My heart’s still pounding, but I can’t feel the beat anymore.
Fiona’s face blurs more as she takes a nervous step back. “Again, I’m so sorry, Noa. I shouldn’t have said anything.” And then, like her ass is on fire, she spins and hurries off toward her friends by the hearth.
The silence that follows feels deafening.
Then, somewhere, a chair scrapes softly across the worn hardwood, and Rhosyn shifts into the space beside me. She leans a hip against the bench, her movement slow and cautious. Like she’s approaching a timid animal.
“Noa…”
Her careful voice accompanies a gentle hand pressed between my shoulder blades. She drags her palm down my spine, a small steady gesture that’s meant to anchor me, I think. Whether in her support or sympathy, I can’t tell which.
The numbness creeps in all the same. It moves slow and methodical, plummeting until it reaches my marrow and settles deep in my stomach. And when I notice the pain is gone—the ache that’s been shadowing me all day—it doesn’t feel like relief. It feels like loss. Like something vital has gone still.
“It’s not what you think—” she starts, but I cut her off before she can finish.
“The party he’s been getting ready for all week,” I manage, but it sounds brittle. “It’s for his betrothal to Ta—” I can’t finish her name. The syllables choke up halfway, my body refusing to dare utter them aloud, like speaking them might make her appear in front of me in some cruel conjuring.
“Yes,” she says finally, and the guilt settles over her face like a shadow. I can see her wishing she wasn’t the one to tell me, wishing she could shield me from it instead.
Her confirmation fractures something small and delicate within me—the piece of me that was just starting to trust him if I had to make a guess. The numbness creeps deeper, cooling everything from the inside out. It fills my chest, pools behind my ribs until there’s nothing left but the hollow weight of it.
He’d said it couldn’t be canceled, that it had been planned long before Ashvale burned and before we became whatever this fragile thing between us is. He’d said it so calmly, so casually, that I hadn’t thought to question it. A celebration, he’d called it. The word had sounded harmless then.
Now I know better.
His betrothal party. Forher. Talis.
And he’d kept that truth tucked carefully behind his teeth.
The worst part is that I gave him room to do it. I stayed hidden in his house all week, surrounded by his scent and the illusion of safety it built.
Everyone outside those walls knew what was coming. Everyone but me.
The only time I’ve been near his pack members—outside of the ones I already know—was that big meeting with the coven. I didn’t talk to anyone then.And the few times I’ve left the house without Rennick it’s been with Hattie and Elio in tow. We’ve planned our trips out carefully, picking hours when the lodge will be quiet, when there’ll be fewer people around to possibly trigger my Nightingales.
Of course, I was ignorant to the truth. This is the first time I’ve stood anywhere that the truth could reach me.
His pack must know about me—about us. They must see what we’ve been tentatively rebuilding between us.
But when I really think about it, how could they?
Almost everything that’s happened between us since we’ve been here has been hidden within the walls of his house. Every look full of unsaid words, the way his hands find me like he’s promising something every time he touches me, all hidden from the prying eyes of his packmates. At least the ones outside of our immediate circle, like Rhosyn, Canaan, and Siggy. The only mistake, the only time we forgot ourselves, was by the creek that day. Danny saw, but clearly, he hasn’t said a word. He couldn’t have. Not if a betrothal party is being planned for tomorrow.
To them, I’m still the omega he ruthlessly rejected. Nothing more than a stray dog he pitied and brought back to his territory when my home became a war zone.
And maybe that’s all I am to him, too. The part of me still bleeding from old wounds whispers it like a confession I don’t want to hear.
But my wolf won’t accept it, won’t believe that Rennick would betray me again in such a monumental way. Not without reason.
He promised!she howls, her defiance echoing through meuntil my skull rattles.Our mate promised he’d never hurt us again.
Rhosyn must sense the conflicting battle happening in my head, because her touch moves to my arm and tightens.
“Hey,” she says softly, releasing me, but her tone is firm enough to make me hold her green gaze. “Listen to me, okay? I don’t know the plan, not fully, but I know there is one. Rennick and Canaan both promised me that. And even if my faith in Nick is a little wobbly right now, I trust Cane. With everything in me, I trust my mate to not allow any fuckery to happen. And if there was evenonesecond where I thought Nick was going through with this out of some kind of loyalty to that vapid, redheaded cunt,you knowI’d be the first one in line to go scorched earth on his ass. Like tie him to a tree, coat him in honey, and let the raccoons host a midnight buffet.”
The picture is ridiculous, but my laugh won’t come. I’m too numb.
Rhosyn keeps going, her conviction unwavering. “But I’ve seen him, Noa. The way he looks at you, the way he is when you’re in the same room as him. You are the center of that man’s world, his heart beats because yours does. And that is why I know whatever’s happening tomorrow, it’s not what it looks like.”
