Page 195 of The Werewolf’s Wrong Mate

Her hand on my face. Her body beneath mine, trusting me after terror. Her mouth saying my name like I was still human enough to deserve it.

All of it began to tilt.

No.

I held on to the word because there was nothing else.

No, because I had known her scent before the bite closed. No, because the wolf had broken toward her with relief, not obedience. No, because Cassie had looked at me and seen more than the pack weapon. No, because no corrupted circle could have made her brave, sharp, exhausted, furious, alive.

Then the other truth rose beneath it. The circle had been designed to control me. Cassie could call me back and Ronan could not. Her voice had worked exactly where Alpha command failed.

My stomach turned. Maybe she wanted me because the mark told her wanting was choice. Maybe I loved her because the binding needed me devoted to the hand holding it. Maybe every time I called her mate, I had been naming a lock around my own throat.

Evelyn watched me understand.

Her voice softened into something almost tender, which made it vile. “For one beautiful moment, you thought something chose you for love.”

Ronan moved before I did. He crossed the room, took Evelyn by the throat, and slammed her chair against the wall hard enough to shake dust from the stone. She gasped. The cuffs rattled. Silver burned deeper.

Ronan’s face was inches from hers. “You will not speak to him again.”

Evelyn’s smile trembled, but it held. “There is your Alpha. I wondered where you kept him.”

Ronan released her.

For several breaths, no one spoke. I stared at Evelyn. I could kill her. That fact didn’t interest me. Killing her would be simple, and nothing simple could touch the thing she had opened in me.

Ronan opened the door. “Cormac, stay with her.”

Cormac looked at me, then at Ronan. “You sure?”

“Yes.”

Cormac didn’t like it. He stayed anyway.

I walked out of Evelyn’s holding room before I killed her. That was the only mercy I had left in me, and it was not for her.

Ronan followed me into the corridor and shut the door behind us. The old stone swallowed the sound. For several breaths, all I heard was the faint hiss of silver through the threshold, Evelyn’s breathing on the other side, and the pulse of Cassie’s life somewhere above me.

Cassie sleeping in a room full of guards. Cassie bruised and bandaged because my world had reached out and taken her. Cassie marked by a thing I had called fate because I had been desperate enough to believe one good thing could come to me without a knife hidden inside it.

I put my hand against the wall. The stone was cold but I felt nothing. That frightened me for one distant second. Then even that passed.

Ronan stood beside me without speaking. He had known enough before he brought me down here. Maybe not everything Evelyn had said, maybe not the exact shape of the cruelty she had saved for my face, but enough. He had known the circle was not a failed claiming. He had known it was command magic. He had known whatever tied Cassie to me might be the trap Silas meant to fasten around my throat.

I looked at my brother. “How long?”

His jaw tightened. “Cormac found the second ash trace after the hunt.”

“How long, Ronan?”

“Long enough to know you needed to hear it from her.”

A laugh moved through me. It had no sound in it. “You thought that would make it cleaner?”

“No,” he said. “I thought if I told you, you would think I was trying to take her from you.”

“You are.”