Page 3 of Curvy Sold Mate

The pack filled the hall in layers. Inner circle at the front—Chris standing to Kahn’s left, arms loose, scanning with the easy alertness of someone who’d learned surveillance from a different tradition. Gideon near the wall, thick arms folded, his face arranged into the expression he wore at all formal events, indistinguishable from the expression he wore at funerals. Beyond them, the ranked wolves, the families, the unmated.

Viktor stood at Kahn’s right flank. He’d been standing at Kahn’s right flank for fifteen years, and the position had worn itself into his posture.

Mating ceremonies were not his concern. He attended them as infrastructure. His job was the perimeter, the crowd, the angles of approach that nobody else was watching. He was good at it, and it was enough.

Kahn shifted his weight—a small movement, left foot to right. Viktor noted it without looking. He’d been reading Kahn’s body for long enough that the translation was automatic: nervous. The ritual Caitlynn and Olivia had built was untested, and new magic carried new risks, and Kahn had never met a risk he didn’t want to stand between and the people he loved.

“Perimeter’s clean,” Viktor said, low enough for Kahn alone.

Kahn nodded once. His eyes moved across the hall—the sweep of an Alpha taking stock, counting his own. Viktor watched him do it, watched the moment his gaze snagged on Caitlynn at the dais and the hard line of his mouth softened by a degree that would have been invisible to anyone who didn’t know what to look for.

“She’s ready,” Kahn said.

“She’s been ready for a week.”

“She set fire to a practice dummy on Thursday.”

“Controlled demolition. The dummy was already compromised.”

The corner of Kahn’s mouth moved. It didn’t reach a smile, but between them, the vocabulary was efficient enough that partial expressions carried full weight.

Caitlynn stepped onto the dais.

The hall quieted in stages—the front rows first, then the middle, the hush rolling backward through the crowd until the only sound was the crackle of the ward candles. She stood at the center of the ceremonial circle, the ward candles burning at precise intervals around her. Viktor noted the spacing—correct, measured with care.

She closed her eyes and raised her palms.

The shift was immediate. Viktor had felt magic before—ambient magic, territorial magic, the low hum of the wards that registered somewhere below thought, more pressure than sound. This was different. The air in the hall thickened with density, as though the space between molecules had contracted. A pressure built behind his sternum that had no physical source, and the candles around the dais flared in unison.

His wolf shifted.

Viktor’s wolf did not stir during ceremonies. It stirred during combat, during border runs, during the specific silence that preceded an ambush—when the body needed what the mind was too slow to provide. Certainly not at mating rituals, and yet there it was, a low vibration at the base of his spine, an alertness that had nothing to do with perimeter.

Caitlynn’s lips moved. The gold in her palms intensified, threads of light weaving between her fingers, reaching upward into the sky. The crowd held its breath. Even Gideon’s arms had uncrossed.

The first name left her mouth with a weight that the hall absorbed whole.

“Olivia Voss.”

The ripple moved through the hall, heads turning. The Alpha’s sister—of course, the magic would begin with her. It made symbolic sense, political sense, the sort Gideon would approve of, and the rest of the pack would accept as confirmation that the new ritual held the old ritual’s respect for bloodline.

Viktor’s fingers didn’t move. His breathing didn’t change. He stood exactly as he had been standing—weight distributed, hands at his sides, eyes forward.

Then the second name.

“Viktor Hale.”

The silence that followed was nothing like the hush that had preceded the channeling. That had been anticipation, warmth, the collective inhale of a crowd awaiting something it wanted. This had edges. It spread through the hall contagiously.

Viktor could not move.

He stood at Kahn’s right flank with his hands at his sides and his face arranged in exactly the expression it had been arranged in thirty seconds prior, which was no expression at all. It was as though his entire being had frozen into place.

Kahn turned to look at him.

Viktor met his eyes, held them, gave him nothing, though it took every bit of his self-control to manage this.

Kahn’s gaze held for two seconds, then three. Then he turned back to the dais, and whatever he’d seen or hadn’t seen stayed between them.