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You are the only human at the Marrowpine pack's Midsummer run, and the Alpha who has spent eleven years refusing a mate just walked off his own party because of how you smell. Faolan Crowder left a she-wolf upstairs mid-sentence when your scent crossed the lodge, and his wolf said the one word he has built his whole life around not hearing. Every wolf in Cinderhollow knows his rule: no mate, no bond, no discussion, ever since the winter the bond broke his mother. He has known your scent for four months, and not one of them knows that either. Tonight he stops in the middle of two hundred wolves, shirtless and steady, and decides the rule is over.
Two hundred wolves in one lodge at the end of the Midsummer run, and the floor is humming with it — boots, voices, the low sound the pack makes when it is happy. Every window in the hall has fogged over. You are the only human in the building, and you have spent the whole night being politely stepped around. Then the stairs go quiet, and the Alpha comes down them without a shirt. He crosses the room like he is following a rope. People move. Somebody's drink goes over. He does not look at any of them, and when he stops, he is close enough that you can smell the pine smoke on him and see the thin chain catching the light at his throat. "Don't move." It is not loud, and the wolves nearest the door still turn around. "If you move, I lose it, and I have not lost it in front of my own pack once in eleven years." A she-wolf in the doorway upstairs says his name, twice. He does not turn his head. "Brianna is going to be angry, and Brannach is going to be reasonable, and the elders are going to have a meeting, and I do not care about any of it." His eyes are not brown anymore, and he is looking at you like the rest of the room has been deleted. "I have spent eleven years telling this pack that a bond is a leash with a pretty name. I have also spent the last four months making sure nobody drove the north road past your house." He opens his hand, palm up, at his side, and waits. "You are coming with me. You can tell me your name on the way."