Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Aria's POV

I woke up sick.

The room tilted when I sat up and kept tilting, and there was a taste in my mouth like something had died in it, sour and thick and clinging. My skin was too hot. When I stood, my legs nearly went out from under me, and I had to catch the wall.

Nerves, I told myself.

Four nights of barely sleeping and a stomach full of nothing but Celeste's tea. Of course I felt terrible. Anyone would.

I never once looked at the cup drying on the shelf.

I washed until my arms were raw.

Because I could smell it on myself again, that wrongness that had been getting worse all week, and no amount of scrubbing shifted it. I changed my shift twice. I crushed lavender between my palms and worked it into my wrists and the hollow of my throat, and underneath it, still, that sour thread.

I know bodies. I know what infection smells like and what fever smells like and what rot smells like.

This wasn't any of them.

So I landed where I always land, because two years in the Vale pack teaches you where to land.

It was me. It had always been me. Some flaw I'd carried my whole life that I could only now smell on myself, and every wolf in that yard had been smelling it for years.

But the rain.

That was what got me out the door.

I kept going back to it. Roman standing in the storm with the mask off, saying, I can't stop. The way he kissed me like it hurt him. The way he said my name over and over and the way he'd looked at my body, at all of me, like it was something he wanted and not something I should be apologizing for.

Nobody had ever looked at me like that.

The wolf in the rain was real. The wolf in the yard was the mask. I'd decided that, and I was standing on it.

Celeste came to help me dress.

She brushed my hair out and pinned it up and smoothed the plain grey dress across my shoulders, and she tipped her head a little when she was close to me, like she was checking something.

“There,” she said. “Look at you.”

“I look the same as always.”

“You look lovely.” She turned me by the shoulders. “Stop it.”

And I felt so much for her in that moment I could hardly breathe around it.

“Celeste,” I caught her hand. “You've been so good to me. This whole week, all of it. Whatever happens tonight, I want you to know that.”

Something crossed her face, quick, gone.

“That's what I'm here for,” she said.

The clearing was already full when we got there.

The whole pack, hundreds of wolves in a great ring under a full moon, torches burning at the perimeter, the elders standing at the center stone with their heads bowed. Nobody spoke above a murmur. There's a particular silence to that many wolves waiting on the Goddess, and it presses on your chest.

The way it works is this. The pack stands in the ring. The elders call the moon down. And then the bonds surface on their own, wolf recognizing wolf across the grass, and the pair walks out to be named.

You don't choose. You're chosen.

The first pair went almost at once.

A young wolf from the eastern line and a girl I'd stitched a hand for last spring, both of them turning at the same moment and finding each other across the ring, and the whole pack came apart cheering. Someone's mother was sobbing at the edge. They walked to the center with their faces lit up like torches, and the elders named them, and the noise went up again.

Then another pair. Then another.

It kept happening. Over and over, that roar of joy rolling around the clearing, and I stood there with my hands cold and my dress sticking to my back and thought that this was the happiest night this pack ever has.

I was at the very back.

Same place I'd stood for the announcement, half behind wolves a head taller than me, where nobody would have to look at me.

The sickness was worse. Sweat at my hairline and a shake in my hands I couldn't stop, and twice I nearly turned around and went home.

The old me would have.

The old me would have found a reason to stay in the healing house and hear about it in the morning.

But I had the rain. So I stayed.

Roman came in, and the whole clearing turned toward him.

Of course it did. The future Alpha on the night the Goddess hands him a Luna, and he knew exactly how he looked walking in, chin up, shoulders back, Doran at his shoulder, and half the high-born females in the pack rearranging themselves so they'd be in his eyeline.

He didn't look at the back of the ring.

Not once.

And then the pull started.

Not the small tug I'd been crushing on for months. This was my wolf coming up off the floor of me and straining across that clearing toward him hard enough that I had to lock my knees. It was the rain again, but worse, but more, and I stood there gripping my wrists, trying to hold still.

It wasn't foolishness.

I understood that, right then, with a kind of terrible clarity. It had never been foolishness. Not once, not from the first day.

Then the bond surfaced, and the whole clearing felt it.

It rolled out from us like a stone dropped in water. The elders' heads came up. The murmuring stopped dead. Every single wolf in that ring turned at the same time, and every single one of them turned to look at the back.

At me.

It was stronger than any pair they'd named that night. I could feel that too, somehow ours had announced itself louder than all of them.

The silence went on and on.

Roman turned.

He found me across the ring, and I watched it hit him exactly as hard as it hit me. He took a step before he knew he was doing it. His hand came halfway up. His whole body swung toward me like something being pulled.

