After My Wolf Awoke, He Chose His Mistress

I woke up on the cold grass before sunrise, and the world smelled.

That is the only way I know how to say it. For nineteen years I had lived inside a kind of soft, clean nothing. People around me would tilt their heads, breathe in, and smile or stiffen at things I could not feel. I had learned to fake the small reactions. A nod. A wrinkled nose. A pretend laugh when someone asked, "Don't you smell that?"

Now my whole body smelled.

Pine sap from the trees behind the pack house. Wet dirt. The iron edge of my own mate-mark on my neck, like a coin held too long in a hot palm. And under all of it, a deeper scent I had never known — green, almost sweet, almost mine. My own.

I pressed my hands flat into the earth. My fingers shook.

*I'm sorry I'm late.*

The voice was inside my head, quiet, female, gentle. Not Damon's mind-link. Not anyone outside me. Her.

*I'm sorry,* she said again. *I'm here now.*

I bent forward until my forehead touched the grass and cried without making a sound. Not from pain. From the simple, terrible relief of being whole. At sixteen I should have heard her. At twenty-two I had stopped praying for it. Now, three years married, with a pup just barely rooted in my belly — *that* I could feel too, a tiny warm thread under my heart — she had come.

I was Taylor Sullivan, Luna of Crescent Hollow Pack. And for the first time in my life, I knew it from the inside out.

I laughed, wet and shaky, into the dirt.

I had to tell Damon.

***

I ran in bare feet through the side door of the pack house, my robe still damp with dew. I wanted to see his face. Three years of him telling me it didn't matter, that he loved me wolfless or otherwise — three years of believing him through the clean, scentless fog. I wanted to give him this.

The house was quiet. I followed his scent without thinking, and that alone almost stopped me on the stairs. I could *track* him. Pine. Cold pine, like winter mornings. I had never known he smelled like that.

I was smiling when I reached the sitting room doorway.

Then I wasn't.

Damon was on the long couch with his head tipped back. His shirt was open at the collar. A woman was tucked against him, her face pressed to the side of his throat, breathing him in slow. Her dark hair spilled over his chest. His hand was on the back of her neck, holding her there.

I knew her.

Melissa Ryan. High school photo in the locked drawer of his study. The one I had seen in year one and chosen not to ask about, because I trusted him.

The scent in the room hit me a second later, and my new wolf staggered.

White cedar. Dark amber.