Chapter 5

Chapter 5:

Celeste’s POV

I watched her come up the path from my window.

Mud to the knees, hair still wet, that ridiculous healer’s kit hanging off her shoulder. She’d been out all night, and she was walking like and this is the part I had to see twice to believe she was walking like someone had wanted her.

Chin up. Shoulders back.

Glowing.

For two years I’d watched Aria Winters move through this pack with her eyes on the ground, and one storm had done that to her.

Something had happened out there.

I went down to meet her because the first rule of managing anyone is that you never let them wonder where you are.

“Look at the state of you,” I said, laughing, pulling a leaf out of her hair. “You look like you’ve been dragged through a river backwards. Come here, I’ll help you dry off.”

She let me fuss over her.

She always did. That’s the thing about wolves nobody’s ever been kind to them. Give them one warm hand, and they’ll follow it anywhere.

I cataloged her while I did it. The flush high on her cheeks had nothing to do with cold. Rain on her, and mud, and underneath both of those, faint but there, something else.

Him.

“You’re in a mood,” I said lightly. “What happened?”

And she almost told me.

I watched it rise in her, the way it does with wolves who have never had a single secret worth keeping and don’t know how to carry one. Her eyes went bright. She opened her mouth. She got as far as, “Celeste, I—”

And then she stopped and smiled at nothing and shook her head.

“It’s nothing,” she said. “I just think things might be about to change.”

I have never in my life wanted to slap someone so badly.

“Change how?”

“I don’t want to say it out loud. In case I ruin it.” She actually laughed. “That’s stupid, isn’t it?”

“Not stupid at all,” I said. “Go and get dry.”

She went.

And the second she was out of sight, I let my face do what it wanted to do.

Two years. Two years of saving her pastries and asking how she slept and sitting in that herb hole listening to her talk about wounds. Two years of touching her arm and telling her she deserved better and watching her light up like a candle every single time, because she is so starved for one kind word that she has never once stopped to ask why the prettiest, most sought-after wolf in the Vale pack chose to spend her mornings with the fat little healer nobody else could name.

Every warm word was a hook.

She swallowed every one of them.

I want to be precise about why I hate her, because it isn’t what people would assume.

I built everything I have.

Every alliance. Every friendship. Every invitation, every seat near the front, every wolf who says my name with respect. I learned which females mattered and made myself necessary to them. I learned what Roman Vale’s mother liked and made sure I liked it too. I have never once in my life been handed a single thing, and I have clawed my way up this pack with my nails, smiling the entire way.

And Aria Winters has never asked for anything.

She sits in that room grinding herbs, wanting nothing, doing nothing, being nothing, and the Goddess looked down at all of us, at me, at every wolf who has spent her whole life earning it, and handed her the one thing I couldn’t take.

Because that’s the problem. That’s the actual problem.

I can win beauty. I can win status. I can win a room full of wolves in an evening, and I can absolutely win Roman Vale, because Roman Vale is not difficult.

But a fated bond isn’t won. It’s given.

It’s the only prize in this entire pack that no amount of work can reach, and it was given to the wolf who has done the least with her life of anyone I have ever met.

So fine.

I can’t take the bond.

I can poison it.

Let me say the other thing plainly, since there’s no one here to hear it.

I don’t love Roman Vale.

I have never loved Roman Vale. I’ve watched him for three years the way you’d watch a horse you were thinking of buying, and here’s my assessment: he is vain, he is frightened underneath it, and he cannot make a single decision without checking the room first to see how it looks.

He doesn’t need to be loved. He needs to be admired.

Give a wolf like that a mirror, and he will follow it off a cliff.

That’s not an insult. It’s a tool. I’ve never once resented Roman for being easy to steer, I’m grateful for it.

What I want has never been him.

What I want is the title.

Luna of the Vale pack. Wolves stepping aside when I walk. Elders asking my opinion. A whole pack arranging itself around me the way it currently arranges itself around Roman, and never, not once for the rest of my life, being anyone’s second choice about anything.

Aria isn’t my rival.

Rival is far too flattering a word. Aria is a thing standing between me and a throne, and things that stand in the way get moved.

I knew before she did, by the way.

The training yard, days ago, Doran bleeding all over the dirt and Aria kneeling in it, and Roman walked past her close enough to brush her shoulder.

I wasn’t watching Roman.

I was watching her.

And her face, Goddess, her face. It came apart for half a second before she got it back under control, and I have never seen anything so naked in my life. A wolf who had just felt her bond move and was trying, desperately, to pretend she hadn’t.

I smiled. I couldn’t help it.

I saw it before she did. I have been ahead of her this entire time.

I’d been in her room by then, obviously.

Twice, while she was working. It took me one visit to find the loose board in the corner because she may as well have drawn a map she looks at it every time she walks in.

Letters. Dozens of them, tied with twine, and I sat on her floor and read every single one.

And they told me nothing.

No names. No pack. No signature, not even at the bottom of the private ones. Just home, over and over, and a family she misses, and this is the part that has bothered me for months a name she left behind because it was too big.

Too big.

Nobody hides a nothing life. Nobody runs from a small name. Whatever she is, whatever she was, she came here to be less than she is, and I have never in my life met anyone who could afford to do that.

I put the letters back exactly as I found them.

I’ve been chewing on it ever since.

