Chapter twenty-three #3
"The girl at Frosthaven. Alex. I told you she didn't feel the same.
" A humorless, dry huff of air. "What I didn't tell you is why.
She already had fated mates. More than one of them — a whole pack of wolves bonded to her.
I watched it happen right in front of me, this thing I didn't have the first clue about, and I wanted her, and I couldn't figure out for the life of me why nothing sparked back.
" He shakes his head, staring at the floor.
"Spent a long time thinking something was fundamentally broken in me.
That I'd gone and fallen for someone who was never, ever going to look at me the way I needed. "
His amber eyes lift to mine, completely bare, stripped of every defense.
"And I get it now," he says quietly. "I wasn't one of Alex's.
I was never supposed to be. That pull I thought was about her—" he taps two fingers against his own chest, right over his heart "—it wasn't. It was always pointing right here.
I just hadn't found you yet." A rough, disbelieving laugh breaks from the bottom of his throat.
"I spent a whole year thinking I got left behind.
Turns out I wasn't unlucky. I was just early. "
My throat goes tight, a thick knot forming behind my breastbone. Through the bond, I can feel it washing off him — not the old ghost of rejection, none of it. Just a profound, staggering relief, so fierce and absolute it makes my own vision blur.
"That's all I've got, though," he adds, his voice softening as he nods toward Luke. "I watched it once from the outside. He can tell you how it actually works."
Luke reaches out, taking my wrist in his hand, his thumb resting heavily over the dark, smoking arcs of the brand.
"They're mate marks," he says, his voice a deep, steady anchor in the room.
"You're our fated mate. Fated mates are rare — most wolves live their whole lives and never find theirs.
It isn't something you choose or earn. It just is.
That pull. The heat. The need." His dark eyes lift, boring straight into my soul.
"That's what it's been. This whole time. "
"The marks," I whisper, tracing the lines with my free hand.
"A mark permanently ignites when two fated mates touch you at the exact same moment.
The combat assessment. The field. Torres and me, both of us handling you at once — it woke the bond.
" His thumb strokes the sensitive skin of my inner wrist. "And then it's real, but it isn't finished.
Sealing it requires this. That's what you felt lock into place tonight.
Two bonds, permanently closed. That's why you can feel us now, and why you always will. "
I sit with it. It's monumental, terrifying, and vast — and yet it clicks into every single strange, inexplicable thing I've felt since the day I walked through the academy gates. The warmth I could never explain around them. The ache when they walked away. The ink that wouldn't wash off.
"So this is permanent," I say, testing the weight of it.
"It's permanent," Luke confirms without a single hesitation. "You're ours, Jessica. And we're yours."
It should be too much. It probably is too much for a normal person. But there's a heavy, scorching rightness settled deep in my bones where a nameless void used to live, and I refuse to be sorry for a second of it.
Then the harsh reality of the clock hits me, and I sit up straight, the fog clearing from my brain.
"The Trial. You're an upperclassman. You've survived it. So you're going to tell me exactly what's waiting for me in there."
Luke's face instantly hardens, all the raw vulnerability vanishing behind a wall of pure stone. "I can't."
"Luke—"
"I mean I can't, Jessica. Everyone who passes takes an oath — a blood oath, and more than an oath.
I physically cannot describe it. The words literally refuse to leave my mouth.
" He holds my gaze with absolute, unyielding intensity so I know it isn't a cop-out.
"And even if I could speak the words — it wouldn't help you.
The Trial isn't the same for anyone. There's no strategy I can hand you. No map."
And that, finally, explains the terrifying silence of the upperclassmen. Explains why the faculty just watches us with those cold, assessing eyes. He has nothing to give me except the one thing that actually matters.
He has to go. He can't be found here in the gray light of dawn, and neither of us needs to say it out loud.
I walk him to the silent door. Torres hangs back against the pillows, watching us with heavy, possessive eyes, letting us have this.
Luke stops before he steps out into the corridor, all that iron control wearing paper-thin again. He reaches out, his fingers wrapping around my wrist, pressing right over the mark that is permanently, irrevocably his.
"Whatever's in there tomorrow," he murmurs, his voice rough.
I wait, my heart hammering against the new, heavy beats of the bond.
"Come back."
Not win. Not pass. Not any of the impossible things he can't help me fight anyway. Just come back.
My throat tightens until it aches, and I reach up, pulling him down for one last, soft, devastating kiss. "I will."
He slips out into the dark. I feel the bond stretch like a taut wire as he walks away, and then it settles — steady, heavy, and unbreakable because it's sealed now, and through this invisible web, he is never truly gone.
When I turn back into the room, Torres is already standing up from the bed, his dark gaze locked onto mine, his hand held out.
"Come back here," he says softly, his voice thick with promise.