Chapter 2 My Mate

KIERAN

The forest smelled wrong tonight. Not the usual rot and pine of rogue territory, but something sharper underneath it, something metallic that made the back of my throat itch. Vampire blood, spilled too close to wolf land for it to be an accident.

“Mark,” I said, staring at my advisor. “If you sight any rogue, let me know immediately.”

“Yes, your highness.”

There had been reports of blood near the border, vague enough that no one else could be trusted to investigate properly. I didn’t send scouts for things like this. I came myself, because I trusted my own eyes more than anyone else’s account, and because whatever waited out here, I intended to be the one who found it first.

We moved deeper into the trees, past the point where the wards thinned and the air changed, and that was when I felt it. A surge, sudden and violent, rolling through the ground like something tearing itself loose. I stopped walking before I even realized I had.

“Your highness?”

“A bond just broke,” I said. “Wolf-born. Close.”

I’d felt it a handful of times in all my centuries, and it never got easier to recognize that particular violence. It wasn’t my business. Pack matters rarely were, and I told myself that even as my feet were already carrying me toward it, faster than I meant to walk.

The trees thinned ahead, and that was when I saw a she-wolf. She was on the ground, barely upright, blood soaking through torn clothing, chain marks raw and blistered against her wrists where silver had clearly been used against her.

A discarded wolf, left to die the way packs sometimes did when they wanted someone gone without dirtying their own hands. I had seen this before. I told myself that was all this was.

Then the wind shifted. Her scent reached me, and something in my chest turned over so hard it nearly knocked the breath out of me. 

Mine.

The word rose in me before I could question it, before I could remind myself that vampires did not think of wolves that way, that whatever I was feeling had no business existing. 

I stood there a moment too long, just staring at her, my jaw tight, my hands closing slowly at my sides like my body had decided something my mind hadn’t caught up to yet.

“My mate,” I said quietly, to no one, to myself, testing the shape of the words in my mouth like they belonged to someone else.

“Your highness?” Mark asked, catching up beside me.

I didn’t answer him right away. I couldn’t. He followed my gaze to her, and I watched something shift in his expression too, confusion first, then a kind of careful alarm. “Your highness, that’s a wolf.

“I know what she is.”

“You’ve gone very still.”

“I’m aware.”

“Is something wrong?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said, and it was the closest thing to honesty I could give him, because I genuinely didn’t know what to call what was happening inside my own chest.

He crouched near her, reaching a hand toward her throat, likely to check for a pulse, and I moved before I decided to move at all.

“DO NOT TOUCH HER.”

I don’t remember crossing the distance between us. One moment I was standing still, the next I had him slammed against a tree hard enough to crack the bark, my hand fisted in his collar, my own reflexes outrunning my thoughts entirely.

Mark grunted, more startled than hurt, and didn’t fight me. “I’m sorry, your highness.”

I let him go. My hand was shaking, just slightly, and I hated that he’d seen it.I turned back to her. Her breathing was shallow, blood pooling beneath her in a way that told me exactly how little time was left.

Silver poisoning layered on top of a broken bond wasn’t something a wolf’s body was built to survive, and something in me recoiled violently at the thought of watching that happen, at the thought of turning around and leaving her here the way I would have left any other stranger.

My mind went back, unbidden, to the old prophecy, the one my court still whispered about even after all these years, the one I had long since decided was superstition dressed up as scripture. A wolf discarded by her own kind will rise wearing two crowns, and by her hand the imbalance between species will end.

I looked at her now, discarded exactly the way the old words described, dying in front of me at the precise moment I happened to be close enough to feel it happen.

“Could she be the one?” I thought, and the question unsettled me more than the pull in my chest had.

“Your highness,” Mark said slowly, reading something in my face I hadn’t meant to show him. “You’re not thinking of marking her.”

“I am.”

“No vampire has ever marked a wolf. Not once, in all our history. You don’t even know if it’s possible.”

“I know it’s the only thing that might work fast enough.”

“And if it kills her instead?”

“Then she dies either way,” I said. “I lose nothing by trying.”

I knelt beside her instead, tilted her head gently to the side, and let my fangs find the curve of her throat. She didn’t fight me. She was already too far gone to fight anything, and something about that, about how completely undefended she was in that moment, made the act feel heavier than I expected it to.

When it was done, I lifted her into my arms, and she felt impossibly light for someone who had survived what she’d survived. Her head fell against my shoulder, and for a moment I just stood there, looking down at her face, at the blood and the bruising and whatever had been done to her before I ever arrived.

“Mark,” I said, my voice steadier than I felt. “Let’s go.”

He fell into step beside me without further argument, though I could feel him glancing between me and the unconscious woman in my arms the entire way back through the trees, toward the wards, toward a court that had no idea what I was about to bring home with me, or what I had just done that could never be undone.

She stayed unconscious the entire way.