Page 194 of The Werewolf’s Wrong Mate

“You were going to use me to kill him,” I said.

Evelyn’s gaze flicked to Ronan. “Use is such an ugly word.”

Cormac’s voice was flat. “Assassination rarely improves with nicer vocabulary.”

Evelyn ignored him. She kept her attention on me. “Then you would have been tragic. Broken. Feral. A danger to your own pack after the grief. Silas would have offered aid, of course. Stability. Oversight. Strong leadership after Ronan’s death and your collapse.”

I looked at Ronan again. Brother. Alpha. The man I had obeyed because someone had to hold the pack together and someone had to be willing to bleed for it. Thorne had meant to put my teeth in his throat.

A cold, distant part of me understood the strategy. That made it worse.

“And Cassie?” I asked.

Evelyn’s face lit. There was no other word for it. She had been waiting.

“That,” she said, “is the embarrassing part.”

I stopped breathing.

“She was never meant to be there,” Evelyn said. “No one lured your precious human because no one cared she existed. The circle was open. The binding was hungry. Your wolf was already fighting me, poor thing. Then she stumbled through the hedge, all fear and cheap champagne, and fell into a spell looking for a hand.”

My mind rejected the words before they finished.

Cassie in the circle. Cassie bleeding beneath me. Cassie’s eyes wide with terror.

My wolf choosing her.

Mine.

Evelyn smiled as if she heard the word inside my skull. “She was not chosen by the moon. She was not proof of some hidden law. She was not a miracle. She was a door left open during a theft.”

“Shut up,” I said.

My voice was low enough that Cormac moved fully between us.

Evelyn leaned forward despite the silver burning her wrists. “She is not your mate, Ian.”

My vision narrowed to her throat.

“She is where the leash landed.”

The wolf hit the inside of my skin so hard pain burst down my arms.

Cormac’s hand slammed against my chest. “Ian.”

I could have gone through him. I nearly did.

Ronan’s command cracked through the room. “Enough.”

Evelyn laughed, breathless now. “That is why she can call him back. That is why your command slides off him and her little human voice catches. The binding was designed to make him answer through the marked female. It merely attached to the wrong one.”

Cassie’s voice moved through me again.

I’m alive. You found me. Now come back.

Then another memory.

There you are.