Chapter 9

Kade

There was a copy of the old pack laws in the Blackthorn archive that hadn't been opened in longer than Kade had been alive, and he found himself down there past midnight three nights running, going through two hundred years of precedent looking for a loophole he was increasingly certain didn't exist.

Alpha marriages could be annulled under specific, narrow conditions: proof of coercion on the part of the Alpha's own pack — he was the one applying pressure to himself, technically, which didn't count — a rival mate bond formally claimed and consummated before the wedding, which he'd forfeited the right to invoke the moment he'd rejected it, a detail that felt less like law and more like a punishment written by someone who'd wanted future Alphas to think twice, or the death of one of the involved parties, which he wasn't willing to consider as an option even hypothetically, for either himself or Seraphine.

He closed the last ledger somewhere around two in the morning and sat in the dark archive a long while, letting the finality of it settle somewhere he could feel it.

Torren found him there an hour later, which meant somebody had told him where to look, which meant Kade's midnight archive habit had stopped being a secret days ago.

"You're not going to find anything down here." Torren dropped into the chair across from him, not unkindly. "I already checked, two weeks ago. Wanted to save you the trip, and then decided you'd probably want to see for yourself anyway, because you're stubborn like that."

"You could have told me."

"Would you have believed me?"

Kade didn't have an answer for that either, which was answer enough.

"There's no clean way out of this," Torren said. "I've looked. You've looked. Neither of us found one, because there isn't one — old pack law wasn't written with rejected bonds in mind, mostly because most Alphas who reject a true mate don't live long enough afterward for it to become a legal problem." He said it plainly, without softening it, which was one of the things Kade valued most about him and resented most about him in roughly equal measure on nights like this one. "So the real question isn't whether there's a way out. It's whether you're planning to do something about that lack of an exit, or whether you're going to keep spending your nights down here pretending research is the same thing as a decision."

"What would you have me do? Ride north and see if I can find whoever's leading Nightshade and beg forgiveness from a stranger who probably isn't even—" Kade stopped himself before he finished the thought out loud, aware of exactly how much he was revealing by finishing it at all.

Torren's eyebrows went up, slow and deliberate. "Isn't even her. That's what you were going to say."

"I don't know what I was going to say."

"I think you do. I think some part of you has been doing the math on that Nightshade rumor since the day I brought it to you, and I think you don't want to say it out loud because saying it out loud makes it a real possibility instead of a coincidence you can keep filing away." Torren leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "For what it's worth — even if it is her. Even if you rode north tomorrow and found her standing there. What exactly do you think happens next? You've got a wedding in four months and a war that doesn't go away just because your heart's inconvenient."

Kade didn't have an answer for that either. He was starting to suspect he was running out of nights where not having an answer was going to be sustainable.

He didn't ride north. He told himself that was discipline and not cowardice, closed the ledgers, and went back upstairs to a bed that had stopped feeling like anything close to rest months ago.

He lay awake a long time that night, staring at the ceiling, doing the math Torren had accused him of doing. A pack reforming from nothing in under a year didn't happen by accident. Word of an Alpha nobody had named, strong enough to run off rogues clean, careful enough to keep her own name out of the markets — it read less like coincidence the longer he let himself actually look at it instead of filing it away.

He thought about the girl in the clearing. Not the Alpha rumor — the girl, the exact half-second before he'd looked past her shoulder and found his father's face and remembered exactly what he was supposed to be. He'd spent months trying not to remember the particular way she'd looked at him afterward, chin up, refusing to be the one who looked away first, and he was starting to understand that the trying was its own kind of failure, because a man who has to work that hard not to think about someone has already lost whatever argument he's having with himself about how much she matters.

Four months. He had four months to make peace with a decision he was less and less certain, lying alone in the dark, he'd actually made correctly.

He fell asleep before he found an answer, and dreamed, for the first time in a long time, about a clearing full of firelight and a girl who hadn't looked away.