Mates.
The word was still hanging in the air, and Raven realized with slow horror that it hadn’t stayed in her head.
She’d growled it.
Out loud.
Low and rough, in a voice that didn’t sound like hers, in front of the entire kitchen.
Her chest ached.
Not pain, exactly — pressure, like two hooks had set behind her ribs and started pulling in the twins’ direction.
Her body leaned forward half a step before she caught herself, and she hated it.
She hated it instantly.
Eighteen years.
Eighteen years this wolf had slept through every beating, every insult, every night she’d pressed a palm to her chest and begged for anything.
And now it woke up — for them.
For the two men who had walked past her in these halls their whole lives like she was a mop someone had left standing against a wall.
Traitor, she thought at it.
The wolf didn’t care.
It strained toward them, warm, desperate and humiliating.
Then her mind, clawing for anything solid, caught on Kieran’s words.
She can sense us now.
Now.
Not shock, confusion or what is happening.
Recognition.
Raven looked between them, and her voice came out quiet.
“Now?” Kieran’s smirk slipped.
Just a fraction — but she saw it, she saw the moment he realized she’d heard him perfectly.
Alaric’s expression didn’t move at all.
His eyes did.
They cut to his brother, flat and cold, and that look told Raven more than either of their faces.
Kieran had said something he wasn’t supposed to say.
“What did you mean by that?” she asked.
Neither of them answered.
The silence stretched, and stretched, and somewhere inside it Raven found her answer anyway.
“Everyone out.” Alaric’s voice filled the kitchen without him raising it.
“Now.” The command hit the servants like a shove.
Trays went down.
Feet shuffled.
Tilly was already at the door, and Old Bren wasn’t far behind — nobody wanted to be a witness to whatever private thing they’d just stumbled into with House Blackthorn’s heirs.
“No.” Raven’s voice cracked out of her before she’d decided to use it.
“Let them stay.” The room went still.
Servants froze mid-step, caught between an Alpha heir’s command and — whatever Raven was now.
Alaric turned and looked at her properly for the first time.
She watched something like disbelief cross his face, because an omega dish girl had just contradicted him in his own house.
“Since when do you have authority in my house?” he asked with a raised eyebrow.
“Why not?” Her voice wasn’t steady.
She could hear it shaking under the anger, feel her own wolf pushing toward him even as she spoke, and she despised every second of it.
“They were good enough to watch me get slapped.
Good enough to watch your sister read my pages out loud and laugh.
So they’re good enough to watch whatever you’re about to do next.” A tray clinked somewhere.
But for some reason, nobody left.
Kieran stepped forward, and his voice came out deliberately soft, the way people speak to something beneath them.
“Careful.
Don’t go mistaking the bond for importance.
It changes what you can smell.
It doesn’t change what you are.” The hooks behind her ribs twisted.
Her wolf whined at his closeness, and Raven wanted to be sick.
She looked at him.
Then at Alaric.
“How long?” “This matter is more complicated than you—” “How long have you known?” The question cracked across the kitchen.
Alaric’s jaw tightened.
Kieran glanced at his brother — asking permission, she realized, the way he probably had a hundred times — and this time Alaric didn’t stop him.
“Two years,” Kieran said.
Nobody spoke.
Raven’s face went still.
She kept it still the way she’d kept it still through eighteen years of practice, because that was the only thing she knew how to do.
Inside, everything came down at once.
Two years.
She wasn’t fool enough to think they owed her anything.
Nobody in this house had ever owed her a thing, and she’d stopped waiting to be rescued before she could spell the word.
That wasn’t the part that made her bristle.
For two years, they’d known something about her own body that she didn’t.
They’d stood in these halls breathing in a bond she couldn’t feel yet, holding the one truth of her life in their pockets while she lived blind.
Every plate she’d carried past them.
Every time the household called her wolfless within their hearing.
They’d watched all of it — not as strangers, but as men who knew exactly what she was to them — and spent those two years quietly deciding what to do about her.
Both of them.
Knowing.
Saying nothing.
“You knew,” she said slowly, “while everyone in this house called me useless.” “Knowing about the bond didn’t make you useful,” Alaric said.
The words were delivered without heat.
That made them worse.
“The Goddess makes mistakes,” Kieran added, shrugging.
“A mistake doesn’t change your position.” And that was the moment the shock stopped being shock.
Raven’s breath went thin.
Her fingers had started trembling, so she pressed them flat against her apron and held them there.
All her life she’d wondered why fate gave her nothing.
No family.
No name.
No wolf worth the word.
She’d made her peace with nothing — nothing was familiar, nothing was survivable.
Now fate finally handed her something, and it was them.
Two men who already hated her.
Two men who’d had two years to decide exactly what she was worth.
Two men whose faces, right now, made their decision plain.
Her wolf didn’t understand any of it.
It kept pulling toward them, and every time their eyes passed over her with that flat disgust, something in her chest flinched like a struck dog.
Stop, she snarled at it silently.
Stop wanting them.
It didn’t stop.
And then — for one moment she would hate herself for later — Raven saw it.
The other version.
The one where the bond meant what bonds were supposed to mean.
Mate to both Blackthorn heirs.
House protection.
A tutor instead of a scrub brush.
A sponsorship signature on a Valerius application, because what House would send its future Luna to the academy unranked?
The gate she’d been memorizing from the outside for three years stood, for the space of one heartbeat, wide open.
Then she looked at Alaric’s face and watched him close it.
She hated herself for hoping.
One second.
It had only taken one second.
“Why did you never say anything?” she asked.
“We were waiting,” Alaric said.
“For what?” Kieran answered, and he smiled while he did it.
“For you to be old enough to hear the rejection.” The words landed like something physical.
Raven felt them in her chest, in her knees.
Her wolf recoiled so hard the pull turned into actual pain, a tearing pressure behind her sternum, and her breath caught audibly before she dragged it back under control.
Her eyes burned.
She did not let them spill.
“So that’s it,” she said.
Her voice came out lower than before.
“Two years.
You waited two years for my birthday — to throw me away.” “We spent two years protecting this House from the humiliation of being linked to you,” Alaric said.
“You can sense us now.
It changes nothing.” Kieran’s lip curled.
“You’re an untrained omega who can’t shift.
There is no version of this where you stand beside us.” Raven looked at them both, these two beautiful, cruel men the heavens had picked out for her, and the grief in her chest finished curdling into something harder.
“Then the Moon Goddess must hate all three of us,” she said.
“If this is what she calls fate.” “What—” a voice snapped from the side, “—is everyone talking about?” Celeste.
She was still standing by the basin, one hand wrapped around her bruised wrist, and her face had been cycling through confusion for the last minute.
She’d been slapped out of the center of attention and clearly could not bear it.
“What was she yapping about?” Celeste’s eyes darted between her step brothers.
“What mate nonsense?
Someone had better explain.”