Chapter 207: Belated, Fated, Now Complicated

She asked if she was rejected by the flame. He told her she was his fated mate. The gap between her question and his answer contained the entire last week of her life rearranging itself into something she hadn’t seen coming because she hadn’t been looking.

He let her sit with it. The fire crackled. His arms stayed. He didn’t push. He didn’t repeat it. He let the sentence exist in the room the way a man lets a match burn after he’s lit it and waits to see what catches.

She kept replaying the words. Her brain stamped them RETURN TO SENDER and shoved them back. Fated mate. Her. The woman who had been thinking she was a burden that he was too polite to put down. Her brain tried the delivery again. Rejected. Address invalid. Next.

She couldn’t process it as a feeling. So she went into puzzle solving mode and processed the facts.

FACT ONE: The fire was either fucked, freestyling, or a fluke.

Fated mates were beyond rare. Sacred. At a normal Moonfire there was one, maybe two.

This one? Everyone who went after Nova magically had a fated mate. Everyone who went before her, the ones who had been paired by the elders, were re-paired by the fire in a mate stampede of wolves. The only Moonfire contestant that didn’t get a fated mate was Celeste. Statistically impossible. That’s why the High Council of Helix was calling every pairing into question to begin with.

Nova could not control the fire. It did not look like that. But that was the truth. The fire turned white for her. That was not a color in the story by the priestess. The fire also gave her a white wolf, which should not have happened either.

FACT TWO: Maverick meant it and was muted.

Maverick had announced Nova was his fated mate at the Moonfire. She remembered his speech. His house flame did not burn her. He had told Maria to wait for Nova on the trail. At the time when he announced it, she believed him.

The image of him standing in the field while she was carried away still made her ribs hurt. So much had happened this week and she had shoved that memory to the back of her mind along with the possibility that he was her fated mate and she had lost him.

Sticking strictly to the facts, she was not able feel him either way to confirm it, and the elders did not acknowledge his claim.

FACT THREE: Wolves who went wrong.

Three wolves had come out of the fire.

One for Derek. One for Alpha Thunderfang. One for Maverick.

All three men had moved towards Nova. She remembered the moment well because her body started spasming right as they approached.

The other fated mates were circled by the wolf before the wolf returned to the flame.

Zero of the wolves circled them. All three had stopped right before that step.

At the time, Nova had suspected something had gone wrong because she didn’t have a wolf. That there was some mistake and those wolves were never meant for her.

Sticking to the facts again, it was safe to conclude that either something went wrong or that those wolves were different than the fated mate wolves. She couldn’t confirm it either way.

FACT FOUR: Fated, fabricated, or flat out broken?

Hearing Alpha Thunderfang claim she was his fated mate on top of Maverick’s announcement of that at the Moonfire made her wonder if she was actually either of their fated mates. Or were he and Maverick both confused because something had happened at the fire that rewired their brains. Something she had done or caused without realizing it and now they both thought that.

But Maverick had claimed that he knew she was his fated mate in the arena, before he saw her face. That took "maybe the fire fucked his mind" off the menu for him. So the leftover possibility was that the fire had done something deeply stupid to Alpha Thunderfang’s instincts.

Before that thought could spiral any further, Alpha Thunderfang answered her unasked question.

"I knew you were my fated mate the moment you walked out on that sand, Nova, before I saw your face. I made an offer to Starborne before your holo finished playing."

Nova ironically couldn’t see his face when he said that because her back was still against his chest. But his voice was sincere and there was no reason for him to fabricate that, which meant she hadn’t fucked up his brain at the fire. So she crossed that off the list.

Alpha Thunderfang grabbed the water bottle and held it up to her lips again. She drank it without a word. The water was a pause. Not a stop. His arms resettled around her and his voice picked up where it had left off.

"After your scores were announced, I felt your pain from across the arena and I knew something was off. When I found you in the slave tunnel, I saw you were bleeding and I had already decided I was going to do whatever it took to get you from Starborne. I took you with me to the Thunderfang arena clubhouse with the intention of having Astra look at you and to keep you there until Starborne answered me on my offer."

His words settled over her. She remembered him carrying her through the arena and putting her on his lap. He had iced her then too. Before the Moonfire. Before the pairing. Before Derek. The carrying had started in a tunnel with blood on the floor and it had never stopped. Every corridor carry. Every hospital carry. It was all the same carry. It had been the same carry since the tunnel.

"The idea of you seeing an auction made my blood boil. I wanted you out of that arena and in our hover yacht. While I was holding ice on your cheek, Sebastian and I were mindlinking. He spoke to the elders on the policy for skipping eliminations due to injury. I sent him instead of myself because I did not want to draw attention to the fact we were looking for a loophole. But then your cuffs vibrated, and you informed me that there was supposed to be electrical shocks in them."

She felt him swallow against the back of her head and the swallow carried weight.

"Something I had not accounted for because that is outlawed in most slave packs. The fact Starborne had you in them told me everything I needed to know. You flinched. But the shocks didn’t come like they were supposed to, which meant your cuffs had been tampered with by someone. When Kai clicked the damn remote and you dropped to the floor to pretend he was shocking you, I need you to know that the only reason he did not get his ass kicked was because you told me not to react to it, so I didn’t. If I ever see him again, I will be settling that debt with interest."