2

The banquet started an hour after the Naming ended, and I spent it exactly where I always spent Thorne pack functions, in the kitchen wing with a tray in my hands and a uniform apron over Ivy's old dress, because apparently public humiliation didn't come with the night off.

"You're serving the high table," Marta told me, not looking up from the trays she was arranging. "Alpha Thorne's orders."

"Of course he did," I said.

She glanced at me then, quick and almost sorry, which from Marta was as close to sympathy as I ever got. "You could tell him no."

"I could," I agreed, and picked up the tray.

I want to explain something about the Thorne pack, since I've decided this is going in my record whether anyone reads it or not. Callum Thorne took me in when I was twelve, after the fever that swept the eastern territories killed most of my birth pack and left me with no name anyone recognized and no Alpha willing to claim me. He gave me a bed, a last name, and food, and I spent the first year genuinely grateful for it, the way a drowning person is grateful for anything that floats. It took longer than it should have to notice that gratitude was the whole transaction. I was never his daughter. I was Ivy's unpaid shadow, and the "adoption" was a tidy word for a very old arrangement, take in the orphan, get free labor, look generous doing it.

I carried the tray into the great hall and the noise hit me like a wall, laughter and music and two hundred wolves in their finest clothes celebrating a treaty that had exactly nothing to do with what had happened to me an hour earlier, except that it had everything to do with it, because half the room was still talking about it.

"There she is," someone said as I passed, not quietly enough. "The rejected one."

I kept my eyes on the tray. Wine glasses, six of them, balanced the way Marta had taught me, careful and even. I made it almost to the high table before Ivy stepped directly into my path, smiling the smile she used when she wanted an audience.

"Careful," she said, loud enough for the nearby tables to hear. "We wouldn't want you dropping something in front of all these important people. Again."

I hadn't dropped anything. Not once, not ever, not in seven years of carrying trays through this exact hall. But that wasn't the point of what she'd said, and everyone around us laughed the way they were meant to, and I felt the coil under my ribs, the thing that had woken up on the amphitheater lawn, tighten another degree.

"Excuse me," I said, and stepped around her.

I set the tray down at the high table without incident, which felt like a small private victory nobody else would ever know about, and I was three steps into my retreat back toward the kitchen when I heard his voice behind me.

"Leave a glass."

I turned. Cassian Vane was seated at the end of the high table, close enough to his father that I understood immediately he had no real choice about where to sit, and far enough that the distance between them looked deliberate anyway. He wasn't looking at me when he said it. He was looking at his own hands.

I set a glass in front of him, because refusing wasn't a privilege I had, and my fingers brushed his when I set it down, barely, the kind of contact that happens a hundred times a night in a room full of people passing things to each other.

It was not like the other ninety-nine times. Heat rolled up my arm like I'd touched a live wire, and I heard him inhale sharp through his nose, and for one full second neither of us moved.

Then he pulled his hand back like I'd burned him, and I stepped away before anyone at the table could notice, and I made it exactly to the kitchen doorway before the glass I was still holding, the empty one, the one I hadn't set down yet, cracked clean in half in my grip.

I stood there staring at it. Two pieces of good crystal, sheared apart like someone had scored a line down the middle with a diamond, and my palm underneath it completely unmarked. No blood. No cut. Just a clean break where a glass should not have been able to break from nothing but the pressure of my own fingers.

"What did you do," Marta said, appearing at my elbow, and for the first time all night she sounded frightened instead of tired.

"Nothing," I said, and it was true, and it was also the most terrifying thing I'd ever said, because I could feel that same coiled heat still sitting under my ribs, humming faintly, like it had liked what it just did and wanted to do it again.

Marta took the pieces out of my hand without asking and wrapped them in a cloth like she was hiding evidence, which I suppose she was. "Go home," she said. "Now. Before anyone else sees your hands."

I didn't argue. I went.

The walk back to the servants' quarters took me past the edge of the Academy training yards, empty at that hour except for torchlight and the long shadows of the practice targets, and I was halfway across the gravel when I felt the air change behind me the way it had changed on the amphitheater lawn, that same pressure against my chest like a hand closing around my ribs from the inside.

"You broke a glass," Cassian said.

I hadn't heard him follow me. That alone should have told me something about what he was, how quiet a man that size could move when he wanted to. I turned around slowly, and he was standing closer than I expected, close enough that the moonlight caught the line of his jaw and I had to fight the same pull I'd felt on the lawn, the same stupid animal want to close the distance instead of guarding it.

"I break glasses all the time," I said. "Occupational hazard."

"Not like that." His eyes were doing something I didn't have a name for yet, moving over my face like he was looking for a lie and hoping not to find one. "I felt it. When you did it. I felt it through the bond."

"There's no bond," I said. "You rejected it in front of five hundred people, remember? I was there. I believe you called me a mistake."

Something moved across his face, fast, gone before I could catalog it. "I didn't call you a mistake."

"You said the moon was wrong about me."

"I said what I had to say." His voice had dropped, low enough that it wasn't for anyone but me, and there was something underneath it that didn't match the ice from the ceremony at all, something that sounded almost like an apology he wasn't allowed to finish. "You don't understand what's happening right now. What you almost walked into."

"Then explain it," I said, and I heard my own voice shake, and I hated that it shook, because I had promised myself an hour ago in the kitchen that I would not let this family see me cry and I was not about to let this stranger see it either. "Explain why the future King of the North humiliated a random girl from the Thorne pack in front of the entire Academy, if it wasn't because he meant it."

He didn't answer. He closed the distance between us instead, one step, then another, until I had to tip my head back to keep looking at him, and every part of my body that had ached since the ceremony lit up at once, wanting, furious at itself for wanting.

"You should hate me," he said quietly.

"I do."

"Good." He reached out and closed his hand around my wrist, not gently, hard enough that I felt it, hard enough that I knew there would be a bruise there tomorrow shaped exactly like his fingers. His voice dropped lower still, rough at the edges, nothing like the flat cruelty from the amphitheater. "Then stay away from me. For your own sake. Because my mate isn't going anywhere, and if you keep standing this close to me, I am not going to be able to keep pretending I didn't mean every word I said tonight."

I stared at him. "You just said your mate. You rejected the bond."

"I know what I said." His grip tightened for one more second, and then he let go so fast it was almost violent, stepping back like the contact had cost him something he couldn't afford. "Forget tonight happened. Both parts of it."

"Which part," I said. "The part where you humiliated me, or the part where you just told me I'm not going anywhere?"

He didn't answer that either. He turned and walked back toward the Academy halls, and I stood alone in the training yard with a bruise forming on my wrist and a glass crystal-clean break with no explanation sitting in the back of my mind, and I understood, with a cold certainty that had nothing to do with the moon, that whatever had happened on that stage tonight was not the whole story.

Someone had made him reject me.

And I was going to find out who.