After My Mate Chose the Other Woman

The snow took the sound of my own name away from me before I even finished falling.

I don't remember deciding to get up. I remember the cold first, how it had stopped feeling like cold and started feeling like something else — heavier, patient, working its way in through the cut on my face like it had all night to finish the job. Silver smoke curled off my cheek and hissed where it met the drift beneath me. I pressed my palm flat against the snow and pushed, and my arm shook so hard I thought it would give out before my weight did.

Then I heard them.

Three pairs of eyes at the tree line, low to the ground, catching what little light the storm let through. Not pack eyes. Rogue eyes — the particular yellow-green of wolves who answer to no Alpha and no law, and behind them a howl went up that wasn't a hunting call. It was a claim.

"Unclaimed," one of them said, in a voice that carried too easily over the wind, like he wanted me to hear it. "No mark. No bond. She's anybody's now."

I got to my feet.

I had no wolf to call. Five years of controlled poison had made sure of that, and whatever Lance's blade had just torn out of me had taken the last thread that used to run warm under my skin. I was human, bleeding, alone, and there were three of them.

I ran anyway.

My legs went out from under me twice in the first hundred yards and both times I made myself stand back up, because stopping meant I would not stand up a third time. The snow came up past my knees in the drifts, dragging at every step, and my lungs burned with cold that had stopped registering as pain and started registering as absence — the same absence I felt where the bond used to be.

And then, underneath the wind, underneath my own ragged breathing, something spoke.

*I'm here.*

I stumbled, nearly went down again, my mind grabbing for the voice the way a drowning hand grabs for anything solid. It wasn't Lance. It wasn't the bond, because the bond was gone, torn out at the root an hour ago in the snow beside my father's scattered cairn. This was something else. Something that had been waiting, silent, for longer than I wanted to think about.

*And you are not dying here.*

Low. Unhurried. Entirely unimpressed by the fact that I was, in fact, currently trying to die in the most efficient way available to me.

"Who—" I said it out loud, my voice cracking on the wind, and got no answer beyond a kind of pressure settling into my chest, steady as a hand between my shoulder blades. I didn't have time to ask again. I ran harder.

The howls behind me were closer now, spread wide the way wolves spread when they're driving something instead of chasing it. I pressed two fingers to my left temple — the old habit, the one thing left that still felt like mine — and I reached across the space where the bond used to be, even though I knew, even though every nerve in my body told me there was nothing there to reach.

Something caught anyway. A last, thin thread, frayed almost to nothing, and I poured every bit of strength I had left into forcing it open.

*Lance.*

A pause. Then his voice, flat, already bored with me. *My mourning ends in two days. Stop staging stunts.*

The link cut before I could answer. It didn't feel like rejection this time. It felt smaller than that — like being hung up on.

I kept running.

Through the white, half-buried in drift and blowing snow, I saw it before I understood what it was: a stone, waist-high, carved with a crest I didn't recognize, standing at an angle that meant boundary, not landmark. Moonveil. I didn't know the name yet. I only knew it was a line, and lines sometimes meant safety, and I had nothing left to lose by crossing one.

I didn't hear the fourth set of footsteps until they were already beside me.

"Don't stop moving," a woman's voice said, low and fast, and a hand closed around my arm — not soft, not asking. "Whatever's behind you, it doesn't cross this line tonight. Not while I'm standing on it."

I turned my head enough to see her — dark hair whipping loose from a braid, eyes sharp even in the storm, moving like someone who had made exactly this kind of decision before and regretted none of it. She looked at my face, at the silver still smoking along the cut, and her expression didn't change, which told me she understood exactly what she was looking at.

"Willow Ferguson," she said. "Gamma of Moonveil. You're across the border now. Keep walking."

My knees finally gave out for good three steps later, and she caught me before I hit the snow.