His Runaway Hidden Mate

Sera

The dream had me before I had myself.

Darkness first, and air that smelled of resin and wet stone, the way the air smells up above the treeline where nobody goes. Then the eyes — two of them, catching what little light there was and holding it the way a wolf holds a scent, patient and starving. I knew what I was supposed to do. I had run the first time I dreamed it, that first week, when the memory was still jagged enough to throw me upright with my hands raised. That was before my body learned the dream by heart.

Then the heat of him. His mouth at my throat and along my jaw and in the hollow under my ear, my hands sliding up the wide plate of his back, the ridge of his spine, the dip at the small of it, the heavy muscle that rolled under my palms when he moved. I had gone where he put me. My hips had followed him without asking me first.

Under the smell of cedar and ash there was something darker, something cold and clean that made the muscles in my thighs go loose and useless, and I heard my own breath break into a sound I had never once made awake. He shifted his weight, and I felt the whole length of him press against the slick, aching place between my legs, hard and wrong and exactly what I wanted, and the shame of wanting it only made the wanting worse.

I arched up into him. His fingers dug into the back of my thigh, he dragged me in close, and I wrapped my legs around his waist — his, mine, the same thing by then — and then he was inside me in one long push that pulled a cry straight up out of my chest.

He held still. One heartbeat, two. Then he moved, and the wet sound of it, the way my body had already learned the rhythm of his, made me twist in the sheets and sob into his open mouth while the base of him slid hard and slow against that swollen little nerve until the whole dream went white and came apart.

I woke with my face wet and my thighs locked together, and for one long, stupid second I did not know where the dream stopped and the bed started.

Then I knew. And the shame came down on me like a dropped stone.

I dragged the blanket over my head and lay curled underneath it, breathing into the dark. The sheets were damp under my hips. The band of my underwear had soaked clean through, and the sweat at my temples had already gone cold. That was the fourth time that month. Fourth time in thirty-one days that my own body had carried me back up to the cold fir highlands and the man whose face I never saw, and laid me under him again while I slept.

I had not told one living person. Not my father. What was I going to say — that the wolfless girl had climbed to the high ground on a full moon to try for the wolf inside her, and had come back down with a stranger's scent worked into her skin and no name to put to it?

I pushed the blanket off, because lying there was making it worse. My mind kept reaching for the half of that night I could not get back — the important half, the beginning.

It was one month and a few days ago, the third full moon I had spent alone in the little clearing in the firs above the boundary, past the ridge where the hunters turn around. The first two moons, nothing. Not a stir. The third, sitting with my back against a trunk and my eyes shut, I had finally heard something wake up behind my ribs: a faint echo, like a second heart beating somewhere very far off, like a voice that was not mine saying my name without being made of words. It was small. It was there. I had been so careful not to move, afraid that moving would frighten it back down into the dark.

And then the wind turned, and there was a man in the clearing.

He came out of the trees still moving on four legs, straightening up as he crossed into the open, and I understood two things in the same breath: that he had been running the moon and had only just come back into his skin, and that he was naked. I scrambled to get my feet under me. He would see me, and by morning every wolf in the pack would know that Sera Voss went up the ridge on moon nights to cry over a wolf she did not have.

Then he turned his head and looked at me, and the world stopped being a place that made sense.

That is the part that shames me most — I had him inside me while I didn't know him at all. I remember the cedar and the ash and that cold clean thing underneath. I remember the sound that came out of my throat when he crossed the clearing, and how, when he tore my coat open and pulled me up against him, I did not put my hands on his chest to push him off. I put them in his hair.

I do not remember the walk down. I remember waking near dawn with my cheek on cold moss and my coat in ribbons and him gone, and the sky already going gray, and the firs absolutely silent.

I shook my head hard, the way you shake off cold, and stood up.

"Not today," I said out loud, to the empty room, because out loud makes it true. "I have one week to the next full moon and the wolf inside me heard me. Nothing that man did is going to take that away from me."

My hand had already gone behind me without my permission, flat against the small of my back on the left side, where the pale crescent had lived since before I could remember. It was warm — warmer than skin had any business being at six in the morning. It had been doing that since that night.

The mirror above the sink was a thing I had learned not to look into for long. Round face, a dust of brown freckles across the nose and under the eyes, dark hair that would not do anything but lie flat, and a body that had learned early to be wide instead of tall. Not what a warrior's daughter looks like. Not what anyone in that pack looks like. I looked long enough to check that nothing had changed, and then I brushed my teeth at the sink instead.

The phone rang while I was still buttoning my work shirt. A video call. My father's name on the screen.