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At an aggravatingly leisurely pace, Aneurin strode through the Pack Hall’s corridors, high and curved like the ones in Deimos, with his best friend, whom Kai had learned was named Viktor, at his side.
“If you don't find her tonight, justchoosesomeone,” Viktor said. “It’s becoming more common. You can’t go this long without a mate. You’re the prince.”
Aneurin bristled, and he ran a hand over his dark hair. Kai had plucked that Aneurin didn’t even like Viktor much, but he’d been the son of his father’s beta, so he felt he had to be his friend. He supposed it didn’t work out for everyone.
“Fate is on my side tonight,” Aneurin said, the seal ring—not quite the orientation of wolves and moon Kai had in Deimos, but similar—glinting on his finger. “I’m going to meet her. I can feel it.”
He certainly could. There had been a tugging at his gut as he stopped at the top of the grand staircase and stared into the packed crowd, a nagging at the back of his mind.
Isla—Saoirse—had been here.
When they approached the ballroom’s double doors, trumpeters blared their instruments, and the revelers who’d been mingling and dancing came to an abrupt halt.
“May I present,” a voice proclaimed from the dais set at the head of the ballroom. “His Royal Highness, Alpha Heir Aneurin of Phobos.”
The crowd cheered and clapped as Aneurin ascended the stairs to his small throne, where one after another, his guests would greet him, most of them unmated women.
He cast his eyes along those who had already been lined by the dais, minding that gut-deep feeling of his to see if his wolf would react. But no. Nothing.
But she was here. Somewhere, calling to his blood and bones and breath.
Kai had felt it, too. Felt it now, and felt it then when he’d seen Isla across the room at the feast.
All of this seemed so…typical. Why was it crucial for them to see this to understand themselves?
“I’m going to take a walk around first,” Aneurin told someone who had essentially been his Marin and didn’t wait for his answer—or for Viktor to catch up—as he descended the dais stairs.
The women around him had become a flurry of abashed giggles and sultry stares. He smiled at each of them and bowed his head, but—
Not her, not her, not her.
Until—
He, or maybe it was Kai, had seen a luminescence first. An aura of gold surrounded a dark-haired girl he did not know that eventually flashed to the one he did. The one he loved.
Neither Kai nor Aneurin could’ve moved fast enough to whom they’d come to understand as their eternities. There had been the strangest sensation ofpullingbefore he saw Isla completely, and he felt like he was standing, though airy, on his own two feet.
“Oh, thank the Goddess,” Isla muttered, wrapping her arms around him, embracing him. Though, even this felt light, and she didn’t have her scent. Like they’d just been illusions of themselves, but this was truly her.
She pulled back to examine his face, her eyes dropping over him. “You’re in clothes.”
He glanced down at his plain attire that he hadn’t noticed, then at hers, neither of them in this day’s fashion, before scanning the rest of the crowd. No one seemed to be looking at them. No, they were looking at Saoirse and Aneurin, the will of Fate before their eyes. The air hummed between them. If only the crowd knewexactlywhat had been going through their heads right then.
Though other than that overwhelming sense of lust and longing, as if he’d still been tethered to the other alpha, Kai felt that void within Aneurin crack from its shell.
“How do we get out of here?” Kai asked Isla as the ballroom floor cleared, leaving Aneurin and Saoirse in the center of it. The future alpha had taken his mate’s hand, preparing for a dance. They’d both started at the touch, the first brush of skin against skin, but that had been it. They surely had better self-control than he and Isla had.
As if she were afraid they’d get separated again, Isla held Kai close. “She said the only way we get out is once we understand, once wesee, and everyone is fine if we play our parts, so, I guess—Goddess.”
“What?” Kai whipped his attention around as Isla craned her neck, seeking something while the orchestra had begun a new aria. This one started with a simple, hauntingly beautiful violin.
“This is it,” Isla breathed. “Thisis the music I keep hearing. The one from my nightmares and my dreams, it’s always been this.”
“The song from their first dance?” First meeting, first dance, first touch.
Isla furrowed her brows. “Yes, but—”
“But what?”
