staring with an expression she couldn't read. The wolves who had scrambled back were staring. The musicians had stopped.

Danek was staring. Mira — still holding his hand, still wearing the Luna chain — was staring. And in Danek's expression, beneath the shock, beneath whatever calculation was already beginning to turn behind his eyes, Lyra saw something that crystallized everything into a cold and perfect clarity.

He knew what she was.

He had known before tonight. He had walked past her anyway.

Lyra straightened. She looked at her sister—really looked, for a long, direct moment that said everything she was never going to say out loud. Then she looked at the scorched stone under her feet and at her own hands and made a decision.

She walked out of the hall.

No one stopped her. They parted to let her through, and she kept her chin level and her pace steady and her burning hands pressed flat against her sides, and she did not run until she was outside in the cold, dark air with the Blood Moon enormous and red overhead, and then she ran, because sometimes that was all there was left to do.

Behind her, through the great hall's ancient walls, she could hear the pack beginning to murmur.

Ahead of her: the dark, the tree line, and something cracking open in her chest that hurt like breaking and felt, impossibly, like beginning.