Chapter 12: Thirty

I woke him at first light by holding out the envelope.

Mathias sat up on the grass and saw what was in my hand.

For a moment he didn't say anything.

The river was gray and the bridge was gray above us, and the first commuters were crossing it with their headlights on.

"I wasn't snooping," I said. "It fell out. And I read it."

"I'd have read it, too," he said quietly.

He took the envelope and held it against his knee.

"Tell me," I said.

He looked at the water.

"I'm thirty in nine days," he said. "On the night of the full moon."

"An Alpha who is unmated on his thirtieth birthday loses the man."

I didn't understand.

"Loses him how?"

"The wolf takes the body for good. He doesn't hate you or love you, he doesn't remember he was ever anything else."

"Wolves have a name for it. We just call it the turning."

"It's what happened to my father's brother, and to his father's brother. Nobody has ever come back."

The bridge hummed above us.

I felt the air go out of me.

"That's what the calendar page is," I said. "That's what you're counting."

"Yes."

"And the bench."

He finally looked at me.

His eyes were grey and tired and very clear.

"I'd left the penthouse nineteen days before," he said. "Alden had picked a mate for me, his daughter, and the pack wanted her."

"I said no. I wouldn't take a woman I didn't love as a way out."

"And I couldn't find anyone I did."

"So I thought, if I'm going to lose him anyway, I'll lose him as a man. No pack, no tower, nobody to see."

"I took a bench in a city I'd never lived in, and I sat down to wait."

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