Chapter 3

Elowen

I didn't get a single second to arrange my face before he walked in.

Three years I'd pictured this a hundred different ways — Elias crossing a room toward me, that half-smile he used to wear like it belonged to me and nobody else. In every single version, he saw me first.

He didn't see me at all.

He walked straight past me like I was a fence post and went to Celeste.

For one stupid, suspended second I told myself he simply hadn't recognized me — three years and a ruined dress and a wolf gone silent will do that to a person's outline. Then I caught my parents' faces. Both of them had gone carefully, guiltily blank, wearing the exact expression of people who'd known this was coming and hadn't warned me.

Elias pulled my sister into his arms like he'd done it a thousand times before.

He probably had.

"Gods, I missed you," he murmured into her hair, not lowering his voice, not noticing there was an audience at all. "Mate."

Celeste laughed and swatted at his chest. "Elias! My parents are standing right there." A little pout, a little preen. "Besides — didn't we just see each other last night?"

Last night.

Something in my chest went white-hot and very, very loud.

"Fuck." The word came out of me one syllable at a time, like a blade being set down on a table. "Elias. Since when do you have a new mate?" My voice climbed, cracked, kept climbing anyway. "And she just happens to be my sister?"

That got his attention.

He turned, and I watched recognition arrive in pieces — confusion first, then something closer to alarm, his nose wrinkling like my scent alone had answered a question he'd been hoping nobody would ask. He actually stepped back. Stepped back. From me.

"You—" His eyes swept over the dress, the silence where my wolf should have been. "You're... Elowen?"

"Oh, good." I put my hands on my hips, because it was that or use them for something worse. "At least you still remember my name."

He had the decency to look uncomfortable for about a second and a half before the excuses started arriving.

"Look — this isn't something you can blame me for. Three years, Elowen. You know what three years does to a wolf. My mate gone, no contact, not even a thread of the bond left to hold onto." He dragged a hand through his hair. "Every night was agony. You have no idea."

Something in me stopped being sad and became something else entirely.

I crossed the yard and had a fistful of his collar before I'd finished deciding to. "Agony." I laughed, and it didn't sound like laughing. "The agony of a cold bed? Of wanting somebody warm in it?" I yanked him down to my eye level. "Let me tell you about agony, Elias. Agony was grinding tinctures until my knuckles split open and healed wrong. Agony was standing at an operating table steadying a man's shoulders while he screamed, every night, for three years. Agony was feeling my own wolf get poisoned a little more each day and not being able to reach her." I let go of him like he was something I'd found on the bottom of my shoe. "Yours was inconvenience."

He didn't fight me off. Didn't even try. Just stood there and let me hold his collar and stared at the ground like a man waiting out weather he knew he'd earned.

Celeste peeled my fingers off him one at a time, unhurried, like she had all the time in the world. Then she wiped her hand down her skirt — actually wiped it, like I'd left a residue on her — and sighed at me with something that badly wanted to pass for patience.

"You really can't blame him for this." She said it slowly, kindly, the way you'd explain something to a child who wasn't following. "It's the Moon Goddess's design, Elowen. Your wolf's been rotting through for who knows how long — that's exactly why the old bond snapped. We're both young. Both strong." A little shrug. A little smile that knew precisely how sharp it was. "Is it really a mystery why the thread found its way to me instead?"

"Strong." My hands were shaking. "Don't you dare say that word to me. Who do you think paid for that strength, Celeste? And what — my mate too? You couldn't leave me even that?" I spat on the ground near Elias's boots. "Forget it. He's not my man anymore. He's garbage."

"Elowen!" My father, low and sharp, eyes darting toward the gate like the whole pack might be listening. "Control yourself. That is the Alpha's son — the future Alpha of this pack. You provoke him and there won't be a place for you here. Not in this pack. Not in this house."

"Then there won't be." I didn't even have to think about it. "I'll leave. This stopped feeling like a home somewhere in the last ten minutes anyway, and this pack made it very clear on the walk in that nobody wants anything that came out of that hollow."

"You—!" My father started, but Elias raised a hand, that awful gentleness sliding back into his voice like he was doing me a favor.

"It's fine. It's fine. She's overwhelmed, that's all — she can't take it all in at once." He looked at me with something that almost passed for guilt, if guilt could sit that comfortably on a person. "I'll go. Give you all some room." A glance back at my sister, warm and easy, like I hadn't just bled all over this yard. "Celeste. See you tonight."

And then he was gone, like he'd never been the reason my entire world had cracked down the middle.

The second the gate latched, Celeste groaned and dropped the sympathetic act altogether.

"Ugh. There goes my whole evening. He was supposed to take me dress shopping — there's an Alpha's banquet tonight, and now—"

"That was a real opportunity for this family." My father actually sounded wounded about it. "That kind of connection doesn't come around twice, Celeste."

"I'll take you myself, then." My mother sighed, already recalculating, already moving on. "No sense crying over it. Some people simply can't read a room."