AfterMyRejectionIMarriedHisUncle

MALAKAR'S POV

Ravion caught up to us before we reached the gates, guards trailing him, his mouth already halfway open to say something he clearly hadn't finished thinking through. "You're not taking her out of the territory tonight."

"I am." I didn't slow down. "Unless you're planning to stop me."

He didn't have an answer for that. His guards didn't move either, which told me everything I needed to know about how far he was willing to take this.

"Father won't like it."

"Your father doesn't get a vote in who I claim, same as I didn't get one in whatever that was back there." I glanced past him toward the crowd still watching from the arch. "She's not yours. She's not yours tonight, not tomorrow. So we're done here."

He stepped back. That was the last of it — there was no further protest, just his voice trailing something bitter behind us that I didn't bother turning around for.

Her sister caught up next, her steps quick and purposeful through the thinning crowd, and I gave them the distance to talk while pretending I couldn't hear every word of it.

"You didn't have to just stand there," Axira whispered.

"There wasn't anything to say that would've fixed it," her sister answered, her voice low, urgent. "Listen. This isn't the ending it looks like. Trust me."

Axira didn't answer that. When she turned back to me, her eyes were red-rimmed and empty, and she didn't look back again as we passed through the gates.

We walked in silence for a while after that. Vargulf Valley was half a day's ride from Emberclaw and I hadn't brought a carriage, hadn't planned on company at all when I left home this morning, so it was just the two of us on foot toward where I'd left my horse, the noise of the ceremony fading behind us until all that was left was the wind and her breathing which was too fast, like she was still bracing for something.

And it was irritating. 

"You can stop that," I said eventually.

She startled like I'd shouted. "Stop what?"

"Whatever you're doing to your hands." I nodded at them without looking directly at her. She'd been wringing the fabric of her sleeve for the last ten minutes, like it was the only thing keeping her upright. "You're going to tear the seam."

She stopped immediately, flushing, and shoved her hands behind her back like a child caught misbehaving.

"I'm not going to hurt you," I said, because it seemed like the thing that needed saying, given the way she was holding herself — her shoulders in, chin down, every line of her body angled slightly away from me like she was minimizing the target.

"I know."

"You don't sound like you know." I turned to her slightly. 

She didn't answer that. I let the silence simmer for a minute, unbothered by it because I honestly preferred when no one was talking, and eventually she was the one who broke it.

"Are you going to ask my name formally?"

"I already know your name. Axira Serath. I did refer to you by your name tonight when I claimed you." I glanced at her. "Do you know mine?"

"Everyone knows your name."

There was something careful in how she said it. Like she was picking her words not to offend me. I wasn't stupid. I knew the tales around me. Never bothered to correct it too. 

"Say it, then."

She hesitated. "Malakar Drenthe."

"And what does everyone know about Malakar Drenthe?"

She went quiet again, longer this time, and I watched her decide whether honesty was safe here or not.

"That you're dangerous," she said finally, quiet. "That your own wolf isn't — that something's wrong with you. That people who cross you don't stay around long enough to talk about it."

"All true, more or less." I kept walking. "Anything else?"

"That I shouldn't be alone with you."

That sentence landed different than the rest — she was scared. Her voice shook as though she remembered that she was walking to her supposed death. 

I stopped walking. She stopped a beat later, a full step of distance between us that she didn't seem inclined to close.

"You're afraid of me."

"Wouldn't you be?"

Fair point so I didn't answer it.

"I'm not going to hurt you," I said again, slower this time, my voice gruff around the edges but a tinge of honesty bled through my words. 

I expected it to land somewhere soft. But it didn't get the chance to.

Because the second our eyes met properly — actually met this evening, not the sideways glances she'd been giving me since the courtyard — something in my chest did something I hadn't expected. 

There was a sharp pull. Like someone had planted a hook somewhere in my chest and yanked hard enough for my expression to falter slightly. 

She felt it too. I knew, because her whole body went rigid, and the color drained out of her face so fast I thought for a second she might actually faint.

"What," she breathed, stumbling half a step back, hand flying to her own chest like she could physically push whatever that was back out. "What was that?"

I didn't have an answer. I'd felt exactly one thing like that before in my life, decades ago, and it hadn't happened with a girl who wasn't my mate, standing in the dark an hour after being rejected by someone else entirely.

"Nothing," I said, because that answer was easier than the alternative, and because I needed time to think before I said something I couldn't take back. "Keep walking."

She didn't move.

"That wasn't nothing." Her voice had gone thin, frightened in a new way now, a way that had nothing to do with my reputation and everything to do with whatever had just happened between us. "I felt that. You felt that too, I saw your face—"

"I said keep walking, Axira." I gritted. 

She flinched at her own name in my mouth, and after a long moment, she walked.

But she kept glancing at me sideways the rest of the way to the horse. I kept not looking back at her, because I didn't have the first idea what to say about a pull that shouldn't exist, between a rejected girl and a man everyone had the sense to fear.

There was no way. 

No way that this wide eyed girl from Serath was my mate. 

Impossible.