Returning His Cord, Choosing His Rival

The night Declan Ashford announces Lyra Pemberton as his chosen mate candidate, everyone in the pack assumes I'll show up and make it a problem.

I don't go.

What happens instead: I'm sitting on the floor of Cael Voss's dorm room, wearing a training jacket that belongs to him, when I notice his mattress looks like it was designed as a form of discipline.

"Does that thing have rocks in it?" I ask, tilting my head back to look at him.

Cael doesn't turn around. He reaches sideways without looking, picks up the spare blanket folded at the end of his bed, and drops it in my direction.

"Complain or leave," he says.

"Complain," I say, catching the blanket. "Keep the bed. I'm not going anywhere."

I'd known about Lyra for weeks before Declan made it official. Someone always tells you these things in a pack this size—usually with good intentions and no sense of timing.

She was from a visiting pack, the kind of beautiful that registered from across a room. Somewhere in the past month, Declan had decided she was exactly what he wanted.

I'd had time to figure out what I was going to do about it.

Three hours before the ceremony, I went to find Elder Vance.

The protection cord Declan gave me two years ago was folded into a small box, the same way it had been when he first pressed it into my hands. I'd kept it like that the whole time. I don't entirely know why—some need to give it back clean, maybe. To have it leave the way it arrived.

"Please get this to him after the ceremony," I said, setting the box on the elder's desk. "Tell him the cord is returned, and that I appreciated it."

I left before he could ask me anything.

Protection cords aren't nothing. When Declan had given me one two years ago, the pack understood what it meant: that I was in his orbit, that he'd extended something in my direction, that there was a shape to what we were to each other.

I'd lived inside that shape. Maybe that's not the same as wanting it, but it had been enough—or I'd told myself it was.

Anyway. I walked out of the elder's office with empty hands and went to find somewhere quiet to wait out the rest of the afternoon.

The ceremony went the way these things go. Declan made his announcement, Lyra stood next to him looking exactly right, and for a while the crowd was mostly interested in the spectacle.

Then people started noticing I wasn't there.

"She'll show," someone said. "She has to. Give it a minute."

They gave it more than a minute. Someone said maybe she was on her way. Someone else said the cord had to mean something to her, that she wouldn't just—

"I'll always think of her like a younger sister." Declan's voice, in that particular register he uses when he wants to sound reasonable and generous at the same time. "If she comes to me, I'll hear her out. But I can't keep the cord in place just because she asks. That wouldn't be fair to Lyra."

Everyone nodded. It was a very reasonable thing to say.

He checked his phone before the night was over. Nothing.

Elder Vance found him in the parking lot after.

Declan opened the box, looked at the cord folded inside—intact, not a thread out of place—and stood there longer than he probably intended to.

"She'll fall apart," I heard the next day, from someone who thought they had a read on the situation. "That's just who she is. Give her a week."