Chapter 25 The Wrong Kind of Right #2
A wolf near the arch shifted his weight forward and Ian lunged.
I threw myself into him. I didn’t think.
Thinking would have called for a saner option, and I was fresh out of those.
I hit his side with every ounce of force I had left.
It was like throwing myself into a moving wall.
He barely moved. I bounced off and hit the bloody stone hard enough to knock what little air I had out of my lungs.
Ian spun on me.
The growl that came out of him shook through the courtyard. His jaws opened. His teeth were inches from my face. His eyes were gold and wild and terrifying.
He didn’t know me. Or he was too far gone to let himself know me.
So I slapped him across the muzzle. My palm cracked against wet fur and bone and the courtyard went silent.
Ian froze.
My hand stung so badly I almost laughed, which probably said something worrying about my current mental health.
“You absolute idiot!” I snapped.
His lips twitched back.
“Do not growl at me! I am injured, furious, and running on painkillers, spite, and a deeply questionable amount of adrenaline.”
A low rumble moved through him.
“Yes, you. Do not take that tone with me while covered in someone else’s bloodstream.”
Sava reached my side, silver blade lifted toward the wolves behind me. “Cassie.”
“I’ve got him.”
“You slapped a feral wolf.”
“I am aware, Sava.”
Ronan’s voice came rough through the rain. “Cassie, move away from him.”
I didn’t look at him. “You have had all week to give advice, and look where that got us.”
Someone made a strangled sound. Cormac, probably. I hoped it hurt a little.
I pushed myself up. My hip screamed. My ribs threatened resignation. I stayed on my knees for half a second, then forced myself upright because yelling from the ground lacked authority.
Ian watched me. The wolf watched me. Somewhere inside him, the man was bleeding behind locked doors.
“I cannot believe you tried to make me leave you behind!” I said.
His ears flicked.
“Yes, you. Ian. The giant tragic murder rug in front of me.”
The rumble deepened.
“You tried to die like an idiot because a group of assholes who desperately wanted an excuse for this not to be real handed you one, and you took it like they were doing you a favor.”
Something moved behind his eyes.
Not enough.
Fine, I had more.
“You want to talk about leash bullshit? Let’s talk about leash bullshit.
” I pressed one hand to my side and turned enough to include Ronan and every wolf staring at us.
“This whole damn week, everyone has said the rite was interrupted. The rite never finished. It barely even started before I fell into the circle and Ian bit me.”
Ronan went still.
Good.
“So explain to me how some stupid control leash fully attached itself to me through a ritual all of you keep saying didn’t happen properly.
How? Did the magic file paperwork early?
Did the moon look down and say, well, close enough, she has poor survival instincts and a history of ignoring red flags? ”
Cormac made a sound like a laugh got punched in the throat.
Nobody answered.
“That is what I thought,” I said. “Nobody knows. Not Ronan. Not the council. Not Silas, who is dead in your very dramatic fountain, so I think we can stop treating him like a reliable academic source.”
A wolf behind me shifted.
Bones cracked.
Ian’s head snapped up, and I stepped between him and the pack.
He snarled behind me, furious enough that I felt the heat of it along my spine.
“Stay,” I snapped over my shoulder.
The growl cut off.
Not gone.
Enough.
I faced Ronan, his wolves, and the council members gathering behind them in their soaked, blood-spattered dignity.
“You can all go fuck yourselves.”
Sava sighed. “There it is.”
“No,” I said. “I am not done. This is where all your stubborn, close-minded bullshit got us. Right here. In a courtyard full of bodies, with Ian ready to let you kill him because you made him believe the only way he could be loved was if someone put a leash on him!”
Ronan’s face changed.
I hoped it hurt.
“You could not believe he chose me,” I said.
“You could not believe I survived because maybe your laws were wrong. You could not believe something ridiculous and accidental could still be real. You looked at Ian and saw a weapon. You looked at me and saw a problem. So when someone gave you a prettier explanation with old magic and control, you swallowed it whole because it let you keep being right.”
Rain ran into my eyes. Or maybe not rain. I grabbed the collar of my sweater.
Sava said, “Cassie.”
I didn’t stop. I pulled the fabric down over one shoulder and ripped the wet bandage off the mark.
Pain flashed so bright the courtyard tilted but I stayed standing.
Barely.
The mark shown under the the moon. It was black around the edges, raw, ugly, and swollen. Beneath all that damage, gold threaded through the bite like fire under skin.
