Betrayed by My Fated Mate

I was seventeen the night Faye came home in pieces.

I remember the porch light was still on at the Carroll house. Flynn was the one who carried her up the steps, and I remember the way his arms shook — not from her weight, because Faye had never weighed anything, but from the effort of not howling. Her dress was the pale yellow one her mother had sewn for the Coming of Age. There was very little yellow left.

I did not cry in front of him. I learned that night that there were certain feelings I could not afford to spend out loud.

The healer came. The healer left. The healer did not look any of us in the eye.

"Her wolf," Flynn said finally, in the hallway, in a voice I had never heard him use before. "She can't — Celeste, she can't reach her wolf."

"How far?"

"Halfway. Maybe less. The healer says it might come. The healer says a lot of things."

I sat on the floor outside Faye's room until the sun came up. I did not go in. I had nothing in my hands worth bringing her.

When she finally woke, three days later, the first thing she said to me was, "Don't make that face. Please. Cel. Don't."

I fixed my face.

She touched the left side of her collarbone, lightly, the way you touch a bruise to see if it is still there. Her fingers did not stop touching it for the rest of the afternoon. I do not think she knew she was doing it.

"Tallulah," I said. Quietly. Not a question.

Faye looked at the ceiling. "Six of them. She was laughing the whole time. Cel, please don't."

"Don't what."

"Don't do anything. Please. They'll bury you next to me."

I promised her I wouldn't. That was the first lie. There would be others.

***

The second thing I learned that year was that Jaxon Payne had known.

Not suspected. Known. Because the bond had already settled in him the way it had begun to settle in me — that low cedar hum I felt every time he passed through a room, that small tightening at the base of my spine I had been pretending was nothing. He felt it. He knew who I was to him. He knew his sister had cornered my best friend behind a barn at the eastern training field, and he had decided, somewhere inside that warm gold-eyed face, that one Omega girl's wolf was a fair price for the political peace of his Coming-of-Alpha year.

I worked that information out slowly, over months, the way you work a splinter out of skin. I sat through pack dinners with him across the table. I let his hand brush mine once at a Beltane bonfire. I watched him watch me with that scent-drunk softness people kept calling devotion, and I let my body do the small involuntary things it wanted to do — the flush, the slowed breath — because if I started suppressing them too early he would notice.

I did not let myself hate him in any way he could smell.

I went home after every event and pressed my thumbnail into the inside of my wrist until the urge to be sick passed.

***

Mateo found me in the kitchen one night with three pack ledgers open on the table.

I had stolen them. Not the important ones — those were locked behind Trevor's office and would take years. These were trade manifests from a low-rank warehouse in the southern run, and they were already enough to tell me that Blackthorn shipping records did not match Blackthorn shipping reality by a margin of about forty percent.

My brother looked at the ledgers. Then he looked at me. Mateo had our father's easy face — the kind that smiled before it thought — and he did not smile now.

"Cel."

"Sit down."

He sat.

"How long," he said.

"Since Faye."

He was quiet for a long time. Then he reached across the table and turned one of the ledgers around to face him. He read it the way I had taught myself to read it — column by column, mouth moving slightly. When he looked up his eyes were not our father's anymore.

"What do you need."

"I need you inside the warriors. I need you trusted. I need you patient."

"How long."

"Years, Mateo."

He nodded once. He did not ask any of the questions a less useful brother would have asked. He said, "Okay," and he poured himself coffee, and the next morning he started showing up to Blackthorn training drills.

I did not thank him. He would not have known what to do with it.

***

Flynn was harder.

Flynn I had to break first.

I went to him in the back room of the Carroll house six months after Faye came home, after the healer had finally said the word *permanent* out loud, and I laid it out for him on the kitchen table the way I had laid it out for Mateo. The trafficking. The Silvercreek rumors I was beginning to confirm. The slow, patient shape of a case that would need a witness from inside Tallulah's personal enforcer ring to ever stand up in a Lycan court.

Flynn listened to the whole thing without moving. When I finished, he said, "You want me to walk into her house."

"Yes."

"You want me to disown my sister to do it."

I did not look away. "Yes."

He stood up. He walked to the sink. He put both hands flat on the rim of it and he stayed like that for a very long time, and I watched the back of his neck go dark with something his wolf was doing under his skin.

"She won't understand," he said finally.

"No."

"She'll think I left her."

"Yes."

"For how long."

"Until it's done."

He turned around. His eyes were wet and his mouth was completely still, which is a combination I hope never to see on another person's face for the rest of my life.

"If you fail," he said, "I will have done that to her for nothing."

"I know."

"Don't fail, Celeste."

"I won't."

The next week he stood in the middle of the pack square and told a crowd of Blackthorn warriors that he had no sister. Tallulah was three rows back, watching, smiling with her mouth closed. She offered him a place at her shoulder before sundown. He took it.

Faye did not speak to me for two months. When she finally did, it was at the back of her mother's garden, and all she said was, "You knew, didn't you. About Flynn."

I did not answer.

She nodded once, very small, the way she did everything. Then she put her hand in mine and she said, "Tell me when."

"When what."

"When I can come back from this."

I couldn't tell her years. I said, "Soon as I can, Faye. I promise."

That was the second lie. But it was the one I was going to make true.

***

Virginia Payne sent for me on a Wednesday afternoon in the third year.

No invitation, no message — just a black car at the end of my street and a Beta-rank driver who knew my name. I got in. I did not ask questions. I had been waiting for her, the way you wait for weather, and now the weather had arrived.

She was in the conservatory at the back of the Payne estate. White orchids. White linen. A woman who did not stand up when I came in because standing was a courtesy and we were not, yet, on terms that required courtesies.

She looked at me over the rim of a teacup for a long, considering moment.

Then she said, "You're going to need money."

I sat down across from her.

"Yes," I said. "Eventually. I'm going to need a great deal of it."

Virginia Payne smiled — small, dry, entirely without warmth — and set her cup down.

"Good," she said. "Let's begin."