"Get in there before someone else sees the mark." Callum's hand was already around my wrist, and he didn't wait for me to agree. He hauled me off the aisle runner and through the little door behind the altar before the guests had even stopped clapping his rejection.
The sacristy smelled like old wax and starch. Robes on hooks, a folding table, a single window too small to climb through. He shoved the door shut with his shoulder and threw the bolt, and I was already yanking my wrist out of his grip.
"Don't touch me," I said. "You made that pretty clear ten seconds ago in front of two hundred people."
"Rowan."
"No, say it again. I liked it the first time. 'I reject Rowan Pell as my mate.' Real clean. Real Alpha." My voice cracked on the last word and I hated it.
He wasn't looking at my face. He was looking at my collar, where the fabric had slipped when he dragged me, where the mark sat on my skin like it had been burned there yesterday instead of five years ago.
"It's still there," he said, and it wasn't a question.
"Yeah, funny thing about marks. They don't check the wedding invite before they decide to stick around."
"It should have faded." He said it like an accusation, like I'd rigged it. "A rejection kills the mark, Rowan, that's how it works, that's how it's always worked—"
"Then maybe you didn't reject me hard enough." I pulled my collar closed with two fingers, buying myself an inch of space that didn't exist because he was already closer, close enough that I could smell the cedar off his jacket, close enough to see the muscle jump in his jaw. "Or maybe the mark knows something you don't want it to know."
"Watch your mouth."
"Watch yours. You're the one who stood up there and told the whole pack I was a mistake. In front of my father. In front of your new bride's entire family, who by the way, are currently drinking champagne fifteen feet from this door."
Something moved behind his eyes, fast, gone before I could name it. Guilt didn't sit right on him. It never had.
"The port deal needed her family's ships," he said. "You know that."
"I knew you were marrying her for the ships. I didn't know you were going to stand in a glass chapel and burn me down to do it."
He reached for my collar. I slapped his hand away and he caught my wrist instead, flipped it, and before I understood what he was doing his thumb was pressed flat against the mark on my throat, right over the raised skin, right where it still throbbed low and stupid every time he got within ten feet of me.
Heat went through me like a struck match. I heard myself make a sound I didn't authorize.
"That," he said, low, watching my face like he was reading a file, "shouldn't happen either."
"Get off."
"You felt that."
"I felt you grab me, that's what I felt." My pulse was going under his thumb and we both knew he could count it. His hand was warm, too warm, and it wasn't moving, and I wasn't making him move it, and that was the part I was going to hate myself for later.
"If the bond's still active," he said, quieter now, like the walls might be listening, "my marriage to Odessa isn't legal. Not under pack law. Not under any law that matters to the elders."
And there it was. Not guilt. Math.
"So that's what this is." I pulled back and this time he let me, his hand dropping like it had never been there, even though my skin still stung with the shape of his fingers. "You're not worried about me. You're worried about the paperwork."
"I'm worried about the port, the pack, and a marriage I need signed in the next twelve hours or the Hale shipping contract walks. That's the order."
"Wow. You didn't even put me on the list."
"Rowan—"
"No, it's fine, it's fine, I archive things for a living, remember? I keep proof. So let's be real clear about what I'm holding right now." I stepped into him this time, and I watched him not step back, watched his throat move when he swallowed. "I've got five years of your signature on documents that say I was your intended. I've got a mark that your own rejection didn't kill. And I've got two hundred witnesses who just watched you humiliate me in a glass room with cameras in it."
"Are you threatening me."
"I'm telling you what I've got. There's a difference. You're the one who needs something from me now."
His eyes dropped to my mouth for exactly one second, then back up, and if I hadn't spent five years memorizing every version of his face I'd have missed it. He caught himself doing it. So did I.
"If the mark's live," he said, and his voice had gone rough at the edges, "there's one way to be sure before I tell the elders anything."
"And what's that."
He didn't answer with words. He reached up again, slower this time, like he was giving me room to say no, and laid two fingers along my jaw and tipped my face toward the light from that one small window, close enough now that his breath was on my mouth, close enough that I could've counted the flecks of gold in his eyes if I'd been in any state to count anything.
"Callum—"
"Don't move," he said, and he leaned in, and his mouth was an inch from the mark, an inch from my jaw, and my whole body went still and stupid and wanting in a way I was going to lie about for the rest of my life—
Someone hit the sacristy door so hard the bolt jumped in its frame.
"Callum!" A woman's voice, sharp, furious, definitely not the bride's. "Open this door right now or I swear to God I will have security break it down!"