Page 3 of Curvy Arranged Mate

She should have been at the ritual. She knew this. The ceremony had started an hour ago, the whole pack filing into the great hall, ward candles lit, Caitlynn channeling. Attendance was expected at the very least, though she supposed it was, in all honesty, compulsory. Sloane had planned to go. She’d been dressed for it since dawn, standing in the middle of her one-room cottage in clean clothes with her hair pulled back, ready.

Then she’d opened the front door.

The claw marks had stopped her cold. Her hand had frozen on the handle, her body locked in place while her eyes traced the gouges, measured the depth, cataloged the angle. She’d stood there long enough for the morning light to shift across the porch boards. Then she’d stepped back inside, closed the door, turned the lock that wouldn’t hold against anything stronger than a human fist, sat down on the edge of her cot.

She hadn’t moved since, hadn’t been able to.

The notes were in the drawer beside the bed. She didn’t need to look at them. She’d memorized every single one. The first had arrived three years ago, tucked under a rock at the edge of the ward line, written in handwriting she hadn’t seen since she was six years old but recognized instantly, her muscles seizing before her brain caught up.

Did you think I forgot?

There wasn’t a signature. It didn’t need one. Her first instinct was to burn it, destroy it… But something in her refused, and she’d shoved it into a drawer—intending to forget about it. She woke up at two in the morning with her pulse hammering so hard she could feel it in her fingertips.

The second note came six months later. The third a month after that. They arrived on no schedule she could predict, at different points along the compound’s perimeter, always just inside the ward line.

Soon.

You look different.

I see you, sweetheart.

That last one had made her vomit. Sweetheart was the word he’d used when he tucked her hair behind her ear before his grip tightened, when his voice dropped to that low, instructive tone that meant she’d done wrong. She’d thrown up in the sink, rinsed her mouth, folded the note into a square the size of a postage stamp, locked it in the drawer with the others.

She could have told someone. She could have gone to Kahn, to Viktor, laid the notes across the Alpha’s desk, said: My father is circling. He’s breaching the wards. He’s watching me.

She could have done that.

But telling meant explaining. Explaining meant saying what Garrett Mercer had done to his daughter in the years before his banishment, in the house at the northern end of the compound that nobody walked past anymore because the family who lived there was gone. Telling meant opening her mouth in front of men who already looked at her with contempt, who remembered only the ambitious she-wolf who’d tried to claw her way to Luna, who’d gone after the human woman their Alpha loved. She would have to sit in that study, under those eyes, pull apart the careful walls she’d built around herself since she was six years old. She’d look weak.

She couldn’t do it.

She pressed her palms flat against her knees. Her fingers were trembling. She watched them shake, cataloged the tremor with detached precision. She’d spent her entire life observing her own fear from the outside because feeling it from the inside was too expensive.

A board creaked on the porch.

Sloane’s head came up. Her hands went still. Every muscle in her body pulled taut, a wire drawn to its breaking point, held there.

Another creak. Weight shifting. Someone standing at her door, feet planted, deliberate.

“Open up, sweetheart.”

The sound that left her throat was so small it barely qualified as sound. A catch, a seizing, the involuntary noise of a body remembering before the mind could intervene.

She knew the voice. It was older now, rougher, scraped thin by years spent in whatever territory had taken him after the banishment. But the cadence hadn’t changed. The slow, measured delivery, each word placed with precision, because he understood that anticipation was its own violence.

“I can smell you in there.” A pause. “You smell scared. You always did smell scared.”

Her legs wouldn’t move. She told them to stand, to carry her to the counter where the blade was, to the window where she could drop to the ground, to any exit that would put distance between her body and that voice. Her legs refused.

Get up. Get up. Move.

The lock turned. A simple thing, a bolt meant to keep out drafts, yielding to a palm that pressed against the door frame with the ease of ownership.

He stepped inside.

Garrett Mercer was lean, stripped down, the muscle reduced to wire beneath skin gone rough with weather. His hair had gone grey at the temples. His jaw was narrower than she remembered, the hollows deeper. But his eyes were the same. The same flat, grey-blue she saw in her own mirror every morning, the color she hated on herself because it was his.

He looked at her the way he’d always looked at her. His gaze moved over her face, her shoulders, her hands, taking stock, assessing what remained of what he’d left behind.