Paid in Regrets

The dress didn't fit, and that was the first thing, and I should have paid more attention to it.

It was Mara Lowell's dress from two seasons back, taken in at the waist by someone who had clearly never met me. It pulled too tight across the ribs, and every breath I took made the seams strain. I remember standing in the little back room off the ceremonial hall and listening to it happen, this small tearing sound under my arm every time I lifted my hands to fix my hair.

You would think that on the night I was finally going to belong, someone would have given me a dress that was actually mine. But that was not how it worked in the Ridgeback Pack, and it had never worked that way for me.

"Stop fidgeting," Della said. She was the old den mother who had raised the orphans, and she had one bobby pin between her teeth and both hands buried in my hair. "You want him to see a mess?"

"I want to breathe."

"Breathe after."

I didn't argue, because I never argued. Twenty years of being the pack's charity project teaches you exactly how much space you are allowed to take up, and the answer is not much. You say thank you and you keep your head down. You make yourself small enough that nobody has to think about where you came from, because nobody knows where you came from, and a wolf with no bloodline makes the pure ones nervous.

But that night I let myself hope. God, I let myself hope so hard that it felt like something moving under my skin.

Because the mating ceremony fixes everything. That is what they tell you from the time you can walk. The Moon Goddess reaches down and picks your other half out of the whole pack, and once you are bonded, you are not an orphan anymore. You are not a bloodline question mark. You are somebody's. You belong to someone, and belonging to someone means you finally get to stay.

I wanted to stay so badly that I could taste it.

Della finished my hair and stepped back to look at me, and something moved across her face that I did not understand until much later. It was not pride. It was closer to sorrow, the kind that arrives early because it knows the road.

"There," she said quietly. "You look like your mother might have."

"You knew my mother?"

"No, child." She would not meet my eyes. "Go on. They're waiting."

The hall was full, and that is the part I want you to hear before I tell you the rest. The whole pack was there. Every family and every elder had come, and the ceremonial fires were lit in their iron bowls down both walls, and the air was thick with woodsmoke and warm bodies and the pine oil they rub into the floor for the rite. It was beautiful. I truly thought it was beautiful, and I stood at the back of it believing the night belonged to me a little.

At the front, on the raised stone, stood Cassian Vaughn.

The heir was golden all over, the way the pure old families were, and he stood with that easy confidence of a man the ground itself had agreed to hold up. Every unbonded girl in that hall had spent years hoping the Goddess would hand her to him. I stood at the back in a dress that was not mine and told myself not to want it, and wanted it anyway, the way you want any door out of a small room.

The Elder began the rite with the old words, the ones about the moon binding blood to blood. He passed the ceremonial blade along the line, one wolf at a time, and each of us gave a single drop of blood into the fire so the Goddess could taste who we were. The fire took each drop and burned on, orange and ordinary, wolf after wolf after wolf.

When my turn came, my hand shook so hard that I nearly dropped the knife. I steadied it the way I steadied everything, quietly, without letting it show, and I gave my one drop into the flame.

And the fire turned white.

I had been to a dozen of these ceremonies, and I had never once seen the fire go white. The whole hall went silent with that thick kind of silence where you can hear the fires breathing. Every head in the room turned toward the front and the raised stone and Cassian.

Because the bond had chosen, and I felt it happen inside my chest. A hook sank into me and pulled, warm and certain, straight toward him, and the word arrived in my body before it ever reached my head. Mate. He was mine. I was his. The Goddess had reached into that hall of pure old blood and picked the orphan in the borrowed dress.

For one heartbeat, I was chosen.

I want you to sit in that heartbeat with me, because it is the last good thing that happened to me as the person I used to be.

Cassian looked down the length of the hall until he found me, and I watched him understand what the fire had done. His jaw went tight. Someone near the front laughed, one short ugly sound, and swallowed it. And Cassian Vaughn, my fated mate, the other half the Goddess herself had chosen for me, lifted his chin and said the word that ends everything.

"Rejected."

The bond did not break clean, and I need you to know that. It tore. It felt like a hand closing around something soft inside me and pulling it out through my ribs, and I made a sound I am not proud of, and my knees hit the stone floor before I understood that I was falling.

"Cass." That was Mara, at his side with her hand on his arm. She was already at his side, and I had not even noticed her up there. "People are watching."

"I know people are watching." He was not looking at me anymore. He was looking at his father and the elders, at all the pure old faces doing quiet math about what it meant that their heir had just been tied to a nobody. "Get her out of my hall."

Hands closed on my arms, and they were not gentle.

Here is the thing nobody tells you about rejection. The pain is not the whole of it. A rejected mate who keeps on living is a shame that follows a bloodline forever, because every time Cassian walked into a room for the rest of his life, someone would remember the night the Goddess handed the golden heir a girl from nowhere, and he had to say no. So it was not enough to put me out of the hall. A living shame keeps walking around.

They put me in the back of a truck. Two of Cassian's men rode with me, quiet the whole way, and I was still so wrecked from the bond tearing that I did not fight and did not scream. I just lay against the cold metal and watched the pines slide by overhead in the dark, and the truck carried me to the edge of the pack, to the Frostwater.

If you do not know it, the Frostwater is a gorge. It is a long black split in the land where the river runs a hundred feet down over ice that never fully melts, and it is the border. Past it lies the north, and the north is where the monster lives, and you do not go to the Frostwater at night. Every pup in the south learns that sentence before they learn to swim.

They stood me up at the edge. The wind came up out of the dark below, so cold it had a sound to it, a low hollow moan off the water far down.

"Nothing personal," one of them said, and he would not look at me either. What was it about that night that nobody could look at me. "You just can't be walking around."

"Please," I said, because it was the only word I had left.

He put his hand flat between my shoulder blades, and he pushed.

The cold came up to meet me. The wind screamed past my ears, and my borrowed dress tore loose at last, and the black water opened underneath me like a mouth. I had time for exactly one thought on the way down, and the thought was this. I never even found out who my mother was.

Then the Frostwater closed over my head, and that should have been the end of me.

It wasn't cold.

That was the first wrong thing. I had fallen a hundred feet into ice water in the dark, and it was not cold at all. It was warm, and it was silver, and somewhere inside all that warm silver dark, something enormous and patient turned toward me and spoke my name.

Sable.

I had never heard that voice before in my life.

But it knew exactly who I was.