Chapter 25 The Wrong Kind of Right #4
“Maybe they can,” Cormac said. “Maybe times have changed while everyone was polishing the same three fears and calling them tradition.”
No one answered.
Cormac wiped blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. “Besides, who would believe them? Werewolves ruined my sister’s wedding sounds like a nervous breakdown with a catering budget.”
Cassie, still braced against me, muttered, “Some taken.”
Cormac nodded. “And Grant can be threatened into silence. He looks threatenable.”
A voice shouted from beyond the service arch. “Excuse me?”
Cassie went rigid in my arms. I turned my head.
The wedding party burst into the courtyard.
They came armed with broken furniture and champagne bottles, wild-eyed and soaked through from the rain.
Cassie’s father led them with a bottle gripped by the neck.
Tessa followed with a broken chair leg in both hands.
Cassie’s mother carried a heavy serving tray like a shield.
Aunt Linda had found a candelabra somewhere.
Grant trailed behind them with a chair leg held as if he distrusted the physics of it.
They stopped all at once.
The courtyard answered their courage with the truth of what had happened there. Blood on white stone. Bodies in the rain. Wolves half shifted and watching. Silas ruined in the broken fountain. Sava with her blade. Cormac bleeding beside her. Ronan standing like judgment in a blood-soaked coat.
And Cassie in my arms, her sweater pulled from one shoulder, the mark exposed, with me naked and blood-covered around her.
No one spoke.
Aunt Linda looked me up and down with the bleak composure of a woman whose fear had been forced to make room for appraisal.
“Well,” she said.
Cassie’s mother hissed, “Linda.”
“I am under supernatural stress, Marianne.”
Henry broke through their legs like a small, furious missile.
“Tessa screamed, “Henry, no.”
Henry ignored her, crossed the blood-slick stone at full speed, and bit the nearest unshifted wolf on the ankle.
The wolf yelped. The sound was so ordinary, so offended and undignified, that it broke something in the air none of us had been able to touch.
Henry barked once and planted himself in front of Cassie and me as if the matter had been handled.
Cassie looked down at him. “Good boy.”
His whole body wagged.
Cormac made a pained sound that might have been laughter. “I amend my recommendation. The dog should be added to the council.”
Aunt Linda lifted the candelabra. “I second.”
Ronan closed his eyes for one brief moment. When he opened them, he looked at me. For the first time since I had walked out of Evelyn’s holding room, I didn’t see only an Alpha measuring risk. I saw my brother looking at the place where he had nearly lost me.
“Is it truly a mate bond?” he asked.
The courtyard waited. I looked down at Cassie first. Her hand rested over my chest. Her body trembled with exhaustion, but the bond between us was steady. She felt my fear and didn’t turn from it. She felt my love and didn’t ask me to make it easier for anyone watching.
I covered the exposed mark on her shoulder with one hand, shielding the raw skin from the rain, then I looked back at Ronan.
“Yes,” I said.
My voice was rough from the shift, from grief, from the place I had nearly stayed forever.
“It is real. It has always been real. That is what I have been trying to tell you.”
Ronan’s face shifted. A crack through the Alpha. My brother underneath.
“It does not make sense by the laws we know,” I said. “It does not make sense by the rite we thought we understood. The corruption tried to use what was there. It didn’t create it.”
No one interrupted me.
“She survived the mark. It answered her before the full moon, and it chose her again under it. The bond is ours now. Maybe it was always meant to be. Maybe that is why Silas could not make it obey him. Maybe that is why she lived.”
Cassie’s breath caught beneath my hand. I let the bond carry the rest to her first. Then I said it aloud.
“She was always supposed to have it. She was always supposed to be my mate.”
The silence after that was not empty. It was the sound of an old law taking its first wound.
Then Grant spoke.
“This is insane!” he said, voice shaking with fear and disgust. “Cassie, get away from him! Whatever pathetic midlife breakdown this is, you are not seriously choosing some naked animal over your own family. Over me!”
Every wolf in the courtyard turned.
So did I.