The potion I got months ago was from a wolf two territories east who deals in things packs hang you for.

I traveled to him myself. I paid what he asked, and I’m not going to write down what that was.

“You understand what this is,” he said when he finally put the vial in my hand. “This isn’t a love charm, girl. This is banned in every territory I’ve ever crossed. Use it on a fated bond and they don’t exile you for it. They open your throat in front of the whole pack.”

“I understand.”

“They’d be right to,” he said.

I bought two vials.

I’ve never trusted a single dose of anything in my life, and I wasn’t about to start with this. The second one is hidden where nobody will ever find it.

Because here’s what it actually does, and it’s better than breaking a bond.

You can’t break a fated bond. Nothing can. The Goddess names who She names, and no herb on earth changes it.

What this does is corrupt the scent.

To a mate, his other half is supposed to smell like the best thing he’s ever encountered, like home, like belonging, like something his wolf recognizes before his mind catches up. That’s the recognition. That’s the whole mechanism.

This turns it sour.

She’ll still be his. He’ll still feel the pull, hard, dragging at him. He just won’t be able to stand the smell of her while it happens.

He’ll be bonded to something that repulses him in front of two hundred wolves, and he’ll have to decide right there what to do about it.

That’s not severance.

That’s so much better than severance.

I started the tea the night before the storm.

Small doses, one cup an evening, because a wolf as sharp as Aria is about bodies would notice a sudden change. Slow is better. Slow lets her explain it away.

And it worked beautifully. Sour on her clothes. Wolves’ noses twitching when she passed in the yard, and their faces went confused. She washed everything she owned twice and checked her herbs for spoilage and never once looked at the cup in her hands.

Every night she drank it.

Every night she thanked me for it.

And then the storm.

She came up that path glowing, and I understood immediately what had happened, and for the first time in months I was actually afraid.

The pull broke through.

Four nights of corruption in her blood, and the bond shoved past all of it and put them in the same room anyway, which means the brew is weaker than the thing it’s fighting.

It should have held. It should have held, and it didn’t.

If Roman gets any real time near her before the moon rises, if he gets close enough for his wolf to override his nose even once more, he’ll push through it entirely, and then she’ll be Luna and I’ll be the pretty friend who stood at the back and clapped.

Not happening.

So I made the decision.

The rest of the vial. All of it. One cup, tonight, timed so the corruption peaks precisely when the Goddess speaks their names.

A dose that size in one go could make her genuinely ill. Vomiting. Fever. Worse.

Let her be sick.

Let her be sick in front of every single one of them.

I made it carefully.

Chamomile and honey to cover the bitterness, valerian for the sleep, and then the vial, emptied all the way, the last drops shaken out. I rinsed the glass twice, dried it, and put it away where it goes.

I practiced my voice while I stirred.

Last one, I promise. Warmer. Last one, I promise.

There.

She opened the door before I’d finished knocking, because of course she did.

“Last one, I promise,” I said, holding it out. “Big day tomorrow. You need to sleep, Aria, you look like you’ve been awake for a week.”

“I probably have.”

She took it in both hands, the way she always does. Grateful. Every time. Two years, and she has never once gotten used to being brought anything.

She drank half of it standing up.

“Celeste,” she said, and stopped, and I watched her decide to say the sincere thing, which is a habit of hers I find genuinely difficult to sit through. “I don’t know what I’d do without you. Really. You’re the only real friend I’ve ever had here.”

And something moved in my chest.

It did. I’m not going to pretend it didn’t. Some small, useless thing turned over behind my ribs, and I felt it clearly for about half a second.

I put it down.

I have clawed my way up from nothing, and I did not do that by letting small, useless things turn over in my chest at the wrong moment.

I gave her my warmest smile. My best one. The one I’ve been sharpening on her for two years.

“That’s what I’m here for,” I said.

She finished the cup.

And it came on her faster than any night before, exactly as it should have, her eyes going heavy, her words slowing down and thickening.

“I think,” she said, sitting down hard on the edge of the bed, “I think tomorrow might be. I’ve got this feeling, Celeste, like maybe things will be—”

“Different?”

“Different,” she agreed, smiling with her eyes already shut. “Maybe he’s not what everyone—”

And she was gone.

Mid-sentence. Out cold, half-dressed, her hand still curled around the empty cup.

I took it off her carefully and set it down.

Then I sat on the edge of her bed and waited, unhurried, until her breathing went deep and slow, and I could smell it happening under her skin, the sweetness turning, curdling all the way through, going wrong in a way no washing on earth would fix.

It’s done.

She’ll wake tomorrow, and she’ll wash, and she’ll put on whatever plain thing she thinks is pretty, and she’ll walk into that clearing with hope all over her face, and she will smell, to the one wolf in the world who was made for her, like something rotting.

I leaned down close to her ear.

“You’ll thank me one day,” I whispered. “He’d have ruined you anyway. Wolves like Roman ruin soft things, it’s what they’re for.”

She didn’t stir.

“By tomorrow night, Roman Vale won’t be able to stand the smell of you,” I said. “And he won’t say it quietly, because he never says anything quietly. He’ll say it in front of every wolf in this pack, and he will never be able to take it back.”

I smoothed her hair back off her face, the way a friend would.

“And when they’ve all watched him throw you away,” I said, “I’ll be the one standing beside him.”

Then I blew out the candle and left her sleeping.