Nova's POV:
"Don't scream."
The woman with the white hair stopped three feet in front of me and said it the way people said things they had already decided were unnecessary but said anyway out of courtesy.
I had not been planning to scream. I had been planning to stand up and put distance between us because something about the way she moved across that parking lot, unhurried and deliberate, like she had walked toward me in her mind a hundred times before doing it physically, made every instinct I owned go very quiet and very alert.
I stood up.
She was closer to fifty than forty, pale-skinned, with white hair that was not the white of age but of something else entirely, something that looked chosen rather than arrived at. Her eyes were a green so light they were almost colorless in the parking lot lighting. She was dressed plainly. Nothing about her surface announced what she was.
Everything underneath it did.
"You're not afraid of me," she said. She sounded mildly interested by this.
"I'm cold and I'm sitting on parking lot concrete and a man just said something in a language I don't know that made my collarbone feel like it was being hollowed out." I kept my voice even. "I don't have bandwidth left for afraid right now."
Something moved across her expression. Not quite a smile. The shape of one.
"My name is Maren," she said. "I've been looking for you for eleven years."
I stared at her. "You've been looking for me since I was eleven."
"Since the night your mark first appeared," she said. "You were running a fever and your parents thought it was a reaction to something you ate and they were wrong." She tilted her head. "The mark glowed for approximately four seconds. Enough for the right people to register it. Enough for the wrong people to register it too."
The collarbone mark. The birthmark I had carried for twenty-two years without ever once thinking about it.
"What is it," I said.
"The Void Moon seal." She watched my face. "It appears once every five hundred years on the mate of the Blood Sovereign. The one who carries it is bonded to him from birth. The bond matures when they make physical contact for the first time."
I thought about the man in the hall. The moment I walked into him. The crack in my chest.
"We made contact tonight," I said.
"Yes."
"And he rejected me in front of four hundred people approximately thirty seconds later."
"Yes."
I breathed through that for a moment. "Why."
"Because he is cursed," she said. It came out flat and factual, the tone of someone delivering information rather than drama. "Two years ago a binding was placed on him. Anyone he forms an emotional bond with begins to lose their life force. He has watched two of his closest people deteriorate. He will not risk the same for a mate." She paused. "So he ended the bond before it could fully form."
"Except it already formed," I said. "When we touched."
"Yes."
"So his rejection didn't actually work."
"The public declaration severed the formal recognition," she said. "The bond underneath it is still there. Incomplete. But present." She held my gaze. "Which means you will feel him. His moods. His pain. His anger. At random and without warning, until the incomplete bond either finalizes or one of you dies."
The parking lot was very cold and very quiet.
"That's what I have to look forward to," I said.
"That," she said, "and the woman who cursed him, who has known about your mark since you were eleven years old and has been removing potential mates before they could reach him for two years." She paused. "Tonight is the first time you made it to contact. Which means she failed. Which means she will not fail twice."
The mark on my collarbone pulsed once. Cold. Like a warning.
"Who is she," I said.
Maren opened her mouth.
My collarbone went from cold to burning in under a second. Not the silver heat from the hall. Something different. Darker. A pressure behind my eyes that arrived without warning and dropped me to one knee before I understood what was happening.
Not pain exactly.
Someone else's pain.
A room I had never been in. Stone walls, low light, the smell of old wood and cold air and something metallic underneath both. And a feeling that was not mine, vast and controlled and exhausted, the specific exhaustion of someone who had been carrying something enormous for a long time and had recently made a choice they could not take back.
His exhaustion.
His room.
I was feeling Caius from a parking lot two miles away and the bond he had tried to sever was feeding me his emotional state like a signal I had no way to turn off.
He was awake. It was past midnight and he was awake and sitting alone somewhere in the dark and the weight coming through the incomplete bond felt like standing at the bottom of something very deep.
Then, through the connection, brief and specific and entirely without warning, something else.
He knew I could feel him.
And for three seconds before he shut it down and locked it behind whatever control he used to manage everything, I felt him feel it too. The pull. The specific, unbearable pull of something the universe had decided before either of them had a say in it.
He locked it.
The connection went quiet.
I was kneeling on parking lot concrete with my hand pressed over my collarbone and Maren crouching in front of me with her colorless eyes very close.
"It's starting," she said.
"What is."
"The bond refusing to stay incomplete." She put two fingers under my chin and tilted my face up and looked at my mark, which I could feel glowing again from the inside. "Your Void Moon wolf is waking up, Nova. Faster than I expected. Faster than she has any right to wake up in someone who has lived completely outside the supernatural world their whole life." She dropped her hand. "When she fully wakes, the bond will attempt to complete itself regardless of what Caius declared tonight."
"And the curse," I said.
"The curse affects bonded connections," Maren said. "The bond you have is incomplete. Which means right now you are in a window that no one in five hundred years has ever been in. Not fully bonded. Not fully rejected." She stood. "Which means the curse cannot touch you yet."
"Yet," I said.
"Yet," she confirmed.
My phone lit up on the ground where it had fallen when I dropped. A message from Jess.
*Where are you. Come back inside. There's someone who wants to talk to you. He says it's important. His name is Aldric.*
I looked at Maren.
"Who is Aldric," I said.
Her expression changed completely. Every trace of the measured, informational tone she had been using went somewhere else. What replaced it was specific and sharp and alert.
"Aldric is Caius's Beta," she said. "His most trusted person." She took my arm. "Nova. If Caius sent Aldric to find you tonight, after a public rejection, then something has already changed." She looked at the hall entrance. "The question is whether he sent Aldric to apologize or to make sure you leave the city before morning."
END OF CHAPTER 2