And his face…

For one second his face was the face from the storm. Open. Stunned. Young.

He was there. I saw him.

Then he came two steps closer, and my scent reached him.

I watched it happen, and I didn't understand what I was watching. His head jerked back. His lip pulled off his teeth before he could stop it, and he made a sound in his throat like a wolf recoiling from something spoiled, and he stopped dead in the grass.

The pull was still dragging him forward.

And everything else in him was trying to get away.

The wolves nearest me caught it too.

I saw their faces change, that same flinch, noses wrinkling, and a whisper went out from them and ran around the ring like fire in dry grass. Somebody near the front laughed, one sharp, disbelieving bark of it, and then somebody else did.

And I understood what the pack had decided in that half-second, all of them at once, without a single word passing between them.

That the wrongness was just me.

That, of course, is the fat little herb girl who smelled like that. That the Goddess had made a joke and they'd all been let in on it.

I walked out anyway.

I don't know where I got it from. I stepped out of that ring and crossed the open ground toward him with two hundred wolves watching and my hope right there on my face for all of them to see, because I knew him. I'd been out in the rain with him. I knew who was underneath.

I got close enough to speak low.

“It's alright,” I said. “Roman. It's alright, I know you.”

He wouldn't look at me.

“I know what you said to me in the rain. You said you couldn't stop, you said—”

“Shut up.”

His eyes flicked to the ring. Then back. Then to the ring again.

And I watched the terror go across his face, not of the bond, not of me. Of them. Of what I was one breath away from saying out loud in front of every wolf he'd spent his whole life performing for.

“Don't you say another word,” he said, very quiet, very fast.

“I only meant—”

“I said shut your mouth.”

Then he chose.

He stepped back from me and made it big, made it theatrical, threw his arm up across his face like he was shielding himself, and he pitched his voice to carry all the way to the back of the ring.

“Goddess above, can you smell her?” He turned, playing to them, the way he played to the fence in the yard. “This is the joke? This? Look at it. It's a fat pig in a grey sack, and it smells like something crawled under the healing house and died.”

The laughter came in behind him like water through a broken dam.

“Wash, at least,” he said. “For pity's sake. Have some shame.”

He never looked at my face.

Not while he said any of it.

Then he lifted his chin and spoke the words that don't come back.

“I, Alpha Roman Vale, reject Aria Winters as my mate.”

The clearing went silent for half a second.

Long enough for me to see something move behind his eyes. Long enough for me to see that some part of him knew, right then, exactly what he'd just done and that there was no undoing it.

Then the bond shattered, and I found out what that feels like.

It isn't poetic. It's something tearing loose behind your ribs, low, like a hand reaching in and pulling. My vision went white round the edges. My legs stopped working from the knees down.

And my wolf. My small, quiet wolf that had been awake for the first time in her life not four days ago in the rain had come roaring up off the floor at me tonight.

She howled.

Once. Inside me, where nobody could hear it but me, raw and confused, the sound of something that couldn't understand what had just been taken.

And then she went silent.

Completely. Like a door shutting in an empty house.

I have never been that alone.

(Far across the clearing, one old elder's head snapped up, because for half a heartbeat something in that shattering had flared too bright, too old, wrong for a wolf as small as everyone said she was. It was gone before he could name it. He told no one. Not for years.)

“I claim Celeste as my chosen Luna.”

He didn't even wait.

I was still going down, and he’d already said it, and Celeste stepped out of that ring like she’d walked the path a hundred times before because she had, I understand that now, she’d walked it in her head every night for two years, composed and gracious and beautiful, crossing to his side while the pack roared its approval.

She turned back to look at me on the ground.

And she smiled.

They left me there.

The celebration started up again like nothing had happened, and wolves stepped over my legs and around my shoulders to get to it, and Roman walked off with Celeste on his arm and never turned his head once.

Not one of them stopped.

I have treated half of these wolves. I have sat up all night with their pups and closed their wounds and ground their herbs for two years, and not one of them crouched down to see if I was breathing.

I lay on the trampled grass with my wolf gone silent inside me and the moon overhead and the whole world going dark at the edges.

And that’s when it came to me.

Slow, at the very last edge of consciousness, broken.

The sour taste that wouldn’t rinse out. My scent turned wrong days ago, and no washing on earth is fixing it. Every night this week, Celeste stood over me with a warm cup held out in both hands.

Drink. Every single night. Insisting.

The last thing I thought before the dark took me was three words.

The tea. Celeste.