Chapter 3

Cassian had thrown me back to the cages. He came down to them anyway.

He crossed the cell in three strides. I smelled the shift on him before I saw it — gold bleeding into his eyes, the Alpha's son losing to the wolf beneath.

"You still smell like mine," he said.

Behind me the man lay chained and unconscious, silver still smoking in his flesh. My burned hand throbbed.

"You rejected me," I said. "Before the whole pack. You don't get to say that word anymore."

"I rejected you as my Luna." His voice dropped, ugly and low. "I never gave that thing permission to claim what was mine."

Was. I let him choke on the tense.

Heels clicked on stone. Maris never missed a scene.

"Don't touch her," she breathed, one hand pressed to her chest, her wet eyes aimed at Cassian. "She's desperate enough to bond with a prisoner. What if she lets it loose to hurt us? To hurt you?"

Clever girl. In one breath she made me dangerous and herself worth saving.

Cassian's hand closed around my wrist to drag me from the man.

Something in me went cold and still.

"Take one more step toward him," I said, "and I'll accept your rejection. Out loud. Loud enough for every wolf upstairs to hear."

The cell went silent.

A rejection only wounded a bond. Acceptance killed it. And the one who threw the mate away paid worse than the one left behind.

I watched Cassian remember it. Watched the blood leave his face as he did the math and hated the answer.

"You wouldn't," he said.

"Try me."

For eight years I had lowered my eyes to this family. I did not lower them now. His grip loosened.

Then the chains scraped behind me. Not the restless drag of an animal. Something deliberate. Something rising.

The man I had pulled out of the dark pushed himself up off the stone, silver burns smoking across his skin, dark hair falling over eyes I already knew were red.

He was too big for the cell, too still for someone bleeding — and he was looking at Cassian's hand on my wrist like he was deciding how many pieces to leave.

"Take your hand off my keeper," he said.

Cassian let go. I don't think he decided to. I think his body did it for him.

He took Maris's arm and left without another word — fast, for a man who never hurried.

Then the red eyes turned to me. To my burned hand. And gentled.

He smiled like someone who had forgotten a great many things, but not how to kill. "You should have let me eat him," he said.