Chapter 4
Snow had started to fall, fat and lazy. The grove was a cathedral of pale trunks and silence. A stone basin sat at its center, carved with the phases of the moon, filled with black water and stars. A silver knife lay beside it, old as sin.
Elder Maeve’s voice echoed off the birch. “Trial One: Truth. Speak without lying while the Alpha questions you. If your tongue falters, the bond will tighten. Trial Two: Endurance. Take the bite of silver without shifting. If you break, the bond will devour you. Trial Three: Choice. At the final bell, with the bond singing, you must walk away without looking back. If you turn—” She looked at my mark, and I could swear I saw sorrow there. “You belong to him forever.”
The first bell tolled, slow and mournful from the chapel on the hill.
Damien stepped into the circle opposite me, coat undone, throat bare. “Truth,” he said. “Who do you want?”
My mouth went dry. The bond pulsed, smug. The grove listened.
“You,” I said, and pain lanced my neck as if the bond tightened to say good girl.
“Why Severance?” he asked.
“Because wanting you isn’t the same as being wanted right,” I answered, and the pain eased.
His eyes flickered in something like approval—then sharpened. “If I ordered you to your knees, would you obey?”
Laughter broke from me, sharp and bright in the cold. “I’d take your knees out first.” The grove hummed with an older kind of approval. The bite’s ache dulled to a burn I could survive.
“Truth,” he said, softer. “Are you afraid?”
“Yes.”
The bell tolled again, closer now, vibrating my ribs.
“Endurance,” Elder Rowan intoned, lifting the knife. “Silver.”
Damien reached for it. “I’ll do it.”
Our eyes met—Alpha, mate, enemy, gravity. He took my wrist in both hands, and for a breath there was no court, no law, no sister watching from the fringe with her heart in her eyes. There was only the bond—hot, inexorable—and the way his thumb stroked once over my pulse like an apology no one else would ever hear.
“Don’t faint,” he murmured.
“Don’t gloat,” I shot back.
The silver kissed my skin. Fire seared a white path up my arm, exploded behind my eyes, wired my jaw shut. I didn’t shift. I didn’t scream. I counted birch knots and winters and all the ways he had broken me in an hour. When the knife lifted, my knees tried to forget how to be knees. I forced them to remember.
The court breathed as one—the sound wolves make when a fight lasts longer than expected.
Damien’s nostrils flared. Pride, anger, desire, all of it tangled. “Almost over,” he said, which was a lie. This would never be over, not really.
The final bell began its slow, fateful swing.
“Choice,” Elder Maeve said, voice hushed. “When the bell stops, you must turn your back on the one you’re bound to and walk to the tree line without looking back. Not once. Not for voice. Not for scent. Not for command.”
The bond woke like a beast. Damien did nothing—and everything. He breathed. He existed inside my skin. He let his power rise in a tide not aimed at me, simply present, an answer in my body to a question I didn’t ask.
The bell swung. Snow fell. Somewhere behind me, Serena sobbed. Somewhere inside me, my wolf pressed her forehead to mine and waited to see if I would save us or kill us.
The bell’s final note shivered the air and went silent.
I took the first step.
“Clara.” Damien’s voice followed, a thread wrapped around bone.
I took the second.
“Little wolf,” he said, softer, wrecking me. “Don’t do this.”
I took the third step, and the bond yanked so hard I tasted iron.
Something hot slid down my throat—blood or tears, I couldn’t tell. Birch trees blurred into a pale cathedral I might never pray in again. The grove held its breath. The world held its breath.
Behind me, the crunch of snow that wasn’t mine.
I knew the sound of him without hearing. The weight of him without touch. Alpha gravity closing the distance we were trying to turn into sky.
If I looked back now, all of it—freedom, fury, the right to choose myself—would disappear like heat in snow.
“Clara,” he whispered, close enough that I felt the word on the bite he’d given me.
I lifted my chin into the cold and took another step. The world tilted.
And then—just as the edge of the trees kissed my outstretched fingers—a hand closed around my throat from the darkness ahead, claws pricking skin that wasn’t his.
A stranger’s growl slid through the birches.
“Easy, Alpha,” the voice rasped, not Damien’s at all. “You’re about to lose more than a mate.”
The grove erupted into savage sound. The bond snapped tight enough to strangle. My vision sparked white.
