I lit the second candle at eight o'clock, then blew it out at nine, then lit it again at ten. By eleven, the wax had pooled twice and hardened twice, and I told myself a calm woman would not keep relighting a candle for a man who was clearly running late.
A calm woman, of course, would also not have spent the afternoon pressing rosemary into a roast she knew Owen barely tasted. But seven years of marking anniversaries teach you certain rituals, and I had not yet learned how to stop performing them.
My name is Abigail Warren. Seven years ago I was the youngest wolf ever admitted to the Lycan King's Healer Corps. Tonight I was a woman in a soft gray dress, smoothing the same napkin for the fourth time, listening to the heater click in an empty pack house.
Thea had gone to sleep at seven. She liked the same lullaby on a loop, and I had lain beside her until her breathing slowed and her small hand uncurled from mine. My daughter is six. Her wolf has not yet woken. The pack does not know what to do with a pup like her, but I do, and that has always been enough for both of us.
The Blackthorn pack house was quiet in the way only an Alpha's house can be quiet, the kind of quiet that has rooms in it. I sat at the head of the table with my hands flat on the wood and waited.
Midnight came. Then one in the morning.
My phone buzzed on the counter.
I did not move at first. I thought, if it is him, I will let him send another. If it is not him, it does not matter. The buzz came again. Then a third time, in a quick, stuttering way that meant photographs.
I walked to the counter. My thumb pressed against the inside of my wrist before I knew I had moved it there.
The message was from Marla, a Delta's wife who had been kind to me when Thea was born and quieter to me ever since. She had written only one word.
'I'm sorry.'
Then the photos.
The Silverpeak Pack's banquet hall. The white pillars. The Mate Ceremony dais I had read about for years and never been invited to. Owen in the dark suit I pressed last week. His hand on a young woman's neck the way a man's hand sits when he means it.
Nylah Taylor.
I knew her face. She was one of his trainee warriors, twenty-three, polished in the way ambitious wolves polish themselves. I had served her tea in my own kitchen.
In the next photo, Owen's mouth was open mid-word. Marla had captioned that one too.
'He said the full vow. All of it. I'm so sorry, Abigail.'
I scrolled. I made myself scroll.
A video clip, twenty-six seconds long. I tapped it with a finger that did not feel like mine.
Owen's voice came out of my phone, deeper than the way he speaks at home, full of an Alpha tone I had not heard him use on me in years.
'I, Owen Bishop, Alpha of the Blackthorn Pack, choose you, Nylah Taylor, before the Moon Goddess and these witnesses, as the mate of my heart and the Luna of my line. What is mine is yours. What I build, I build for you. From this night on, my wolf walks beside your wolf, and no other.'
I had begged for those words.
I had begged on our first marking anniversary, when the bite on my neck was still pink and he had laughed and said vows were for wolves with too much time. I had begged on the third, after Thea was born, when I needed a public ritual to anchor me to the pack that did not love her. I had begged on the fifth, quietly, in our bedroom, with his back to me. He had said, 'You already have me, Abby. Don't make me say it like a script.'
A script.
He had memorized the script. He had stood under Silverpeak's pillars and said every line in his full voice and not once stumbled.
I sat down on the kitchen floor. I did not decide to. My knees simply chose for me.
My wolf, who had been a small low hum at the back of my chest for seven years, lifted her head.
I did not have a name for her anymore. I had stopped using it. She remembered her own.
'Selene,' I whispered, because she was already looking at me.
She did not speak. She only pressed.
It is hard to describe what a wolf feels like when she has been folded small for years and finally sets one paw down inside you. It is not pain. It is the absence of a pain you stopped noticing. My ribs felt suddenly the wrong size. My hands were warm.
I heard the front door.
I was on my feet before I understood I had stood. I smoothed my dress. I tucked my hair behind one ear. Old habits. Stupid, stupid habits.
Owen came down the hall first. He smelled like another woman's perfume and a banquet's wine and the cold of a long drive. He did not look at the table.
Nylah was behind him.
She was carrying a small leather weekend bag. Just one. The kind of bag a woman brings when she expects the rest of her things to follow her in daylight.
Owen stopped in the kitchen doorway. He saw the candles. He saw the roast. He saw me.
His face did a small, tired thing. Not guilt. Inconvenience.
'Abby. You're up.'
I did not answer.
He turned half toward Nylah, the way an Alpha turns to introduce a guest he has already decided the room will accept. 'You remember Nylah. We're doing a joint training integration this quarter. I want her close to the command structure. She'll take the guest quarters for now.'
For now.
Nylah lifted her chin a quarter inch and gave me a smile so careful it could have been measured with a ruler. 'Luna,' she said, sweet as syrup, soft enough that the title sounded like a question she already knew the answer to.
My wolf did not growl. She watched. There is a difference, and Nylah did not know it yet.
Owen reached past me to set his keys in the bowl by the stove, and his sleeve brushed the edge of the table where the candle had burned down to a stub. He did not notice. He had not, I realized, looked at the table once.
'Make up the bed in the east guest room,' he said over his shoulder, the way he had said a thousand small instructions across seven years. 'She's had a long night.'
I looked at him.
I looked at her.
I looked at the phone in my hand, where his voice was still queued up, ready to say the vow again.
And I said nothing.
My silence has always been the thing he trusted most about me. Tonight I let him keep trusting it, because Selene, who had been quiet for seven years, had just begun to count.
