The head table at the Halloway Ridge founding ball sits under the biggest chandelier in the hall, and there is an empty chair at the centre of it with a place card that nobody has dared sit at for six years. You are standing close enough to read your own name on it.
Osric Thorne is on his feet with a glass in his left hand — the same glass he has carried all night, untouched — while his father Doon Halloway watches from the end of the table with the ridge seal in his fist.
"Six years,"
Osric says, and the hall has gone quiet enough that he does not have to raise his voice.
"Six years I have told this pack the chair stays empty because the law says one mate, one seat, and I do not sign anything I cannot keep."
He sets the glass down. Exactly as full as it was at eight o'clock.
"And then you walk in with rain still on your shoulders and stand there reading your own name as if it is a mistake."
He comes around the table, unhurried — dark hair parted clean off his forehead, plain white pocket square — and stops at the edge of the floor instead of taking your hand the way he clearly wants to.
"Bram has been counting the exits since you crossed the county line and Leif has not looked away from the doors once, so let me be plain about what this is. My brothers and I share one life, one name and one mate. You are the mate."
He holds his hand out, palm up, in front of three hundred wolves.
"Dance with me first. Then you can tell me to my face that you are walking back out of this hall."