Chapter 4 Insignia on the Floor #2
Nothing happened. No jolt, no flash, just the ordinary warmth of another person’s skin. That was fine. I wanted something ordinary, something I could control.
Stacy’s fingers curled around mine. She smiled, and the smile was genuine, and she was close enough to kiss, and I leaned toward her, and—
My stomach heaved.
It came out of nowhere. One second I was reaching for Stacy’s jaw; the next, my body seized. Nausea rolled through me in a thick, punishing wave. My skin went cold. The desire I’d been forcing vanished like someone had poured ice water on a lit match. Everything below my waist went utterly dead.
The bond clamped down on me with a force I hadn’t known it could exert. It was worse than pain. Every bit of want was gone at once, replaced by a revulsion so deep it felt chemical.
There was no arguing with what my body had done.
Stacy’s hand was still in mine. She was looking at me with concern sharpening into confusion. “Everett? What’s—”
“I’m sorry.” I pulled back. Let go of her hand. My voice sounded wrong, thin and tight, and I couldn’t fix it. “This isn’t—I can’t.”
Understanding dawned in her expression, and with it, a flash of pity that made me want to put my fist through the table. She saw what had happened, though she couldn’t know about the nausea or the way my body had revolted at the idea of anyone who wasn’t Liza. She understood enough.
“Of course,” she said, too kind, too careful. “I’ll go.”
She went. I listened to her footsteps cross the hall and fade down the corridor, and then I was alone again with the embers and the insignia and the bond that was teaching me what it meant to reject your fated mate and then try to pretend she didn’t exist.
I braced my hands on the table and breathed through the nausea. It faded slowly, leaving a metallic taste and a hollow ache in my chest.
Maybe the nausea was only the bond refusing Stacy. Maybe the sickness had already begun. Either way, the old warnings no longer sounded exaggerated.
I straightened up. Wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. Tried to reset, to find the controlled, capable version of myself that had stood on that platform and sworn to lead this pack. He was in there somewhere. He had to be. I picked up the whiskey.
And then I felt it again.
It had come through the bond earlier, sideways, under her anger and exhaustion, and I’d put it down to the night. Now it came clear. Something that didn’t belong to me or to the snarled knot of resentment between us.
A pull.
Low. Deep. The instinctive focus that came with a possible mate scent. The recognition was hers, a sudden attraction followed by a shock sharp enough to reach me across the river.
I went still.
No.
The feeling intensified. She hadn’t expected this. She hadn’t gone looking for it. Yet the Goddess might have handed her another wolf on the same night I’d thrown her away.
A second mate?
The thought was impossible. I’d only heard of second chance mates in stories from other packs and older generations.
Through the open bond, I could feel her drawn to someone else.
In West Valley. In Dominic Salvi’s territory.
The glass in my hand shattered. I hadn’t realized I was gripping it. Whiskey and blood mixed on my palm. I stared at the mess.
The Goddess couldn’t replace me this fast. And if the other wolf was Dominic Salvi, she couldn’t mean him.
Salvi ran his pack with none of the careful presentation that kept packs alive in a world where humans outnumbered wolves a thousand to one.
He sat on the better side of the river and had never had to fight for what he had.
Was that the man the Goddess thought worthy of the mate she’d first given me?
I wrapped my bleeding hand in a bar towel and pressed it against the cuts. The sickness stirred in my gut again, thinner this time, more like a warning than an assault.
A rush of wariness dimmed Liza’s startled attraction. After tonight, why would she trust that pull?
But the pull was there. I’d felt it. If the other wolf was Salvi and contact brought the unmistakable flash of a confirmed second bond, I might feel that too.
Every second of it.
I stood in my empty hall with blood soaking the towel and the bond straining inside my chest, and I thought: She was supposed to come back.
She was supposed to be angry for a night, maybe two. Cross the river, lick her wounds, realize that a life without a pack was no life at all, and come back to negotiate. Accept my rejection. Let us both move on. That was the plan.
Nowhere in the plan was Dominic Salvi.
Nowhere in the plan was the Goddess offering Liza a second chance before the snow from my ascension had even stopped falling.
I left the hall. Walked past the insignia on the table, past the shattered glass and the bloodstain on the wood, past the bench where Stacy Vogel had sat and offered me everything the bond wouldn’t let me take.
I climbed the stairs to the Alpha’s quarters and locked the door and stood at the window watching the snow come down over the valley in the dark.
Across the river, Liza Mallory was settling into a borrowed bed in enemy territory with what might be a new mate scent on the air and my bond still lodged in her chest like a splinter she refused to pull.
My wolf clawed at the inside of my ribs, furious, desperate, demanding I cross the river and fight for what was mine.
I told him to shut up. She wasn’t mine. I’d made sure of that.
The snow kept falling. The bond kept burning. And the sickness, patient and certain, began its work.