Half-Claimed

My twin is wearing my wedding dress.

She’s standing on the platform in the fitting room — the raised one in the center with the floor-to-ceiling mirrors on three sides — and the ivory silk falls from her shoulders to the floor in a clean line. The bodice is structured, nipped in at the waist, cut low across the collarbone. It was measured on my body eight weeks ago. The seamstress wrapped the tape around my ribcage and I breathed in and held still and she wrote everything down in a little leather notebook. My measurements. My design. My dress.

It fits Soleil perfectly. Of course it does. Same body, same frame, same measurements to the quarter inch. We're twins, after all, and if she's muscular from training for war, training to become a healer isn't exactly sedentary. The seamstress hasn’t had to adjust a single pin.

Soleil’s hair is down, loose and layered and catching the window light. The same face as my face is in the reflection, tilted slightly, and wearing a half-smile. She’s not trying it on. She’s wearing it — I can see the difference in her shoulders, which are relaxed, and her hands, which rest easily at her sides. She’s not being careful with it. It’s already hers.

Ronan is standing at the base of the platform.

I smell him before I fully register him — cedar and skin-heat, his specific scent, the one the bond locked onto when I was eighteen and my wolf knew him across a crowded hall. The bond pulls. It always pulls when he’s close, a low tug behind my sternum, and for one stupid second my body leans toward the doorway the way it always does when he’s in a room. Toward my mate.

He’s looking up at her.

His lips are parted. His gray eyes are wide and soft and hungry, and his whole body is angled toward her, leaning in, chin tilted up. I have studied this man’s face for three years. We've been sharing a bed for over two. I know his meeting expression, his strategy expression, his public-address expression where his jaw sets and his eyes sweep the room. I know his careful face — the one he wears with me. Attentive. Considered.

This isn’t any of those.

He’s looking at my twin in my wedding dress and he is happy. Not strategizing or assessing. Just happy — the pure, uncomplicated kind that starts in your chest and radiates outward to soften your face and shoulders. The kind you can't fake.

I have never seen this expression on his face. Not once in three years.

The seamstress is kneeling at the hem, mouth full of pins, making adjustments. She says something I can’t understand. Soleil laughs — her real laugh, low and loose, starting in her chest. I’ve known that laugh since before I had words for anything. Ronan smiles.

Nobody turns toward the doorway.

My hand is on the doorframe. I don’t remember putting it there. My knuckles are white against the wood and I’m gripping it hard enough that the grain bites into my palm, and I don’t move — I don’t step in and I don’t step back, I just stand there with my hand locked on the frame and the bond pulling me toward a man who is looking at my sister the way I have wanted him to look at me for three years. The way I thought he would, after we got married.

Something comes out of my throat. Not a word — just air, a caught breath, too loud for the hallway.

Soleil’s head starts to turn.

I step back. One step. Two. My heel finds the hallway carpet. I ease the door most of the way closed before she can find the doorway, before she can find me in it. Through the narrowing gap I can still see them — my dress, my sister, my mate, reflected in six mirrors, and none of those mirrors contain me.

There’s a bench at the end of the east wing corridor. I sit down and put my hands between my knees.

I’m shaking. Not my hands — all of me, from the jaw down, a full-body tremor I can’t clamp. My teeth are clicking together. I press my palms flat against my thighs and push down hard and think stop, stop, stop it and my body doesn’t listen, it just keeps shaking, and for ten or fifteen seconds I sit on this bench and I am not in control of a single thing that is happening to me.

Then it passes. It crests, and it rolls through me, and what’s left on the other side is cold and wrung out and very, very still.

My fingers are numb. That’s normal — I run cold, always have, hands and feet and the tip of my nose. Ronan keeps our thermostat at seventy-four because he hates blankets and I don’t complain because his body puts off heat like a furnace, and when I press my feet against his calves at three a.m. he grumbles but doesn’t pull away. This morning I woke up with my face against his shoulder and his arm heavy across my ribs and the room thick with cedar and skin-heat and my vanilla and orange blossom cologne — his scent, the bond-scent, the one that makes my wolf go quiet and settled — and I lay there for a minute just breathing him in before the alarm went off.

He was in the kitchen when I came down. Leaning against the counter, coffee in one hand, phone in the other, scrolling through something with his brow slightly drawn. He looked up when I rounded the corner and his face changed — just the mouth relaxing, the eyes warming half a degree. It’s small and it’s mine and I have loved that micro-shift for three years.

