Chapter 1 The Scent I Stole

The trick to faking a mate bond is in the breath.

You breathe out slow and let your scent carry what you want it to carry. Pine resin if you need the wolf to believe you belong to the forest. Rain on stone if you need him to think of home. Every wolf has a scent they are waiting for, even if they do not know it yet, and a bond-broker's gift is the ability to find it and wear it for a night.

I had done it four times before tonight. Two of those wolves were still alive. One was a mercenary from a pack near the Canadian border, and the other was a Council clerk who never figured out who had skimmed his ledgers. I told myself the two dead ones had it coming. I was good at telling myself things.

The Blackpine pack house sat on a ridge above a pine forest so dense it looked black even in the daylight, and I had walked eight miles through it with my boots full of snowmelt to reach it. The estate was an old Gilded Age thing, all gray stone and tall chimneys, with a wing on the east side that had been boarded up for longer than anyone living could remember. The windows glowed amber. Somewhere inside, a fire was burning, and wolves were talking in low voices.

I stood at the base of the steps and let my heart settle. Then I breathed out.

Silas came down the steps himself. That surprised me. An Alpha with a true mate coming to his territory for the first night usually sends his Beta, or a couple of warriors, or at least a Gamma to sniff the new arrival before letting him through the door. Silas came alone, and he came barefoot, his shirt untucked, his dark hair silvering at the temples. His eyes were pale and clouded, and he moved down the stone steps without looking for them, his hand trailing the iron rail.

"One more step and you will be on my porch," he said. His voice was soft, almost gentle. "Say your name first."

"Deke."

"Deke." He tested the word like it was a fruit he had never eaten. "From Ashfall."

"Yes."

"Come up, then."

I climbed the steps, and he turned his face toward me, and I let my scent out on the cold air. I had built it for him over three days: cedar and clean snow and a little smoke, the kind of smoke that comes off a hearth in a house that has been lived in a long time. It was a scent I had practiced. I had practiced it with my eyes closed in a motel outside Lake Placid, breathing into a towel and thinking of the way a real bond feels when it finds you, that sudden catch in the chest, like a hook behind the ribs.

Silas breathed in.

Something crossed his face. His mouth opened slightly, and his hand tightened on the rail. He stood very still for a long moment, and I felt my own wolf rise in my chest, uneasy, because a wolf who is being lied to about the most sacred thing in his life should not go quiet like that. He should growl. He should demand proof.

"Your hands are cold," he said finally. "Come inside."

The hall was full of pack. I had expected that. Blackpine was not a large pack, maybe forty wolves in the house and another thirty scattered along the territory, but they had gathered in the main hall for the arrival of their Alpha's mate, and every face turned when Silas led me in. Some of them looked at my hair, which is pale enough to be mistaken for white in low light, and some of them looked at my eyes, which are gray and have been called unfriendly. A few looked at my hands, which were still cold and which I had not bothered to warm.

The Beta was in the front of the crowd. Mara. She was taller than most of the women in the room, with black hair pulled back and eyes that were a deep amber, almost brown until the firelight caught them. She did not smile. She looked at me the way a wolf looks at a scent on the wind that does not belong to the season.

"Beta," Silas said. "This is Deke. He is my mate."

Mara's nostrils flared. She took one step toward me, then another, and I held still while she circled me. I have been sniffed by a lot of wolves in my life, and I have learned to make my heartbeat slow and steady, my breathing even, my scent constant. The trick is not to be afraid. Or to be afraid in a way that smells like nothing.

She stopped at my shoulder.

"He smells like cedar," she said.

"He smells like home," Silas said.

"That is not what I said." Mara's voice was flat. She looked at Silas and then at me, and her jaw worked once, as if she were chewing a thought and finding it sour. "You came through the pass alone?"

"Yes."

"Nobody met you at the border?"

"I did not ask anyone to."

She filed that away somewhere behind her eyes. "You will want to eat. There is stew in the kitchen. After that, the Alpha will show you your room."

She walked away without another word, and the crowd parted for her.

I ate stew at a long table with three of the pack's older wolves, who asked me polite questions about Ashfall and then went quiet when I gave short answers. I learned their names. Elder Yara, a woman with white hair and a face like a dried apple, watched me from across the table and said nothing at all.

After the meal, Silas took my hand.

The touch was the part I had not planned for. A fake bond does not require touching. It requires scent, and presence, and a steady performance over weeks. But his fingers closed around mine, and something went through my arm like a wire pulled tight, and I felt my wolf turn toward him inside me, entirely against my will.

He led me up the stairs, and I followed, and the pack watched us go. At the top of the landing he stopped and drew me close, one hand flat on the small of my back. His scent was everywhere. He turned his face into my neck and breathed in, and I felt his mouth against my pulse, and my own breath came out ragged in a way I had not intended.

"You are warm now," he said. His voice had gone lower. "Good."

"I am," I said.

He kissed me. It was not a hard kiss. It was a slow one, the kind that asks a question and waits for the answer, and I gave him the answer because my body was already giving it before my mind could object. His hand slid up my back to my shoulder. My fingers found the collar of his shirt. For a few seconds I forgot what I was doing in this house and why I had come, and the only thing in the world was the taste of him and the heat of him and the way his body fit against mine like it had been built to.

He pulled back first. His clouded eyes were close to mine, and his thumb moved along my jaw.

"You do that very well," he said. "Almost as well as you do the scent."

The floor went out from under me. I did not move.

"Almost," he said again, and stepped back, and folded his arms. "You are a bond-broker. I have smelled three of you in my lifetime, and you are the best of them, but the fourth one always slips. You have a habit of holding your breath when you lie. It makes the scent go thin at the edges."

I said nothing. My wolf was pressed low in my chest, growling at me.

"Your room is the second door on the left," Silas said. "Mine is the first. The walls are thin. If you try to leave in the night, I will hear you." He tilted his head. "I am blind, Deke. Not deaf."