Page 219 of The Werewolf’s Wrong Mate

She flinched and I hated myself for it.

Then a Thorne wolf came over the fountain wall toward her family, and I stopped being a man long enough to meet him.

The courtyard descended into teeth.

Rain hit stone, but the blood hit harder.

Chapter 24:

A Violent Kind of Freedom

Cassie

Silas said, “That you were never his destined mate, little human. You were a mishap.”

For one second, I heard absolutely nothing else. Not the rain hitting stone. Not Henry barking hard enough to tear his own throat raw. Not my father shouting my name with blood on his mouth. Not Tessa crying somewhere near the fountain.

Just that word.

Mishap.

It was a stupid word for what my body had been through. Too small. Too tidy. The kind of word someone used after knocking over a centerpiece or sending an email to the wrong person. I looked at Silas, and some calm part of me thought, This is what monsters do when they own a room. They give the pain a name that makes it sound administrative.

My body wanted to sit down.

Unfortunately, the courtyard was full of werewolves, hostages, rain, and whatever remained of my dignity. There was also a very real chance that if I sat down, I would never get back up, and I had not survived this long to die on decorative paving.

Silas kept talking. “The rite Ian entered was altered. It was never designed to join two noble souls under the moon, or whatever poetry these provincial wolves still feed their females. It was designed to bind his wolf to the female who held the mark.”

A cold sheet of understanding slid over me. Not all at once. The human brain was mercifully terrible at processing supernatural betrayal in real time. Mine offered me small, awful pieces instead.

Altered.

Bind.

Female who held the mark.

Me.

The mark under my sweater pulsed like it had heard its own name spoken by someone who had no right to know it.

Ian stood a few feet away from me, rain dampening his dark hair, his body too still in that way I had learned meant he was holding back something large and dangerous. He didn’t look surprised.

He looked destroyed. That was worse.

He had known.

Maybe not for long. Maybe only since he left the room. Maybe he had been trying to carry it quietly because that was what Ian did with anything sharp enough to cut someone else. He took it into himself and stood there bleeding internally while everyone admired his control.

But he had known. The hurt of that moved through me fast and hot. Then it ran into something larger.

Fear.

Not of him.

For him.

Because I knew that face. I had seen versions of it in men who had been told too many times what they were useful for and not enough times what they were worth when no one needed them.