Seraphina is fixing my veil, and I still remember the pillow.
That is the first problem. Twenty-five years have passed, and my body has not forgotten what her hands feel like. They are soft. They smell of lavender and warm milk. They tuck a pin behind my ear as gently as a real mother would.
"There," she says. "Perfect."
Every wolf in Ravenmoor is watching her do it. Three hundred faces, all of them glowing, because Mother Luna is kind enough to dress her sons' bride herself.
I smile at her. It is the hardest thing I have ever done, and I once crossed a volcano barefoot.
Let me tell you what the altar looks like from where I stand.
Four men wait for me there. Four brothers, born in the same hour, built like the same storm.
Dorian, the eldest, stands with his hands clasped behind him like a man at his own execution. Cassian chews the inside of his cheek, the way people do when they are trying not to laugh at a funeral. Lucien winks at me. He actually winks. And Silas, the quiet one, stares at nothing and everything at once, ink on his fingers, a sketchbook shoved into his jacket where a flower should be.
They are about to be my husbands.
Their mother is the woman who tried to kill me when I was a baby.
They have no idea who I am.
My name here is Ember Vale. A lost omega found shivering at the border, grateful for a roof. Nobody questions a grateful omega. That is the whole trick.
My real name is Liora Ravenmoor. I was born in the room above this hall, on the night my mother died, and within the month my father married the woman now pinning flowers in my hair, to give me a mother.
She gave me a cradle, warm bottles, and a pillow. The pillow was not for sleeping.
The music starts. I walk.
Black candles line the aisle. Someone has scattered white petals across the floor, and every step I take crushes some of them.
It is forty steps from the doors to the altar. I know because the dragons showed me this hall in smoke when I was nine, and I have counted them in my sleep ever since.
I always imagined this walk differently. In my version I was angry. In my version I felt something.
What I feel instead is a small, wrong silence.
An hour ago, in the dressing room, Seraphina fastened a necklace at my throat. Her fingertips brushed the pulse under my jaw, and my fire jumped. Just a spark. A gold flicker no bigger than a coin, gone in a breath.
But fire costs. Every flame takes one memory of my mother, and it never asks permission.
I reached for the lullaby my mother's ghost used to hum, the one I sang to myself every night in the mountains, and there was nothing there. Not a note. Not a word. Just a smooth white wall where a song used to be.
Saffira warned me. Dragon fire is a loan, she said, and the interest is always the thing you love most. I thought she was being poetic. She is never poetic.
Seraphina asked if I was all right. I said it was nerves.
She smiled like she believed me.
Forty steps. Thirty. Twenty.
In the front row, my father sits with a blanket over his knees, watching my face. Alpha Aldric. Five days ago he said yes to me without asking my name, and he has studied me ever since like a man reading a letter in bad light.
He should not look at me like that. Not today. Not in front of her.
Beside him sits Corvin, the Beta, with his easy smile and his many rings, patting my father's shoulder as though the old man were a favorite horse.
I do not know why my father said yes.
I will find out. Right after I marry four men.
Dorian takes my hand first.
His palm is warm and rough and perfectly steady, and for one second I forget to hate him. Then I see the dark thread under his collar, crawling up his neck like a vine. It tightens when his mother laughs in the front row.
He does not seem to notice. That is the part that turns my stomach. He has worn that thing so long it feels like his own skin.
"You can still run," he says, so quietly the Elder cannot hear.
"Do you want me to?"
His jaw works. "No. That is the problem."
He turns me to face the Elder, and the ceremony begins.
Vows are strange when every word is a lie and every lie is also a plan.
Dorian says his. Cassian says his with a bored sneer, but his voice cracks on the last word and he pretends it was a cough. Lucien makes the whole hall laugh, then looks at me with eyes that have no laughter in them at all.
In my head, I make four vows of my own. I will stand beside them. I will not say for how long, or what I plan to burn down first.
Then it is Silas's turn, and Silas says nothing.
He just stands there, mouth shut, while the Elder waits and the hall begins to murmur. Dorian shifts. Cassian mutters something rude. In the front row, Seraphina's smile goes tight at the edges for the first time all day.
Then Silas steps forward and presses something into my palm.
A folded square of paper, soft from being carried against his chest.
I should not open it. I know I should not open it. My hands do it anyway.
A drawing. Charcoal, smudged, so fine it could be a photograph.
A woman's face. Tired eyes, a crooked smile, one eyebrow lifted as if she were about to tell me a secret.
I stare at her. She feels important. She feels like the only thing in the room that matters. And I cannot tell you who she is.
For one long, terrible second, she is a stranger.
Then I find the corner of the page, where he has written one word in tiny, careful letters.
Elowen.
My mother's name. My mother's face.
I almost did not know her.
That is how I learn the fire took more than a song.
And the only person in this house who remembers her is a man who should not know I exist.
Behind me, the Elder clears his throat. "The bride will answer."
I look up. Every face in the hall is turned toward me. Except one.
In the front row, Seraphina has risen to her feet. The smile is gone. And she is walking toward the altar, one slow step at a time, holding a cup of warm milk.
