The morning after the kitchen, Wylder waited until we'd finished stretching at the edge of the training field before he said it.
"There's something you should know about the Summit."
I glanced up from lacing my boots. The sun was still low, the grass wet at our ankles. He wasn't looking at me the way he had during drills. He was looking at me the way he looked at problems he'd already turned over in his mind three or four times.
"The combat exhibition," he said. "Mated pairs. Wolf-form coordination in front of every Alpha on the continent."
I finished the knot. Straightened.
"You'd be entering with me," he said. "It's the most public declaration of a mate bond that exists. Every Alpha in that hall would see it. Including the ones from Ironridge's tier."
I did not need him to name Lukas. He didn't.
"He's required to attend," Wylder went on. "As a vassal Alpha. He'll be in the arena."
The wind moved through the pines above us. I felt Seraphine lift her head inside my chest, ears pricked.
"You don't have to decide now," Wylder said. "You don't have to decide this week. The choice is yours."
He meant it. That was the strange part. There was no lean in the way he stood, no pull in the register of his voice. He had laid the thing on the ground between us and stepped back to let me look at it from every angle.
I looked at it.
My fingertips drifted up toward the hollow on my neck — the old checking reflex, ten years of gauging Lukas's temper by the temperature of the bond. My hand stopped halfway. The spot was less cold than it had been last week. I could feel that without touching. Something in me, small and quiet, marked the change.
I lowered my hand.
"We'll enter," I said.
He didn't smile. He nodded once, slow, and I felt his wolf settle in the space beside Seraphine like a hand closing around a warm cup.
But underneath — in the private part of me the bond had not yet learned to read — Lukas's voice was still there. *Fluke. That silver-white thing is a fluke. You got lucky once, Emory. You'll get on that arena floor and your wolf will be sluggish again and every Alpha in that hall will see what I saw for ten years.*
I did not say it out loud.
Wylder's head tilted. Just slightly. I felt him brush the edge of it — a soft, questioning press through the bond, not intrusive, not demanding. He was asking permission to come closer.
I closed the door, gently.
He stepped back without a word. No offense. No push. He simply picked up his water bottle and gave me the room I had asked for without asking.
I loved him a little for that. I did not say that either.
---
I went out alone that night.
I had not shifted without him nearby since the first day. I told myself it was practice. I told myself I needed to know I could do it without a hand at my back.
The forest was cold and blue under a half moon. I stripped my jacket, folded it on a stump, and closed my eyes.
The shift started clean. Spine, ribs, shoulders. And then — halfway through, with my bones half-reformed and my breath dragged across a throat that was neither wholly mine nor Seraphine's — I froze.
*Sluggish,* said Lukas's voice, from inside my own skull. *Embarrassing.*
My body locked. Between shapes. Between women. Half-crouched in the dark with my hands still hands and my hips already not hips, and the pain of the stalled shift climbed my spine like a wire pulled tight.
I could not breathe.
Then Seraphine surfaced. Not gently. She rose up through the paralysis with the full weight of her, and her voice was the roughest thing I had ever heard inside myself.
*You are not his assessment of us.*
The wire snapped.
*You are what emerged from his worst act.*
My shoulders cracked forward. My hands were paws.
*Run.*
I ran.
The forest opened. My silver-white body hit the undergrowth and it moved for me — ferns bending, small stones scattering, the ground itself giving way under paws that struck harder than I knew a wolf could strike. Seraphine's breath was my breath. Her stride was longer than any stride I had ever taken in a human body or dreamed of in a wolf's.
I ran until the ghost of his voice was behind me. I ran past it. I ran until there was only the cold air in my lungs and the pale flash of my own coat under the moon, and Seraphine's low, humming satisfaction curled in the base of my throat.
When I stopped, miles from the pack house, I stood in a clearing with my head lifted and my ears pitched to the wind, and I did not touch my neck.
---
Seven hundred miles southeast, at that same hour, I would learn much later, a copper-haired woman was sitting alone in a locked storeroom with a small glass vial balanced between two fingers.
She was watching an omega drink from a cup she had filled herself, watch in hand, counting seconds.
She was smiling faintly.
She had always been methodical.
