Lena's POV
I counted the candles once, just to keep my hands from shaking.
Two hundred and forty-seven. All white. All burning. All for tonight.
I told myself that was why my hands wouldn't stay still the excitement, the joy, the kind of happiness so big your body doesn't know what to do with it. I smoothed the front of my white dress for the fourth time and reminded myself to breathe. My best friend Sadie had done my hair in loose curls. My cheeks hurt from smiling all morning. I had been waiting for this night since I was nineteen years old and Cain Ashford looked at me across a crowded room and said, you're mine, Lena. You've always been mine.
Two years. I gave him everything I had for two years.
The ceremonial hall was packed. A hundred wolves from Silverstone Pack dressed in their finest, standing shoulder to shoulder in the flickering light. Elder Rowan waited at the altar with the binding cloth folded over his arm. The air smelled like pine and candle smoke and anticipation.
I stepped into the doorway.
Someone near the front saw me and smiled. I smiled back. I walked forward. The crowd shifted. Made room. I kept my eyes on the altar and thought: this is real, this is happening, tonight I become his Luna.
Then Cain walked in from the other side.
My heart lifted the moment I saw him. Tall, golden-haired, broad-shouldered the Alpha heir everyone in three territories called perfect. He was wearing the black ceremonial jacket I had helped him pick out. He looked beautiful. He looked like my future.
He did not look at me.
He walked to the altar with his eyes straight ahead and took his place in front of Elder Rowan and the crowd went quiet the way crowds do when something important is about to happen.
I stopped walking.
I don't know why I stopped. Some part of me knew before the rest of me did.
Cain turned to face the room and opened his mouth and said a name.
It was not mine.
"Mara Voss."
The silence lasted one full second. Then the crowd gasped a hundred wolves breathing in at once and I followed their eyes to the left side of the hall where my stepsister stood in a pale gold dress I had never seen before. She was smiling the way people smile when they have been waiting a long time for something. Her hands were folded in front of her stomach, and I could see, now that I was looking, the soft early curve beneath the fabric.
She was pregnant.
My wolf Iris had lived inside my chest since I was thirteen years old. She was part of me my instincts, my strength, my other half. We had never been separated for a single day.
When the mate bond broke, she screamed.
It wasn't a sound anyone else could hear. It was inside me a tearing so deep and so total that my legs stopped working and I dropped straight to my knees on the stone floor. The hard impact shot pain up through my bones but it was nothing, nothing at all compared to what was happening inside my chest. The bond that had connected me to Cain for two years the warm golden thread I had trusted like a lifeline didn't fade. It didn't gently loosen. It was ripped out.
Iris collapsed into silence.
I knelt on the floor of the ceremonial hall with two hundred and forty-seven candles burning around me and not one person moved toward me. Not one wolf stepped out of line to offer a hand. They looked. Some of them looked away. The ceremony continued.
Cain walked toward Mara. He took her hands in his. He never once turned his head in my direction.
I don't know how long I knelt there. Long enough for my knees to go numb. Long enough for the binding cloth to be lifted and the words to be spoken and the pack to raise their voices in formal witness.
I was still in the room. No one seemed to see me anymore.
Sadie found me eventually and helped me to the side wall. Her face was gray with shock and something that looked like guilt, and I filed that away in a place I couldn't look at yet. She pressed water into my hands. I couldn't feel my fingers. She said my name twice and I heard it from very far away.
Lena. Lena, look at me.
I looked at her. I said, "Did you know?"
Her silence was its own answer.
I handed the water back. I stood up on my own. I walked out of the hall on my own two feet while the celebration began behind me, and I did not let myself make a sound until I was outside in the cold night air and completely alone.
Then I pressed my back against the stone wall and I let myself feel it all of it, every sharp terrible edge of it for exactly sixty seconds.
I counted.
When I got to sixty, I stopped. I straightened. I wiped my face with the back of my hand.
I was not going to fall apart in the dark outside my own mating ceremony. I was not going to give this night more of me than it had already taken.
That was when I felt it.
Low in my stomach. A flutter so faint I might have imagined it, except I had been feeling it for two weeks now and convincing myself it was nerves, or the excitement of the coming ceremony, or simply the way anxiety sometimes lives in your belly like a small restless thing.
It fluttered again.
I pressed my hand flat against my stomach over the white dress and stood very still in the cold and let myself think the thought I had been refusing to think for fourteen days.
No, I told myself. Not now. That can't be now.
But my hand stayed where it was and the flutter didn't stop and somewhere deep in the locked-down silence where Iris used to live, something tiny and warm pushed back against my palm like an answer.
My mate had just chosen my stepsister in front of a hundred witnesses.
My wolf was gone.
And I was standing alone in the January night holding a secret against my stomach that changed everything.
What happens when the only person you have left to protect is someone who doesn't exist yet?