21. Chapter 21 #3
I took a swallow because refusing at that point would have made me conspicuous.
The dark wine moved through me like heat looking for weak places.
Conversation circled the festival at first. Harmlessly, if one did not listen too hard.
The rarity of the eclipse. The age of the observance.
The way the Black Harvest Moon occurred only every fifty years, and what that meant for those lucky or burdened enough to witness it.
An older man with a grave face remarked that the Goddess gathered unfinished destinies on nights like this.
A woman in emerald added that some paths were clarified beneath a darkened moon because ordinary daylight lied too often to the heart.
I listened and tried not to sway where I stood.
Not from drunkenness exactly. More from a strange heaviness behind my eyes, in my limbs, under my skin. The ground remained solid enough. My thoughts did not. They felt slightly delayed, as though each one had to push through something thicker than air before it reached me fully formed.
The quartet drifted across the grounds behind us, still beautiful and now somehow farther away. The lights overhead looked too soft. Everyone’s voices carried a persuasive smoothness I could not decide was natural or enhanced by whatever had found its way into my bloodstream.
Then, with the ease of a conversation that had been nudged in a certain direction before I ever joined it, the subject turned to mates.
My spine went rigid.
I felt it happen before anyone said anything explicit, just from the subtle shift in tone, the slight sharpening of regard, the way Moriah’s attention narrowed on my face.
“Such nights have always been associated with fate,” one of the elders said, turning his wineglass slowly by the stem. “Or the correction of it.”
I did not like that wording at all.
Moriah took up the thread as if he had handed her something prepared. “The Goddess does not always choose gently.”
There it was. The knot in me drew tight.
Sage’s hand remained at my back. Not restraining. Not yet. Just present.
I set my wineglass down on the nearest strip of clear table linen with more care than necessary.
I did not trust myself to keep holding it.
“She chooses what’s best for you,” I said, and heard immediately that my voice came out thicker than normal, as though I had been speaking through sleep.
I swallowed and tried again. “That’s the point. ”
Several of them looked at one another with the tolerant patience older people sometimes reserved for the young, even when the young were full adults in formal clothes rather than children in borrowed shoes.
“Is it?” Moriah asked.
Her tone held no cruelty. That was what made it more difficult. She sounded almost sincerely interested, like a teacher inviting me to extend a thought she already intended to dismantle.
“Yes,” I said. “The Goddess chooses the mate that is best for you. Not just who’s convenient. Not just who looks proper on paper. Not just who is the same species.”
Something hard flashed in Moriah’s eyes, there and gone.
One of the silver-haired men gave a small hum as though indulging an idealism he had heard before. “A generous belief.”
“It’s not belief. It’s how it works.”
“Does it?” another woman asked quietly. “Or is that merely the story told to those who are expected to submit without question?”
The words landed oddly.
Not because they were good. Because they struck with more weight than speech ought to carry, as if each sentence came wrapped in some pressure beyond ordinary persuasion. My temples began to throb. I pressed two fingers to one of them and tried to gather myself.
I knew what I knew.
I knew the bond to Nikolay existed whether he had welcomed it or not.
I knew that something in me answered him in a way it had never answered anyone else.
I knew that when I thought of losing that connection entirely, some ancient, terrified part of me recoiled as if from mutilation.
None of that had changed just because a group of elegantly dressed wolves under fairy lights wanted to debate destiny like it was a point of etiquette.
Moriah’s mouth softened into something almost sympathetic. “Child, the Goddess is vast. Vastness is not precision. Sometimes divine choice lands where it causes harm.”
A murmur of agreement moved through the circle.
“Sometimes,” the older man said, “she chooses across nature.”
“It is not wrong,” said the woman in emerald, “to question whether a bond that violates the core of what you are can truly be a blessing.”
Violates.
My head lifted sharply. “No.”
The word came out rougher than I intended.
Sage’s thumb moved once against my back, soothing and possessive in the same motion. “Maddie—”
“No.” I pressed my fingers harder at my temple. “That’s not right.”
My thoughts kept trying to slide apart on me. Their words entered too easily and seemed to hang around after they should have been dismissed, not because I believed them but because they were being driven into me somehow, tamped down through the fog with deliberate hands.
The Goddess can be wrong.
Nature matters.
It is not wrong to want what is natural.
I shook my head as if that could clear it. “You don’t get to decide that for someone else.”
“We decide many things for the health of a pack,” Moriah said.
“And for the health of a soul,” added one of the elders softly.
I looked at them and felt an almost sick disbelief rise in me. They sounded so reasonable. That was the obscenity of it. Not snarling prejudice. Not open hatred. Concern. Tradition. Structure.
“I know what I want,” I said.
Did I sound certain? I couldn’t tell.
Because even as I said it, the fog pressed harder.
My legs felt distant from me. My heartbeat had become too loud.
The fairy lights overhead seemed to pulse in slow golden breaths.
Somewhere beyond the circle, laughter rose from the rest of the festival with a brightness so normal it made what was happening here feel briefly impossible.
Sage stepped closer. Close enough that his chest almost touched mine. Close enough that everyone else in the circle dropped back into a kind of listening stillness.
His face was inches from mine. Beautiful, composed, intent.
“Just think, Maddie,” he said. He was walking me away from the festival.
His voice had changed. It was still soft, still careful, but the softness now carried purpose like a blade wrapped in velvet.
“You could change fate.”
I stared at him.
He stopped. “You could have a mate who would love you exactly for who you are.” His gaze dropped to my mouth and rose again. “One who would never be ashamed of your nature but be proud to call you mate.”
My hands curled at my sides.
“Someone like me,” he finished.
A chill moved through all the warmth in my body, thin and electric.
It took effort to make my tongue work properly. “You are not my mate.”
For the first time that evening, something in his expression hardened fully enough for me to see it. Not for anyone else, maybe. For me.
“I could be,” he said.
“No.”
“I know what is best, Madelyn.”
The way he said my name—without asking, without uncertainty, with the confidence of a man stepping into a place he believed should already have been his—made nausea curl low in my stomach.
My legs felt wrong beneath me now. Heavy. Unreliable. Like somebody had quietly replaced my bones with wet sand while I stood there distracted by arguments. I tried to steady myself.
“No,” I said again, jaw setting around the word even as the ground seemed to tilt by a cruel little degree.
A pack member approached from the edge of the gathering and bent toward Sage’s shoulder. I didn’t catch the face. Only the murmur.
“Only about twenty minutes until dusk.”
Sage’s hand settled more firmly at the small of my back.
Relief hit me so suddenly it was almost dizzying. Good. Fine. Conversation over. Whatever bizarre philosophical ambush this had been, perhaps even they understood it had gone far enough.
He looked down at me with that same composed care he had used all weekend and said, “Come with me.”
I should have refused.
Instead, I let him guide me away because my body was lagging behind my judgment and because some desperate part of me wanted distance from Moriah’s eyes and the elders’ voices and the pressure in my skull.
I thought he was taking me to sit down. Somewhere quieter.
Somewhere I might get water or cold air or enough space to remember how my own thoughts sounded when nobody else was arranging them.
He led me off the main lawn and onto a narrower path that branched away from the fairy lights.
The difference was immediate.