Chapter 13:

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The morning of the wedding was cold and very clear, the kind of sky that looks painted. I stood at the window in my dressing room for a few minutes before anyone came in, watching the frost on the glass melt from the heat of the room, and I tried to find something complicated in what I was feeling.

There wasn’t much. Mostly I was hungry — we’d been told not to eat before the ceremony — and slightly overwhelmed by my own dress, which Theron had commissioned from a designer I’d mentioned once in passing, and which fit in a way that made me understand for the first time why people cry at fittings.

The moon-shaped cakes were stacked in the reception hall. I’d finished them two days ago.

The ceremony was held in the old stone church at the center of the Iron Fang estate, with the pack elders seated in the front rows and the rest of the guests filling in behind. Theron was already at the altar when I came down the aisle, and he watched me walk toward him with the undivided attention of someone who has been waiting a long time for a specific thing and is watching it arrive. I kept my eyes on his face the whole way.

We were halfway through the ring exchange when the doors opened.

Soren came up the aisle fast, still in his bandages from the lashing, and his voice when he called my name cracked on the second syllable.

“Fable. You can’t marry him.”

𝗥𝖾𝖺d 𝗐𝘪𝘁𝗵𝗈𝘶𝘵 𝗂n𝘵𝖾𝗋𝗋𝘶𝗉𝘵iо𝘯ѕ 𝗈𝗇 𝗀a𝗹n𝗼𝘃𝗲𝘭𝘴.𝗰o𝘮

Osmund was on his feet already, gesturing to the guards, his face the particular shade of red that in a wolf of his age carries medical implications. “Get him out. Now. I will deal with you personally—”

“I don’t care!” Soren was not performing this. Whatever had been calculated in him before, it wasn’t here now — his voice was ragged, his hands at his sides, his eyes fixed on me and not on his father. “I don’t want the inheritance. I don’t want any of it. I want Fable.”

The church had gone very still.

“Fable.” He came closer, and the guards moved with him, not quite touching him yet. “In our past life — you married me. We had a life together. Until the end, we were together. That’s how it was supposed to go. That’s still how it’s supposed to go.” His voice broke, recovered, broke again. “I can give you everything he can give you. I just need a few more years, and I’ll be able to — please. Come back.”

I looked at him for a moment.

He’d remembered. He’d carried it — whatever version of those years he’d carried — and it had brought him here in his bandages to make this speech in front of everyone who mattered to both our families. I didn’t doubt it was real. That was the saddest part, probably: that it was real, and it still didn’t move me at all.

“Soren,” I said. “What you remember and what was true aren’t the same thing. I was there too. I know what those years cost.” I kept my voice level — not cold, just clear. “Theron is the only person I love. That’s not going to change because you came here. From today, you’re my husband’s nephew. I hope you find a way to live with that.”

I turned back to the altar.

We exchanged the rings. I kissed Theron in front of his family, and his hands were steady at my waist, and behind us I heard Soren make a sound I didn’t turn around for.

The marking ritual came after — the mutual claiming, witnessed by the pack elders and the Lunar Goddess and everyone assembled, the bond that settled into my skin like something that had always been there waiting to be named. Our wolves found each other in the space between us and recognized what they already knew.

Somewhere behind us, there was a commotion. Then a different sound. Then silence.

Someone said, quietly, that Soren had put a knife into his own chest.

He didn’t die. He was taken out on a stretcher and treated by the pack healer and survived, which is more than he deserved and exactly as much as I wished for him — which is to say, his survival. Nothing more complicated than that.

The reception went on until nearly dawn.

In the months that followed, Soren broke with his family entirely and tried to form his own clan, telling anyone who would listen that he would take back what was his. The attempt was not successful. He didn’t have the resources or the alliances, and Theron had spent years building exactly the network that Soren would have needed and didn’t have access to. The Iron Fang, with Theron’s properties repatriated and his foreign holdings brought home, became something different than it had been — larger, better connected, more itself.

Soren faded into the background of other people’s stories, which is the most honest ending available to someone like him.

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