Cassie’s hand pressed harder against my chest. “Do not. He is not worth dental records.”
Grant’s mouth twisted. “You think this is funny? You always do this! You make yourself the center of everything. You ruined Tessa’s wedding, and now you’re standing there like some cheap romance cliché with a freak who bit you.
You should be embarrassed! You should be grateful anyone is still trying to get you out! ”
The growl started in my chest but Tessa moved before any wolf could. She punched Grant straight in the nose. The crack was wet, sharp, and deeply satisfying.
Grant dropped the chair leg and stumbled backward with both hands over his face. “What the fuck?”
“The wedding is off,” Tessa said.
Grant stared at her through his fingers. “Tessa.”
“No.” Her voice shook, but her arm didn’t. “You do not get to say my name like you are the injured party when you spent this entire nightmare worrying about the wedding while my sister was missing!”
“I didn’t know there were wolves.”
“You knew she was missing!”
Even Grant had no answer ready.
Aunt Linda began applauding wildly.
“Tessa Marie,” Cassie’s mother said automatically.
Then she looked at the dead wolves, the blood, Grant’s bleeding nose, me naked in the rain, and Henry guarding our feet with the seriousness of a war hero.
She lowered the serving tray.
“Actually,” she said, “continue.”
Tessa pointed the broken chair leg at Grant. “You made me feel like marrying you meant I had won something. Do you know how humiliating that is? I almost married a man whose best survival instinct is condescension.”
Aunt Linda clapped harder. “That’s right, honey!”
Cassie’s father looked from Grant to me to Ronan, then back to Cassie. The champagne bottle stayed in his hand.
“I am going to have questions,” he said.
Cassie sighed against me. “I assumed.”
“Many questions.”
“I assumed many.”
“And I am not okay with any of this.”
“Completely fair.”
His gaze dropped to my body, then shot back to Cassie’s face with paternal horror. “Also, he needs pants.”
For the first time since the night had broken open, something close to a laugh moved in my chest. It didn’t leave cleanly. It was rough and unsteady, but it was mine.
Cassie felt it.
She looked up at me, pale and exhausted and alive. “Yes,” she said. “He needs pants.”
Ronan took one step forward. My body shifted before thought, placing itself between him and Cassie.
Not fully wolf.
Ronan stopped, then he looked at both of us. I expected command. Law. Another terrible choice shaped into duty. Instead, he looked tired in the way a man looks when the world he has held together changes shape in his hands and demands he decide what survives.
“No one touches them,” Ronan said.
The council elder turned sharply. “Alpha.”
Ronan looked at him and the elder stopped.
Ronan’s voice carried through the rain. “No one touches my brother’s mate. No one touches her family. No one follows them without my direct order. Anyone who tries will answer to me.”
“And me,” I said.
Every wolf heard it.
Henry barked once.
Cormac lifted a finger from where he had finally sat down on the wet stone. “And Henry, apparently.”
Aunt Linda shouted, “Damn right.”
Cassie leaned against me because her legs were done and her pride had finally lost the vote.
“I told you,” she whispered.
I looked down at her. “You told everyone.”
“I was efficient.”
“You slapped me.”
“You growled.”
This time, the laugh made it out.
She lifted her chin. “About that goodbye kiss.”
My chest tightened. The courtyard still held danger.
The council had not vanished. The old laws had not rewritten themselves because Cassie had yelled at them in the rain.
Silas was dead in the fountain. Evelyn still breathed in chains.
Her family had seen wolves, and there would be consequences I could not yet count.
None of it disappeared.
But Cassie was alive. The bond was whole.
When I bent to kiss her, it was not goodbye.
I cupped her face with one bloodied hand and kissed her carefully, because she was hurt, because she was human, because she had come back for me when I had tried to make myself a sacrifice without asking her permission.
She kissed me back like she was still angry.
She should be.
Behind us, Aunt Linda applauded again and said, “Finally.”
Cassie laughed against my mouth.
I felt it through the bond, warm and bright and impossible. And for once, it didn’t feel like defiance.
It felt like living.