With practiced ease, he guided me through the formalities: greeting his pack, presenting ourselves before the Alpha-Don. His father, Miles Valehowl, sat at the head of the long table in the estate's private gathering hall, the amber moonstone beads of an old prayer-strand threaded between two fingers, turning slowly. When Kael brought me forward, the beads did not stop. That, I would learn later, was a blessing given. His mother, Lyra Valehowl, straightened a single place setting at the table as we approached, the gesture so automatic it seemed less about the silver than about the world she was quietly arranging around her son's new mate-bond. She pressed her cheek to both of mine in the old greeting, and her scent reached me first, jasmine and old amber and warm candle-wax. Kael's poise put me at ease. He knew exactly how to handle every situation, never once making me feel uncomfortable. When a Beta-elder's mate addressed me by the wrong bloodline, he corrected her with a half-smile that carried no malice but absolute finality. When the Council Elder asked me to repeat the old invocation to the Moon Goddess I had not rehearsed, Kael murmured the words a half-beat ahead of me, his lips barely moving, so I could echo them without stumbling.
When it came time to leave for the mating procession, his attentiveness continued. He made sure everything was in order, ensuring I was settled before stepping in himself. His hand hovered at the small of my back without pressing, a question rather than a command. The pack warrior who held the carriage door shut it with a respectful tilt of his head, gaze lowered, once we were both inside, and the convoy began to move. As the engine of the lead obsidian carriage woke beneath us, the anxiety that had gripped my chest began to ease. Through the dark glass I watched the cedar-lined drive fall away, and I realized I had not thought of Lucian Greywood once during the entire ceremony.
Meanwhile, in another mating procession across the city, Lucian couldn't hide his agitation.
The Greywood convoy cut through midtown traffic with the usual escort: a lead carriage, two flanking sedans, and a tail vehicle carrying pack warriors whose sole task was to ensure the heir's mating day proceeded without incident. Inside the principal car, Lucian sat rigidly in a charcoal suit that had cost more gold moons than most wolves earned in a year, his jaw shifting once to the side as he checked his communicator again. It was the day he took his intended mate, yet there had been no word from me. Not a single message. No sending through the mind-link. The crystal might as well have been fused to his hand as he scrolled and rechecked it for what felt like the hundredth time.
Nothing.
He had expected something. A plea. A bitter farewell. Even anger would have satisfied him, because anger meant attachment, and attachment meant the door was still open. But the crystal offered nothing except the mocking parade of congratulatory sendings from allies and distant kin who understood that a Greywood mating was less a love story than a claiming of territory. Vesper Dawnmere was becoming bonded to the Greywood line today, and the joining of Dawnmere standing with Greywood strength was supposed to be the headline. Yet the heir's mind was twenty blocks north, circling a she-wolf who had stopped answering his calls moons ago.
By the time he arrived at the den, the unease in his chest had grown unbearable. The venue was a Greywood-held gathering hall on the top floor of the Regency, one of the pack's flagship neutral-grounds. Moonstone chandeliers threw fractured light across two hundred place settings. Pack warriors in tuxedos stood at each exit, their postures those of wolves who could shift from service to enforcer in the space of a single breath. Lucian scanned the crowded hall, his mind racing. Turning to his attendants, wolves who had grown up in the Greywood orbit and understood that the heir's moods were weather systems best read carefully, he issued a firm order.
"Make sure Selene doesn't show up here to cause trouble."
The command hung in the air for a beat. One of the attendants, a Greywood wolf who had known Lucian since they were pups running errands for the old Beta-elders, pressed his lips together. The stifled laugh that escaped was the kind of sound a wolf makes when he has been handed something so absurd it overrides every instinct toward self-preservation.
"Relax, Lucian," he said, grinning. "Selene's not coming to crash your mating. She's busy with her own."
Lucian's hand went still on the crystal.
"She's getting mated today, too. Right about now, she's probably in the middle of the ceremony at another den."
