AMARIS

The fated mate bond could really ruin a person’s life. The moon goddess is a sadistic bitch, for lack of better words.

She uses the fated mate bond to mess with one’s life and probably she gets wet by that.

I knew this firsthand, which was saying something given that I had managed to be mated to their father and sleep with their son inside the space of a few months, so I was genuinely in no position to be shocked by what Alpha Corvin had done to Luna Zoya.

I understood it, that was the uncomfortable part. The pull of a fated mate was not something you reasoned with or talked yourself out of or made sensible decisions around, I knew that now the way you knew a burn was hot, from direct experience and not from being told.

I still was not going to say any of that out loud to anyone.

The meeting had ended less like a meeting and more like a grenade going off in a closed room, the twins walking out in that twin way they had when they were united in something, which was terrifying under the best circumstances and downright apocalyptic at four in the morning after a night that had already featured a failed blood bonding, a public scandal, a legal mating, and the resurrection of a dead woman with extraordinary hair.

I walked back to my room and did not run into anyone and counted that as the only good thing that had happened since approximately nine this morning.

It was a blessing at this point!

I changed into my night lace and stood in the middle of my room for a moment looking at the bed, the beautiful expensive bed that Gravemoon pack had prepared for me, and thought about how badly I wanted to fall face-first into it and sleep for approximately one hundred years.

Then I thought about what sleeping in it meant now. About Freya downstairs. About the white flowers along the fence that someone had presumably taken down by now. About Corvin looking at me a beat too long in that boardroom before he remembered he was not supposed to.

Also I am going to be inseminated with his heir and breed a power house and walk away from the child.

That’s if I manage not fucking any of the twins again.

I fell face-first into the bed anyway because I was twenty-two years old and I had just been legally mated and I had earned it.

I was about thirty seconds from unconscious when someone knocked on the door.

I considered pretending I was already asleep.

The knock came again.

I peeled myself off the pillow and went to the door and opened it, and Beta Marco stood in the hallway looking the way a man looked when he had been awake for twenty-two hours and had at least four more to go. The weariness was sitting right there on his face, visible and undisguised, which was notable because Marco was a man who kept everything off his face as a matter of professional pride.

"The Alpha is waiting for you," he said.

I looked at him.

"Waiting for me for what?"

"It is customary for the Alpha and Luna to share a bed on their wedding night." He said it like he was reading it off a policy document. "It would be expected."

"Marco." I gripped the doorframe. "It is four in the morning. I have been awake for twenty hours and I have had the single worst day of my entire life, which is a competitive field, and I would very much like to sleep in my own bed. Alone. Just for tonight. Just this once."

"I will return in one hour." He did not blink. "If you are still here when I do, I will have you escorted to the Alpha’s rooms. I am sorry, Luna. It is not my decision."

He left before I could find the right words, which was probably intentional.

I closed the door.

"Fantastic," I told the room. "Absolutely fantastic."

I went to the mirror and started putting my hair up for bed, tucking it into my bonnet with more aggression than the hair strictly deserved, and thought about all the ways tonight could have gone differently if the universe had any interest whatsoever in being fair to me.

The universe, as established, did not.

A second knock.

I stopped with my hands still in my hair and my fingers wrapped around the bonnet, and the smell hit me before I had even fully processed that someone was at the door.

Apples.

Fresh and sharp and clean, his scent, unmistakable now because I had been next to him enough times to know it the way you knew a song, without having to think about it.

I stood there for a moment.

He was on the other side of that door at four in the morning and he had just found out tonight that his mother had drugged his family and tried to kill him in his sleep, and I had been mated to his father three hours ago, and I was standing in my night lace with my hair half up and I had approximately one working brain cell left and it was telling me very sensibly not to open the door.

I opened the door.

Rowan stood in the hallway with both hands pushed into his pockets and his eyes on me, and he looked exactly like a man who had nowhere else to go at four in the morning, which was the most Rowan thing he had ever looked like in all the months I had known him.

"Can I come in?"

I breathed out slowly. "Rowan."

"I know." He held my eyes. "I know what I’m asking. Please."

I looked at him for a moment, at the exhaustion sitting in every line of his face and the thing underneath it that was not exhaustion at all, and I stepped back from the door and made room.

He came in and I closed it behind him and leaned back against it, keeping the wood at my spine and the distance between us deliberate, because I did not trust myself to stand close to him with all the emotions this night had generated still sitting loose and unprocessed in my chest.

He stopped a few feet away and turned to face me and said nothing for a moment. The lamp on the bedside table threw a low warm light across the room and he stood in it with his hands still in his pockets, his eyes moving over me once before he made himself stop.

I crossed my arms under my chest and held myself there.

"How are you doing with all of it," I asked.

He pressed his lips together. "I don’t know. There’s too much moving in my head all at once. I don’t think I’m even processing it yet."

"It must be really hard."

"It is." He looked at the floor briefly and then back at me. A long pause, and then, "Amaris. Can I hug you."

I looked at him.

"Rowan, I’m mated to your father."

"I know." His voice stayed low and even. "It’s just a hug. I just need a minute of it. Please."

I looked at him in the lamplight with his exhausted face and his hands in his pockets and the absolute wreck of a night sitting on both our shoulders, and I did not answer him.

He took a slow step toward me.

I did not move back.

He took another, and then he was close, right there in front of me, and he pulled me into him before I had finished deciding whether I was going to allow it, his arms coming around me fully, his chest against mine, his chin coming down to the top of my head, and I felt the full length of him holding me with a steadiness and a care that I had absolutely no defense against at four in the morning after the day I had just survived.

My arms came up between us and then around him.

I felt his chest expand on a long inhale, slow and deliberate, his face pressing into my hair. His arms tightened slightly around my back. I could feel his heartbeat against my cheek and I closed my eyes and stood there in the warm quiet of my room and just breathed.

His breath was warm against my scalp. Then against my temple. Then lower, his face moving gradually until his mouth was near the curve of my neck, not touching, just there, his exhale slow and hot against my skin.

His lips brushed the side of my neck and I felt the whole length of my spine respond to it before I could think about it, and I pressed my hands flat against his back and kept myself very still.

Then he whispered, right there against my skin, barely any volume to it at all.

"I told Lila I don’t want to get married."