Chapter Six: His Mark or Nothing

"Where is she," I said. The she-wolf flinched. She was young seventeen, maybe soaked through and trembling, and I realized I knew her face. Talia. The daughter of the only family in Crescent Hollow that had still nodded to my father in the street after his fall. She'd risked everything to cross that line and find me. "The old holding cells under the elder hall," Talia whispered. "Damien put her there at dawn. He told the pack she's being protected." Her voice cracked. "Wren, she's not being protected. She's bait. He said it himself, to Marcus, he didn't even lower his voice if you don't walk back across the line and submit before the Founding Moon, he'll" "I heard you the first time." I didn't recognize my own voice. It had gone flat and far away, the way the world goes when the floor drops out from under it. My mother. Who looked at the ground while they dragged me out. Who chose her own safety over her daughter in front of two hundred witnesses. And still still something in my chest screamed at the thought of Damien's hands on her. That was the cruelty of it. He didn't even need her to love me. He just needed me to be the kind of person who couldn't let her die. And he was right. God help me, he was right. "Then it's simple," I said. "I go back." "No." Cain didn't raise his voice. He never did. "You don't." I rounded on him. "That's my mother" "Who will be dead the moment you're useless to him." He came toward me, slow, and the storm in his eyes had gone hard as flint. "Think, Wren. Stop feeling and think. Why does he want you back across that line? Not for justice. Not even for silence a corpse is silent. He wants you to walk back willingly, in front of witnesses, and submit. Because a witness who returns and bows discredits herself. Everything you might ever say about him becomes the bitterness of a girl who came crawling home." He stopped inches from me. "He doesn't want to kill you. He wants to make you small. And the second you cross that line on your knees, your mother loses her only value and so do you." The truth of it landed like a second rejection. "Then what." My eyes were burning and I refused to let them spill. "I leave her there? I let him put her where he put my father?" "No." Cain's hand came up not to my jaw this time, but flat against my sternum, over the place where the bond had torn out of me a day ago. "We take her out. But not by trade. By force, at the one moment he can't stop us the Founding Moon, with every pack in the region watching, where the old law binds his hands as tight as it binds ours." His jaw flexed. "But for that, I need you to be more than a rumor in his cells. I need you to walk into that gathering with standing no Alpha alive can override." Roan had gone very still by the door. "Cain." A warning. "Don't." Cain didn't look at him. "There's one claim that outranks a pack's," Cain said, low, only to me. "Older than Alpha law. The mate-bond of a sworn club, marked and witnessed. If you walk into the Founding Moon as mine truly mine, my mark on your throat then you don't enter as Damien's discarded Beta brat. You enter as the Luna of Ironfang." His thumb moved, once, over my collarbone. "And the moment that mark is on you, every threat he's made becomes an act of war against a club he cannot win against in front of the whole territory." The room had gone silent. Talia was staring. Roan's hand had drifted to the back of his neck like he wanted to stop what was happening and knew he couldn't. "You're asking to mark me," I said. "I'm asking you to choose it." Something flickered in his face and for one unguarded second, the cruel king of Ironfang looked almost afraid of my answer. "A bond like that can't be taken back, Wren. Not by him. Not by me. Once it's done, you're mine in every way the old law recognizes, and I am yours, and there is no severing it the way Damien severed you." His voice dropped to gravel. "I won't put it on you while you're broken and grieving and out of choices. That's what he does. I want you to walk into this with your eyes open, knowing exactly what it costs." I thought of the mark. Of his teeth at my throat the way they'd been last night, but permanent now, a thing the whole world would read on my skin. I thought of my mother in a cell. I thought of two hundred wolves who would have to stand in a neutral hall and watch the girl they threw out walk in wearing the brand of the one club their Alpha feared. My wolf, who should have run from him, rose instead and this time I didn't hate her for it. "If I do this," I said slowly, "it's not because I'm out of choices. I want that clear. I'm not a thing he made small and you made big. I'm choosing the weapon I'm going to be." I lifted my chin and met the storm head-on. "I'll take your mark, Cain Marrok. And then we're going to walk into the Founding Moon and take everything Damien Hale traded me for." For a moment he didn't move. Then he bent his head, slow, and pressed his mouth to the place where his mark would go not biting, not yet, just a promise laid against my pulse and I felt the heat of it all the way to my knees. "Tonight," he murmured against my skin. "Under the moon. Witnessed." "Tonight," I agreed. And that was when Talia, forgotten by the door, made a small broken sound. I turned. She was holding something out to me with a shaking hand a scrap of paper, folded small, edges damp from being hidden against her skin the whole wet ride across the line. "I wasn't only sent by Damien," she whispered. "Wren, I'm sorry, I didn't know how to say it in front of them. Someone else gave me this. Made me swear to put it in your hand and no one else's." I took it. Unfolded it. Three words, in handwriting I had known since I was six years old. Don't trust him. Celeste