Chapter 7: Hollis's POV

Hollis's POV

I had not slept properly in six days.

The mark on my left wrist had been dead for thirty-two years, a faint gray scar my mother called a birthmark.

Then a white wolf stood up in a gravel yard, and it had lit.

I knew exactly what it meant.

Every wolf in the kingdom knows what a mate mark is, and every wolf hopes for one until they have it.

I wanted to cut it out of my arm.

I stood in the Keep's cold corridor at one in the morning with my sleeve pushed up and looked at the silver line.

It was warm, and it pulsed once for every beat of my pulse.

She was asleep forty steps away, behind a door I had no right to open.

I knew which bunk was hers.

I knew she slept on her left side with one arm out of the blanket, because I had walked past twice and told myself I was checking the wards.

I made myself turn around.

I had a rule, and I had a reason for it.

When I was nineteen, my father, the Alpha of the Garrow pack, traded me to a rival Alpha as a pledge for a border treaty.

I was property for two years, and the man who held me called it mentoring.

I had learned what it was to be a young wolf whose body belonged to someone's order.

I would not be that man to anyone, least of all a recruit who had just fought her way free of her own father.

So she would never know what the mark was, and it would burn quietly until it killed me.

That had been my plan for six days.

It was a bad plan.

It was my plan anyway, and I went down the stairs toward the vault to take my mind off it.

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