Mateless

The iron gauntlets clank every time Cora shifts her weight. There are twelve of them in the line tonight, wrists in ceremonial cuffs, standing at the boundary of the clearing while the mated couples renew their vows under the full moon. *"Twelve incomplete souls, as Lorna liked to call them."* Cora is twenty-six. She has heard the same speech every year since she turned eighteen and the mating moon passed her by. Eight years of standing in this line. Tonight a child in the crowd throws a rock and splits Marta's temple open. Cora steps in front of her friend and takes the next one on the cheekbone. No one apologises, because the mateless getting pelted during the Moon-Tide is practically tradition. By the end of the night Marta Hartley is on her knees in the dirt with the charge of inciting dissent read out over her, and Gideon Hale is hauling her toward the concrete box behind the meeting hall. And in the tree line, where a hooded man with amber eyes stood watching Cora and then stepped back into the dark, there is a silver coin stamped with a raven in flight. The man is Rafe. He has been living out of the Council's reach with a folded bundle of letters in his coat, written in his sister's hand. Mira was declared fated to a man who already had a mate. Mira died at twenty-three in a hunting accident that left no witnesses and no blood. Rafe also has a list. Suspected false mates, seven names, the seventh circled with a question mark. What he does not have is anybody inside the pack. Cora wants the one thing he knows how to do. *"You teach me the echo bond ritual, and I'll help you burn the Council to the ground."* An echo bond is not fate. It is chosen, it is sealed with a witness's blood, it is weaker than the real thing, and nobody either of them has heard of has ever tried to break one. Then Lorna sets her terms: tell her where Rafe is hiding, or the whole pack watches Marta die at dawn. A shifter romance about a woman her pack has spent eight years calling incomplete, a stranger carrying a dead sister's letters, and a bond that two people build on purpose instead of waiting to be given one. The romance is closed-door.