My Mate Branded Me Before Choosing Another Luna

I walked the hall before anyone else arrived.

Stone floor. Long tables of dark wood. The air smelled of pine and old ash and that clean emptiness of ground that belongs to no pack. I made myself walk the whole perimeter twice. Left door, right door, the service entrance behind the kitchens, the sightline from the dais to every seat. I logged the exits the way I once logged the shifts in Kaden's scent.

I wore no insignia tonight. No regalia. No title pinned anywhere. Dark clothes, close to the body, nothing that could be read as a claim.

And I had left my sleeve up.

The brand was visible.

Elias glanced at it once, then away. Damon said nothing. But I felt his eyes follow me as I crossed the room, and I felt the air change in that particular way it did when his wolf pushed against the bars of him.

He had gone still by the dais. Jaw tight. Eyes near black.

He was reading the room. Reading the exits. Reading every scent coming in through the doors.

And his attention kept coming back to me.

My scent was different now. I could not smell it the way a wolf could, but I knew it. The bond I had carried for three years was gone, and that bond had pressed down on a wolf's scent the way a thumb presses on a string. With the pressure gone, something underneath was rising. Faint. Changing.

I did not know what it was.

I only knew my wrist felt warm for the first time in weeks.

---

The Silverpine party arrived late, on purpose.

Eight of them. Maci at the front, her clique of warrior she-wolves in formation behind her. Full regalia, blades at their hips, chests out, the posture of wolves who wanted the room to count them. Kaden walked beside her like a king entering a place he believed smaller than him.

The trophy coin gleamed at her collarbone.

I did not look at it long. I had been rehearsing the sight of it for days, and I had already decided what it would cost her.

They did not wait for the feast to begin.

They moved on the provisions the way wolves fall on a fresh kill. Rare game. Aged wine. Meat Silverpine's thin territory had never produced. They took the best cuts first, filled their goblets before the ceremonial pour, talked over each other, loud and careless, performing their entitlement.

Maci let them. She stood at the head of her table and smiled at me across the hall.

"There she is," she said, loud enough for every wolf to hear. "The branded stray. The discarded, wolfless Omega. I'd heard she crawled to a Prince for scraps. Looks like the Prince has a soft spot for strays."

She laughed. Her clique laughed.

I sat perfectly still.

I did not flinch. I did not look down. I did not answer. I let her words sit in the air, and I listed them like inventory, the way I had once listed Kaden's scent-shifts and told myself each meant nothing.

This time I was not telling myself anything. This time I was building a ledger.

I reached for my glass and held it steady, and I did not taste it.

Damon had not moved. His eyes were still and dark, and I could feel the pressure off him like a storm waiting to decide where to land.

I did not need him to land it yet.

I was not done waiting.

---

Kaden sat across from me.

He could not look away. That is what I noticed first — not his anger, but his inability to leave me out of his line of sight. He looked at me the way a man looks at a thing he believed he buried and finds growing out of the dirt again.

The phantom scent had been haunting him. A wolf who wrongfully severs a fated bond is tormented by the smell of the mate he threw away. Elias's scouts had confirmed it: Kaden standing in empty corridors, turning toward nothing.

Now it was real. It was me. And it was wrong.

Because my scent was changing in front of him.

Stronger than it had been. Free of the old bond. And underneath it, carrying it, a note he could not name — something that made his wolf lurch with a recognition his conscious mind refused to process. I watched it move across his face. I watched him tell himself he was wrong. I watched him fail.

His composure cracked like ice.

He shoved his chair back. It fell. He crossed the table in two strides, both hands closing on my throat, and pulled me halfway out of my seat. His Alpha tone blasted through the hall, cracking and desperate.

"What have you done? What are you hiding?"

I did not struggle.

I let him hold me there, my brand burning cold where his thumbs pressed against my pulse, and I looked at him the way I had looked at him from the stone floor the night he burned me.

I did not answer.

I let the hall hear the silence.