Chapter 6—What The Moon Did.

Donald's POV

The gates opened as the car was approaching them. The sentinels were in position. The territory smelled of pine and cold earth — everything exactly as it should be.

Rowan met me at the entrance. His face was careful in a way I did not like.

"Where is she?"

"She at the east wing, on the second floor. She is quiet. Has not said much since she arrived."

"Injuries?"

"The swelling around her eye is significant. The cut on her cheek is recent like it happened within the last twenty-four hours. She cleaned it herself."

"What else?"

Rowan hesitated. That was unlike him.

"She saw someone shift in the courtyard. A sentinel who did not realize she was watching. She... did not take it well."

"She will adjust."

"Alpha, she has never seen anything like this. She is terrified. The wolves, the gates, the way the trees moved when you crossed the boundary — she thought she was hallucinating. She asked me twice if she was dreaming."

I said nothing for a moment. Then, "Where is she now?"

"East wing. Martha gave her tea. But he has not touched it."

"Call her down. I will meet her in the study."

"I can bring her something to eat first, let her settle."

"I said call her down, Rowan."

He held my gaze for a moment longer than he should. Then he nodded and went upstairs.

I waited in the study for five minutes. Then ten.

I reviewed the contract, scanned the pages Rowan had left on my desk. Her name was on the first page. Rebecca Sthalone. No address. No history. Exactly what I had asked for. Someone with nothing.

I heard footsteps on the staircase. Light and careful. The footsteps of someone who had learned to move quietly through spaces where noise had consequences.

I set the contract down and walked to the foot of the stairs.

She had not seen me yet. She had one hand on the railing and her eyes on the steps, moving with caution.

She was tiny inside the clothes Martha had found for her.

Her hair was loose. Her face—

Her face.

The swelling around her left eye had darkened to a deep bruise. The cut on her cheekbone was still raw — an open wound, barely scabbed. Someone had done that to her yesterday. For what reason? I wondered.

She looked up and saw me.

And immediately, her foot slipped.

I moved on instinct — up the remaining steps in two strides, and closed my hands around her arm to steady her. The moment my skin touched hers, the world split open.

Heat tore through me from the point of contact. Something beneath physical, something that bypassed every rational process I had and went directly to the wolf. The wolf that had been a manageable silence for eight years came awake with such force that I nearly lost my footing on the stairs.

MINE.

The word came from somewhere underneath my mind, from a place I did not govern. It came with a certainty that was total and entirely uninterested in my response to it.

She gasped. Her free hand flew to her neck. "What—" Her voice was small and shaking. "Why does my neck feel like it is burning? What did you do to me?"

I looked at her throat and saw it. Silver-white, glowing faintly at her collarbone, a crescent overlapping a wolf's paw, pressed into her skin as though it had always been there and had simply been waiting for this moment to become visible.

My mate's mark.

"No," I said. The word came out harder than I intended. I did not soften it.

"What?" She was still touching her neck, her eyes wide and confused, darting past me toward the courtyard where wolves still moved through the torchlight. "What is this? Who are you? What are those things out there, those animals. I saw a man turn into—"

"Breathe."

"Do not tell me to breathe! I saw something that is not possible. I am not supposed to be here. I signed a piece of paper. I did not agree to — to wolves."

I released her arm and stepped back. A full step. Then another. I put distance between us that my wolf screamed against. The bond pulled at my chest like a hook in flesh. Every instinct I had screamed at me to go back, to touch her again, to hold her and nor let go.

I pressed it all down.

Eight years of silence. And this was what the Moon had been keeping from me.

This.

A contract bride. A woman with a bruised face and too-large clothes and terror in her eyes. Someone who had been sold to me like a line item on a spreadsheet. Someone who flinched when I moved too fast. Someone who looked at my world like it was a nightmare she could not wake up from.

"This contract is terminated," I said. My voice was even. Controlled. "I do not want it, and I do not want whatever this is." I gestured toward the mark at her throat. "This bond, I reject it. Entirely and completely."

She stared at me. Her hand was still pressed to her collarbone, the mark still glowing faintly between her fingers.

"I do not —" She blinked. "I do not understand. What bond? What are you talking about?"

"It does not matter. What matters is that you need to leave. Tonight."

"Tonight." She repeated the word like it had no meaning. Her eyes moved past me again — to the courtyard, to the darkness beyond the torchlight where shadows moved in ways that were not human. She swallowed. I saw her remember the man who had turned into an animal right in front of her.

"I cannot," she said quietly. "I do not have—"

"I am not asking."

She opened her mouth. I saw her about to say something about the wolves, about the darkness, and about having nowhere to go, but I did not let her finish.

"Pack your things," I said. "You leave within the hour."

I turned and walked back down the stairs.

Every step away from her was physically painful. My wolf howled inside my chest. The bond flared and bit, and I pressed it down and kept walking.

I was six steps from the study door when I heard a small, sharp sound.

I turned.

She was falling, crumpling at the top of the staircase, her hand sliding off the railing, and her whole body folding. Her face had gone grey and her eyes were half-closed, unseeing.

The bond tore through my chest with a violence that made my vision white.

Rowan was closer. He was already running, already halfway up the stairs. But he would not reach her in time.

I do not remember deciding to move. I just moved.

She hit the landing, almost on the floor, when I caught her. One arm under her shoulders, the other behind her knees. The moment she was in my arms, the bond screamed with something with a sharp pull.

She was breathing. Shallow, too fast, but breathing.

"Alpha." Rowan was beside me now. "Her injuries, the stress, the bond manifesting and the rejection. is too much for her system. She is not like us. The mark settling—"

"I know what it is," I said. My voice did not sound like mine. "Get Martha. Now."

Rowan ran.

I looked down at her face, at the bruise, the cut, the grey tint under her skin, and felt something I had not felt in a very long time.

Fear.

For her.

And I hated it.