Page 7

“The ritual drew our names, Sloane.”

The silence that followed was total. The cottage held it. The pine-scented air held it. The space between them held it while her face went through a sequence he tracked without meaning to: confusion, disbelief, a brief flicker of something that might have been fear, and then nothing.

“What?”

“The ritual drew our names. Yours and mine. Twenty minutes ago, in the great hall, in front of the entire pack.” He kept his voice level because one of them had to. “You weren’t there. You were supposed to be there.”

“I was busy,” she said, and the flatness in her tone was so total it almost qualified as comedy.

“Busy being strangled.”

She shrugged again, avoiding his eyes.

“Sloane.”

She looked up at last.

“You’re telling me the magic paired us.” Her voice scraped through the words. “You and me.”

“Yes.”

“Chris Williams and Sloane Mercer.”

“Yes.”

She stared at him. The hazel eyes searched his face, and he held still under the examination, because whatever she was looking for, he wasn’t going to flinch from it. She studied him the way someone studied a trap, checking the edges, the mechanism, the place where the teeth would close.

Then she laughed.

The sound was awful. Raw, torn from a throat that couldn’t afford it, and she winced even as it left her, her hand coming up to press against her neck where the bruises were setting in. But she kept laughing, a jagged, breathless sound that bounced off the stone walls and the bare floor and the single window.

“That’s not possible,” she said.

“The magic doesn’t make mistakes.”

“The magic made a spectacular mistake.” She pushed herself to standing. She was tall, almost his height, and she swayed once before she caught herself on the wall. “I don’t know what went wrong with the ritual, but you and I are not bonded. We are not mates. We are not anything.”

“I didn’t say I wanted it.”

“Good. Then we agree.” She pointed at the door. “Leave.”

“There’s a man out there who just had his hand on your throat.”

“That’s my problem,” she spat angrily.

Chris lifted his chin. “It became my problem when the magic put your name next to mine.”

“Then un-put it.” She took a step toward the door, toward him, and he could see the effort it cost her. She was running on adrenaline and fury, and both were burning down. “Go back to the hall. Tell Caitlynn to redo the ceremony. Tell Kahn. I don’t care. Tell whoever you need to tell that there has been a mistake, and then leave me alone.”

Chris stood. Up close he could see the damage more clearly: the swelling along the right side of her throat, the burst capillaries spreading beneath the skin, the way she kept swallowing against pain she wouldn’t name.

“I’m not leaving you alone with whoever that was still out there.”

“You don’t get to decide that.”

“Look, Sloane, whether or not either of us wants this match… it is done. So I will stay. I don’t have a choice.”

Her nostrils flared. The gold in her eyes brightened, her wolf pushing forward, and for a second he thought she might shift. The air between them vibrated with it, with the dual pressure of two wolves pressing against two sets of ribs in a room too small for the tension it contained.