After My Mate Declared Me Dead

The banquet hall smelled of pine resin and roasted venison, and I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

Silver candelabras lined every table. The pack had draped the rafters in amber and gold, and the whole room hummed with laughter and the particular warmth of a hundred wolves in one place, fed and safe and together. I stood near the head table in a deep green dress that no longer buttoned quite right at the waist, and I didn't mind. Three months along, Elara — our healer — said. Strong heartbeat. I had pressed my palm flat against my stomach on the walk over and felt something close to awe.

Harvest Moon. Nathan's favorite celebration of the year.

I looked for him across the room and found him near the far wall, talking to his Beta, Marcus Webb. Marcus was laughing at something. Nathan was not, but that wasn't unusual — he had been distracted for weeks, tense in a way I had learned not to ask about directly. I told myself it was Alpha business. I told myself a lot of things.

His mother, Vivienne Carter, swept past me without stopping. She had seated me, I noticed, beside a junior warrior named Cole who couldn't have been more than nineteen. The head table — Nathan's table — had one chair conspicuously empty.

I didn't understand yet. I was still looking at the candles.

Then the door at the far end of the hall opened, and I understood everything and nothing simultaneously.

She walked in wearing my mother's shawl.

I recognized it before I recognized her. The ivory silk, the hand-stitched jasmine border my mother had spent three years completing — I would have known it in the dark, in a burning building, at the bottom of the sea. My mother died when I was twelve. The shawl was the only thing of hers I had kept. I had given it to Nathan for safekeeping six months ago when I found a small moth hole in the storage box and panicked about the fabric.

He had called it a nice vintage piece.

The woman wearing it was tall, dark-haired, and absolutely at ease. She moved through the crowd like someone who had done it a thousand times, and the crowd parted for her in a way I had always assumed they parted for me. A small boy walked beside her, his hand in hers. He had Nathan's jaw. He had Nathan's eyes.

He was perhaps three years old.

The cramping started low and quiet, almost gentle, like a warning.

I pressed my hand to my stomach.

She stopped in the center of the room. The laughter around me didn't die — it shifted, became something else, a collective held breath. And I realized, with the particular slowness of a person whose mind is refusing to catch up to their body, that everyone in this room already knew. The junior warrior beside me. Marcus Webb, who had stopped laughing. Vivienne Carter, who was now moving toward the head table with a small, satisfied smile.

Everyone knew.

The woman looked directly at me.

"Saoirse." Her voice carried easily. Warm, almost sympathetic, the way a person sounds when they are about to say something they have been rehearsing. "I think it's past time we were properly introduced. My name is Adele Jacobs. And tonight —" she touched the shawl at her collar, a casual, proprietary gesture that drove the air out of my lungs — "tonight we're celebrating five years."

Five years.

Nathan and I had been together for four.

"The photograph was taken the same night," she continued, and someone handed her a framed picture — I saw it from across the room and my vision went strange at the edges — Nathan, younger, in the underground den, his hands on her shoulders, both of them looking at the camera with the particular ease of people who belong somewhere. The timestamp in the corner. The date.

The night he marked me.

"Ayden," Adele said, and the boy looked up at her, then out at the room with Nathan's exact expression of mild, assessing calm. "Say hello to the pack."

Vivienne Carter stepped forward. Her voice was clear and carrying and utterly without apology.

"This is the Luna this pack deserves."

I turned to Nathan.

He was already looking at me. His expression was not cruel. It was not guilty. It was irritated — the specific irritation of a man who has had a logistical problem become a public one before he was ready to manage it.

The cramping deepened.

I opened my mouth. I don't know what I intended to say. Something came out — his name, I think — and then Adele made a sound, a sharp, theatrical gasp, and her hand flew to her neck.

"I can't —" Her voice broke on cue. "I can't keep doing this. If she stays, I swear to the Moon Goddess I will claw this mark off myself —"

Nathan's aura hit me like a wall.

The Alpha tone was not a sound exactly. It was a pressure, a command that bypassed language and went straight to the part of every wolf that was built to obey. I had felt it before in training exercises, in tense alliance negotiations. I had never felt it aimed at me.

"Remove her."

Marcus Webb was already moving.