Page 238 of The Werewolf’s Wrong Mate

She told me I had listened to people who wanted the bond to be false because the truth frightened them. She told Ronan and the council that they had wanted an excuse, and I had taken it because I had spent my life being taught to believe the ugliest version of myself first.

I wanted to turn away from that.

I could not.

She was right.

Evelyn’s cruelty had found purchase because it sounded like every law I had ever obeyed. A weapon needed a hand. A dangerous wolf needed command. A man like me didn’t get chosen. He was aimed. He was managed. He was used until the work was finished, then watched in case he remembered his teeth belonged to him.

Silas had not created that belief in me.

He had only named it.

Cassie stood in the rain and tore the name apart. She said the rite had never finished. She said everyone had repeated that truth when it helped condemn her, then forgot it when a corrupted explanation helped condemn me. She stood before wolves older than her whole bloodline and demanded they explain how a broken ritual could still become a perfect leash.

No one answered her. The silence did what nothing else had done. It let doubt enter the wound. I had torn at the bond until I thought I could feel the roots coming free. I had believed the pain was proof of corruption. I had believed the agony meant I was cutting out a chain.

Now, watching Cassie stand between my wolf and the pack, I felt what remained beneath the torn edges.

It was not command or obedience.

It was her.

Her fear. Her anger. Her pain. Her impossible refusal to let me decide alone what her life was worth. Her stubborn, reckless courage, bright enough to reach me through the red haze where Ronan’s command had failed.

She stepped in front of me when wolves moved. My whole body prepared to kill them.

Then she snapped one word over her shoulder.

“Stay.”

The wolf stopped, because she had trusted me with the word. That difference moved through me slowly, too large to understand all at once. A leash dragged. A command bent the spine. Cassie’s voice did neither. It offered a place to stand, and some broken part of me recognized that I could choose to stand there.

Then she faced the pack. I watched her shoulders tremble. I smelled the blood where her stitches had opened. I heard the thin catch in her breath as the mark burned under the wet fabric of her sweater. She should have been on the ground. She should have been safe. She should have been anything except a human woman placing herself between a feral wolf and an execution order.

She told them they could go fuck themselves.

There would be a time, if we lived, when I would remember that and laugh with my mouth against her skin.

In that moment, it felt sacred.

She spoke of me as if I had not been ruined by what I had done. As if my restraint had mattered. As if my care for her had been mine and not something planted in me by an enemy’s hand. She said I had always been more than they allowed me to be.

I didn’t know how to believe her but I wanted to, and that wanting frightened me more than death had.

Then she pulled the sweater from her shoulder and ripped away the bandage, and the mark opened beneath the moon.

Gold threaded through the torn bite.

I went still.

The wolf went still with me.

All night, I had called it binding because I could not bear the other word. I had punished every warm pulse between us by naming it leash. I had tried to carve it out while killing my way through Thorne wolves because if the bond died and Cassie lived, I thought that would be enough.

The mark didn’t die. Under the full moon, with my blood on the stones and her choice ringing through the courtyard, the mark answered.

“This is my mate,” she said.