Eighteen

I had imagined my eighteenth birthday a hundred different ways, and not one of them ended the way it did. That's the thing nobody tells you about being a wolf. You spend your whole childhood waiting for the moon-gathering after your eighteenth — the night your wolf is old enough to recognize its mate, the night the Goddess is supposed to show you the one person in the world made to stand beside you. Every girl in the Ashfall pack grows up on those stories. We trade them like sweets. We fall asleep on them. So when the gathering came, and the bonfire roared up against the dark, and three hundred wolves of three allied packs filled the clearing under a moon so full and low you could have touched it — I was not afraid. I was the opposite of afraid. I had my mother's silver earrings in my ears and my best friend Pia's hand crushed in mine, and I was so sure, so completely sure, that tonight the world was going to hand me something good. I felt the bond the moment he walked into the firelight. I want to be honest about that, because everything after depends on it. It was not a small thing. It was not a maybe. It was as if I had lived my whole life with a sound in my ears so constant I'd never known it was there — and then it stopped, and the silence where it had been was him. Kael Ashfall. The alpha. The alpha of my own pack, twenty-two years old and already wearing the weight of it in his shoulders, dark-haired and grim-mouthed, the most important person in three hundred miles. My mate. Pia felt me go rigid and followed my eyes and gasped. "Della," she whispered. "Della, that's —" "I know," I said. I couldn't feel my own mouth. "I know who it is." And here is the part I have replayed every single night for two years. He felt it too. I know he did. I have never let myself doubt that, not once, even when doubting it would have hurt less. Across forty feet of firelit clearing, in front of three hundred wolves, Kael Ashfall went still the way I had gone still. His head came up. His eyes found me — found me unerringly, the way a bond makes you find the one — and for one single suspended heartbeat I saw the recognition hit him, and I saw something open in his hard grim face, something young and stunned and almost glad. For one heartbeat. Then he closed it. I watched him do it. I watched a man take the best thing the Goddess had ever offered him and fold it shut like a door. "No." He said it loud enough for the whole clearing to hear. He had to — an alpha's rejection has to be witnessed, that's the old law, that's the cruelty built into the bone of it. He said it loud and flat and final, and the word went out across the bonfire and the gathered packs and landed on me like a roof coming down. "I reject the bond," Kael Ashfall said. "I reject the mate. Ashfall has no place for it." I never got to speak. That is the part that has lived under my skin for two years, sharper than the rejection itself. I never got to say one word. I didn't get to ask why. I didn't get to be angry, or proud, or even to refuse him back. The bond between us was real and enormous and mine, and he ended it in public before I had opened my mouth, and three hundred wolves turned to look at the girl the alpha had thrown away on her birthday. Pia's hand was the only thing holding me up. The fire kept roaring. The moon kept shining, low and full and indifferent. And somewhere under my ribs the bond didn't die clean — it tore, slow and wrong, the way a green branch tears instead of snapping. I did not cry in that clearing. I want that on the record too. I waited until I was alone.