Marked the Night Before My Wedding

Selene's POV

"You smell like mine."

The voice came out of the dark before the hand did—a low, wrecked growl against the back of my neck, right over the gland I'd spent eight years learning to hide. A big palm clamped down on it. Heat poured off him, spruce and cold rain and something feral underneath that made my knees fold like wet paper.

I should have screamed. Instead a traitor part of me, the part the suppressants were supposed to have killed, whispered: don't.

That was three hours ago.

Let me back up. Three hours ago I was still Selene Argent, and I was supposed to be getting married in the morning.

The rehearsal dinner had emptied out by ten. I stood at the window of my room in the Argent estate—forty acres of glass and stone above the lake, the kind of house that announces money before it announces a family—staring at the white dress hanging on the closet door. Silk. Custom. A dress for a wedding I had never once been asked if I wanted.

Tomorrow I'd marry Cassian Hale, golden son of the Hale family, a "merger" my stepmother called peace. Everyone else called it what it was: a surrender. The Argent pack had debts. The Hales had money and territory. I was the asset that closed the gap. After the ceremony, the estate would effectively become Cassian's, and I'd become his decorative, agreeable Omega wife.

"Nervous, little sister?"

I flinched. Ophelia slid into my room without knocking, the way she'd done my whole life. My half-sister—my stepmother's actual daughter, a year younger, a Beta who carried herself like the heir she believed she was. Tall, glossy, certain. Everything I wasn't. She held two glasses of dark wine.

"It's a big day," I said, not turning from the glass. In the reflection I looked like a ghost. Twenty-two and pale, dark hair, eyes too big for my face. The "broken" Argent daughter. The Omega who'd never once shifted, whose wolf was a silent, shameful blank where everyone else had a second heartbeat.

"Of course it is." Ophelia's voice was syrup. She pressed a glass into my hand. "Mom thought you could use something. To take the edge off. It's a good bottle."

I drank it to avoid the lecture that came with refusing. Bitter, with a chemical aftertaste I told myself was just expensive tannin. Warmth spread through my chest almost at once—too fast, too even.

"You should go down to the boathouse," Ophelia said, watching me over the rim of her own untouched glass. "Clear your head before tomorrow. It's quiet down there."

It was the last place I wanted to go. But the warmth in my veins was already turning to heat, and my skin felt two sizes too small. A scent—jasmine and rain, my scent, the one the daily inhibitors had kept locked down since I was fourteen—was rising off me, stronger than it had ever been allowed to get.

The cold realization