Did Serena mark him at all?

Elara had seen the evidence. She had walked into Gavriel’s quarters and found Serena on top of him, hand bleeding, the mark fresh and glowing on his shoulder. The scene was unambiguous. The mark was real. The glow was active. The blood was Serena’s.

Unless it wasn’t Serena’s mark. Unless someone else had marked him and the timing was coincidental and the position Elara had found them in was contextually misleading.

But the mark was glowing gold, which usually meant Serena. Active meant bonded. Bonded meant pain transmission. Pain transmission meant Gavriel should be on the ground right now bleeding from his nose and clutching his ribs.

He was standing with his arms crossed looking mildly constipated.

Unless the matebond was broken. Snapped. Severed. Like the one with Guinevere. Had the dark magic that nearly killed him damaged the new matebond too? Had the coma interrupted the formation? Was the mark a mark without a channel, a door without a hallway, a connection that existed on skin but died before it reached bone?

Her mind was spiraling. The spiral was productive, organized, the spiral of a woman whose intelligence processed confusion by generating hypotheses and whose hypotheses were stacking up faster than her ability to test them.

She had zero answers. Multiple theories. Insufficient data.

Both the Gamma and the Beta Luna stood on the sideline in matching silence. Both stewing in thoughts that were shaped nothing alike.

Gavriel fighting his wolf. Elara stewing in a mark that glowed and a matebond that didn’t transmit and a best friend who was either mated to the Gamma of Drakenfell or had been framed by circumstances so perfectly misleading that the framing deserved its own investigation.

Neither said a word.

Two people. Three feet apart. Both carrying secrets that would detonate the same group of people. The irony was so thick you could have spread it on toast, and the toast would have tasted like bullshit.

✦✦✦

DRAKENFELL — TRAINING FIELD

SEVEN MINUTES LATER

Rook: Real mate.

Gavriel: I know, buddy.

Rook: No. I mean that is our mate. MATE.

Gavriel: I said I know.

Rook: No, you don’t get it. We have connection to her.

Gavriel: I know we do. We’ve always had that.

Rook: The loud wolf howled at our mate.

Gavriel: I heard.

✦✦✦

DRAKENFELL — TRAINING FIELD

ELEVEN MINUTES LATER

Rook: Our mate is winning.

Gavriel: She’s slapping him in the face. That’s not winning. That’s not even fighting.

Rook: He stopped moving. She did not. That is winning. I don’t make the rules.

✦✦✦

DRAKENFELL — TRAINING FIELD

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER

Rook: Go to mate.

Gavriel: No.

Rook: Go to mate.

Gavriel: No.

Rook: Go to mate.

Gavriel: Saying it three times doesn’t change the answer.

✦✦✦

DRAKENFELL — TRAINING FIELD

THIRTY MINUTES LATER

On the sideline, Gavriel Sterling had been watching with a mildly constipated look on his face from fighting his wolf for thirty minutes. The fighting had been the quietest war he had ever waged.

Rook: Mate is hurt. She is bleeding. Go to mate.

Gavriel: Stand down, Rook. She has two Alphas on that sideline. We are doing nothing.

Rook: The two big ones are shaking.

Gavriel: I noticed.

Rook: If they shift, I shift. Mate is ours.

Gavriel: Mate is theirs. We talked about this.

Rook had been disagreeing with Gavriel about Serena since the moment she walked into Drakenfell. The disagreement was not new. The disagreement was ancient, persistent, and running on a fuel source that Gavriel could not identify and could not shut off and was frankly goddamn tired of arguing with. Arguing with your own wolf was a debate that had no fucking moderator.

Rook:I want to lick mate.

Gavriel:No.

Rook:The loud wolf tried to lick mate. If he gets to try, I get to try.

His jaw was locked. His arms were crossed. His body was a statue holding a volcano. He was also deeply, profoundly confused, and the confusion had layers, and the layers were stacked vertically. At the top: what the fuck is wrong with Thor Crushturn?

The Thor layer was urgent. Gavriel had watched five rounds of a wolf he outranked behaving in ways that would have earned a court-martial in any other context and the context of this specific training field was apparently governed by different laws. Laws written by chaos and enforced by nobody.

Thor’s behavior included the play bow, the belly roll, the paw salute, the howl with vibrato, the circling, the face-slapping, and the sustained eye contact that should have been classified as a goddamn war crime.

He had questions. Many questions. Questions he couldn’t ask because asking them would require speaking and speaking would require unclenching his jaw and unclenching his jaw would require relaxing and relaxing was off the table.

The moment Aurelia’s golden eyes opened, Rook had started howling inside Gavriel’s skull with the persistent, unrelenting enthusiasm of a wolf who had found what he was looking for and did not give a single fuck about the consequences of claiming it.

In fact, Rook was three seconds from taking control and “taking control” meant Gavriel would be sprinting across a training field towards a woman he had loved for ten thousand years and the sprinting would end his friendship, his rank, and possibly his life.

Two Alpha Kings were on that sideline. Two. Both of them were already vibrating. Both of them were already fighting their own wolves. If Gavriel shifted and sprinted toward their mate, the resulting collision would produce a body count

Rook: We have a matebond with mate.

Gavriel: We would be feeling her pain if we did.

Rook: Something blocking.

Something blocking. Two words from his wolf that were either the most important observation of the day or the most paranoid, and Gavriel couldn’t determine which because his brain was split between fighting Rook, watching Serena, monitoring Thor, and processing ten thousand years of past life memories.

Across the field, both of Dex’s fists were white at the knuckle, his eyes solid gold, his breathing controlled through sheer force of will that was running low on sheer and lower on force. He hadn’t said a goddamn word in twenty-five minutes. The silence was louder than anything Thor had done on that field.

Fin was identical. Frozen. Rigid. A pillar of controlled fury whose control had a shelf life and whose shelf life was written in minutes, and the minutes were running.