Marked the Night Before My Wedding

Selene's POV

The morning was grey and the cold did nothing for the fever still simmering in my blood. I went up the back lawn with my arms wrapped around myself, the bite on my neck a guilty, pulsing star. Every step jolted it, every jolt a reminder that last night hadn't been a dream.

I let myself in through the kitchen entrance. The caterers were already in, prepping for a wedding that, somehow, was still happening. I kept my head down, my hair a curtain over the left side of my neck, and went straight up the service stairs to the one room in the house that was still mine: my mother's old workroom in the north wing.

Nobody went in there but me. Shelves of dried herbs in labeled jars, my mother's notebooks in her precise hand, the faint smell of lavender and old paper. My mother had been a botanist and a self-taught pharmacist—a quiet, gifted woman who'd died when I was four and left me a roomful of formulas I'd spent my whole adolescence teaching myself to read. I locked the door and leaned against it, breathing hard.

My fingers went to my neck. The skin was swollen, hot, radiating a low ache that wasn't really a wound at all. It was a call. A signal, broadcasting on a frequency only one person in the world could hear—the Alpha who'd put it there.

No. You are not my mate. You are my ruin.

I knew the theory from my mother's notebooks. An incomplete bond—a mark without the second, mutual bite—created a chemical link that only strengthened, drawing the marking Alpha toward the marked Omega like a compass finding north. I had maybe hours before someone with a sharper nose smelled the change on me.

I pulled jars off the shelf with shaking hands. Silver nettle to mask. A tincture to dull the signal. And the one that mattered: powdered silver anemone, a rare bloom my mother had grown in the greenhouse and called the "ghost flower," the only thing that could shut an Omega's glands down completely. Three days, her notes said. Seventy-two hours of borrowed time.

I worked fast, grinding and mixing over the little burner she'd left behind, the way I'd watched her do as a child and taught myself since. The paste came out greenish and acrid and cold. I smeared it thick over the bite.

The effect was instant and brutal—a searing cold like ice on a burn, then a numbing nothing. The pull in my gland went quiet. The jasmine-and-rain faded under the sterile herb smell. I wound a high cashmere scarf around my throat and hid all of it.

For a moment I just sat on the floor with my head in my hands. Fifty-eight hours, if I was lucky.

A sharp knock made me jump. "Selene? Your father wants you in the front room. Now."

My father. Marcus Argent. He hadn't asked for me directly in years.

The front room felt like a tribunal. The wedding flowers were everywhere, suddenly garish. My father stood at the head of the room, his face like poured concrete. The pack's senior people stood around him—lawyers, council, the family's old guard—their expressions running from pity to fear. My stepmother, Vivienne, was at his side, a portrait of concern. Ophelia stood just behind her, a faint, glittering smile on her lips.

"Selene," my father said. No warmth. "There's been a development."

My heart stopped.

"Cassian Hale was in a car accident last night, on the highway coming back from the city." Each word landed like a dropped stone. "He's in the ICU. Critical. The wedding is off."

A flicker of wild, stupid hope sparked and died in the same heartbeat.

"This leaves us exposed," Vivienne said, smooth as oil. "The Hale alliance is gone. Our position is weak. We need a stronger partner."

My father's grey eyes pinned me. "I've secured one. The only one with enough power and money to guarantee we survive the year. You'll be married to Lucian Blackwood. Of Blackwood Holdings. His people are already on their way here. The civil ceremony is this afternoon."

The name dropped into the room like a power line.

"Blackwood?" someone whispered. "The Butcher?"

"He buried three fiancées—"

"They say he can smell a lie. That he won't tolerate an Omega who isn't—who hasn't kept herself clean."

My blood went to slush. Lucian Blackwood. The name they used to scare junior pack members. A man who'd taken his family's company and turned it into the most feared and least understood power in the country's underground of packs—the kind of money that owned police chiefs and judges, the kind of reputation that came with the word that had just been said out loud: Butcher.

And I had another Alpha's bite seared into my neck.

"It's an honor, Selene," Vivienne said, eyes glinting. "To be chosen by a man like that."

Chosen. I was being offered up. They were sending the "broken" Omega to a man famous for cutting off anyone who wasn't pristine. If he rejected me—or worse—the blame would fall on the Argents' weakness, not Vivienne's scheme, and she could finally push to have Ophelia named heir.

Ophelia drifted to me as the room dissolved into anxious murmuring. Her perfume was cloying. "Poor Selene," she whispered against my ear. "Pray he's in a good mood. I hear he likes to take his time."

I couldn't speak. I just stared straight ahead while my mind screamed.

The rest of the morning was a blur of terrified prep. Vivienne "kindly" provided a new dress—black, high-necked, more funeral than wedding. As the afternoon light started to fade, I heard them arrive: not music, but the low growl of a convoy coming up the long drive. Black SUVs, matte and identical, pulling into a precise line.

We were assembled on the front steps, a shivering row of Argent family and staff. I stood at the front, the black dress strangling me, the scarf around my neck feeling thin as paper. The lead car's door opened.

He got out without waiting for anyone to open it for him. Tall, dark, all sharp angles and unforgiving lines, in a charcoal coat that probably cost more than the cars his people had arrived in. No bodyguard hovering—he didn't need one. Even from the steps I felt the pressure of him, a weight in the air that made it hard to draw a full breath.

His gaze swept over us, cold and dismissive, finding everyone wanting. Then his eyes—a shocking, frozen blue—landed on me.

He went utterly still.

He crossed the gravel without hurrying, and his people parted for him like he was weather. He stopped in front of me, close enough that I could smell the cold and the rain on him, and under it something dark and familiar that made the paste on my neck ache.