He caught my wrist when I reached for his coffee. Pulled me a step closer, his thumb against my pulse point. The heat of his hand on my skin. Three years and something in me still thrilled every time we touched.

“Your hands are freezing,” he said.

“I know.”

“It’s July.”

“My hands didn’t get the memo.”

He smiled. Half a smile — just the left corner of his mouth, which is all I usually get. I told him about my fitting and he said “five weeks” and I said “five weeks” back and we stood in the kitchen and it felt like a promise.

That’s what I thought love looked like on Ronan Julian — the half-degree warming, the grip held a beat too long, the coffee offered without asking. Small things. Steady things. I built a whole future on steady. On being the calm one, the quiet person who doesn't make demands or add to his stress as heir to the Alpha.

I sit on the bench and I understand now that those small, steady things were the ceiling. They were everything he had for me. And what I just watched him aim at my sister, without knowing I was there — that open, hungry, unguarded look — that was something he never had to ration because he never gave it to me at all.

My phone buzzes. Claire, the seamstress: Running a bit behind! Give me twenty?

Twenty minutes. She needs twenty minutes to finish with the woman wearing my dress before she can start my appointment. My appointment. For my fitting. For my ceremony.

I text back: No rush. I’ll be here.

Forty minutes ago I stopped at Soleil’s quarters on my way to the east wing. Her door was open — always open, she treats privacy like a suggestion — and she was singing off-key in the bathroom.

“Sol.”

She poked her head out, toothbrush in her mouth, wet hair hanging loose. My face, mid-morning, still half-asleep. She grinned around the toothbrush and looked twelve years old.

“Mmph.”

“Fitting at eleven. Come with me? I need someone to tell me if the neckline is too much.”

She spat, rinsed, reappeared. “Can’t. Training block until noon. Kira’s running knife drills and if I skip again she’ll have me doing laps.”

“You outrank Kira.”

“Which is why I can’t skip. Morale.” She pointed the toothbrush at me. “Send me a picture. I’ll give you the honest assessment.”

“Your honest assessment is always ‘you look fine, stop worrying.’”

“Because you always look fine and you always worry.” She ducked back into the bathroom. “Go. Be gorgeous. I’ll see you at dinner.”

She had training until noon. Drills with Kira. That’s what she told me forty minutes ago, standing in her bathroom with toothpaste on her chin and my face grinning back at me.

The training grounds are behind the north building. Soleil’s quarters are on the west side. The guest room we’ve turned into a studio for Claire, who is also in charge of Soleil's bridesmaid dress and all six flower girls (can't leave out any of Ronan's nieces), is in the east wing. There is no version of her morning that routes her from training to this room by 10:57, in my dress, with the seamstress already on her knees pinning the hem like this was to be expected. The seamstress who just lied to me, the future Luna, as well.

My twin looked me in the eyes and said can’t, training block until noon and then she came here. She told me to send her a picture of the dress she was planning to wear.

I sit on the bench. The morning light makes long shapes on the floor. Down the hall, if I’m quiet enough, I can still hear her laughing in that room.

I love my sister. I need to say that now, here, on this bench, because I don’t know how much longer it’s going to be true.

I have loved her since we shared a crib and she cried louder and got picked up first and I learned to wait. She is the bright one, born twelve minutes ahead of me, Sun to my Moon, and I have never resented her for it. I braided her hair. She taught me to throw a punch. I reorganized the healer schedules while she ran Sentinel drills and I thought we’d found our lanes — warrior and diplomat, parallel and equal. I have wanted her to find her mate with a ferocity that surprised me, lying awake next to Ronan picturing her face when the bond finally hit. She deserved that. She deserved someone who looked at her the way —

The way Ronan just looked at her.

In my dress.

On my platform.

While I stood in the doorway and didn’t exist.

My hands are so cold I can’t feel the scar on my palm — the thin line across the right one, where a delirious patient in my second year of healer rotation lost control before he could shift back. That scar is the only mark on my body that’s mine alone. Soleil has a dozen combat scars the pack treats like medals. I have one, from a panicked patient, and right now I can’t even feel it.

I pull out my phone. I find next Tuesday in my calendar — the final fitting, last adjustment before the ceremony.

I delete it.

I put the phone down and press my hands between my knees again. Down the hall, my sister’s laugh is still carrying through the closed door. My mate is still in that room, looking at her with a face I’ve never earned.

Five weeks to the Luna Ceremony. I wonder which one of us he thinks is going to be standing next to him.

I wonder if he even knows yet.