Every wolf in the courtyard reacted. I felt the collective inhale. The sudden shift in the air. The old certainty cracking under the sight of a human woman standing alive under the full moon with a mark that refused to die.
I pressed my fingers around the edge of it.
“This is my mate,” I said.
The word sounded insane.
I said it anyway.
“However strange that sounds, and I do want credit for knowing it sounds extremely strange, I choose him. I choose us. Whatever dumb werewolf magic this is, it didn’t suddenly make Ian into more than you allowed him to be.
He was always more. You were all just too busy using him and fearing him to see it. ”
Behind me, Ian made a sound.
Low.
Broken.
Not wolf enough to be only a growl.
“If you are going to kill him,” I said, “then kill me too.”
The moon came fully through the torn clouds and the bond snapped back.
Not away.
Back.
It hit with such force that I staggered. Sava caught my arm, but she didn’t pull me away. Pain and gold and heat flooded through the torn place in my chest. All the ragged edges Ian had tried to carve apart blazed at once, and then the agony shifted. It was no longer being ripped open.
It was being remade.
No.
Claimed.
Not by magic alone. Not by old law. Not by accident.
By me. By him. By the choice I had just made with every wolf in the courtyard watching.
I turned slowly.
Ian was staring at me. His eyes were still gold. His body was still huge, dark, and blood-soaked. His teeth were still bared enough to make any sane woman reconsider her life choices.
But he was there.
Ian was there.
I stepped toward him and put my hand on his muzzle.
“There you are,” I whispered.
His body shuddered. The bond glowed between us, no longer a hook, no longer a tear, no longer that ugly word Silas had put in everyone’s mouth. It felt warm. Terrifying. Whole.
Ours.
“I love you,” I said.
The wolf went completely still.
“And yes, I know how insane that sounds. I am the human woman saying it to a giant wolf in a murder courtyard while my shoulder is glowing like a haunted night-light. I am very aware.”
A sound moved through him.
“I love you,” I said again, softer, because the second time was for him. “I couldn’t let you sacrifice yourself one more time. Not for me. Not because of me. If that means dying here, then fine. It has been a deeply unreasonable week.”
His ears lowered.
My heart cracked.
“So come back,” I said. “Because if I am going to die, I would like the goodbye kiss you were too much of a coward to give me.”
Ian
For a moment, I didn’t understand the words.
The wolf understood threat. Blood. Movement. The shape of Ronan’s wolves beyond Cassie’s shoulder. The path to the service arch. The rain thinning the scents of the dead. The sound of heartbeats too close to the route she should have taken.
Cassie had come back.
That fact moved through the wolf as danger before it moved through me as miracle.
She should have been gone. She should have been in the car with her family, with the road opening ahead of her and Sava beside her, alive because I had given what was left of myself to make the pack look at me instead.
I had built the last of my purpose around that image.
Cassie away from this place. Cassie beyond Ronan’s reach, beyond the council’s vote, beyond Silas’s dead hand and Evelyn’s laughing mouth.
Then she threw her injured body into mine and broke that purpose with the force of a woman who had never once accepted being handled when she was angry enough to stand.
The wolf had spun on her. I felt the snarl in my throat. Felt the heat of her blood through the rain. Felt the pull to cage her, guard her, force her behind me where teeth could not reach.
Then her hand cracked across my muzzle.
The sound cut through the courtyard. It cut through the wolf. It reached the place in me I had tried to bury.
Cassie stood in front of me, shaking with pain and fury, and called me an idiot as if I were not a beast covered in blood. As if I were not the thing every wolf in that courtyard had feared I would become. As if some part of me was still a man worth yelling at.
I held on to that.
Barely.
Her voice came in pieces at first. The wolf caught tone more than meaning. Anger. Terror. Love turned sharp because I had tried to make grief look noble.
Then the words began to settle.
She told me I had listened to people who wanted the bond to be false because the truth frightened them. She told Ronan and the council that they had wanted an excuse, and I had taken it because I had spent my life being taught to believe the ugliest version of myself first.
I wanted to turn away from that.
I could not.
She was right.
Evelyn’s cruelty had found purchase because it sounded like every law I had ever obeyed.
A weapon needed a hand. A dangerous wolf needed command.
A man like me didn’t get chosen. He was aimed.
He was managed. He was used until the work was finished, then watched in case he remembered his teeth belonged to him.
Silas had not created that belief in me.
He had only named it.