Get It 27

[Max’s POV]

The great hall holds two hundred wolves and smells like beeswax and expectation. Candles line every beam, each flame another pair of eyes, and the elders sit front row with their hands folded into approval they’ve been rehearsing all week.

I stand on the platform beside my father, and the wood beneath my dress shoes reflects candlelight back at me like a warning. My suit is charcoal, my tie is straight, and I am supposed to be the picture of an alpha heir ready to honor his pack’s oldest rite.

Mina waits at the foot of the steps in white, her family three rows back with smiles so wide they could crack the pews. She looks exactly the way the pack wants its future Luna to look—composed, radiant, certain of what happens next.

My wolf doesn’t look at her. He has been still inside my chest for the last hour—not pacing, not restless, but settled into a certainty so absolute it requires no movement. He knows what I’m about to do the way he knows how to breathe.

I scan the crowd, eyes passing over the second row, the third, the standing section near the pillars. Somewhere in this hall is the only face that matters, and my pulse is hammering while I search.

Back wall, near the east door. Kylie stands pressed against the stone in a silver dress, half-hidden behind a column, arms crossed, chin down—performing invisibility one final time. Her fingers are wrapped around the pendant at her throat, and I pull my gaze away before anyone traces the line. My pulse settles back into normal.

“Are you ready?” My father adjusts his cuff and turns toward me with the easiness that’s rare from him. “The pack has waited long enough.”

“I’m ready.” The two words taste different in my mouth than he expects them to, but he nods, satisfied, and steps to the front of the platform.

“Tonight we honor the oldest tradition this pack carries.” Father’s voice fills the hall the way authority fills a room—completely, leaving no corner untouched. “My son stands before you to name his chosen mate, and in doing so, secures the future of this bloodline.”

The hall answers with silence—the reverent, expectant kind, two hundred wolves holding their breath for a name they already believe they know. Mina lifts her chin at the bottom of the steps, and the candlelight catches the white of her dress like it was designed for this exact moment.

“Max.” My father turns to me, and his hand rests on my shoulder—brief, paternal, a gesture the audience will remember as warmth and I will remember as weight. “Name your chosen mate.”

Her eyes meet mine from the foot of the stairs. The expectation in them is total—not arrogant, not unkind, just the bone-deep assumption because she has been told her entire life that this moment is hers.

My jaw works once, twice. The name the pack expects sits behind my teeth and my body will not release it—not because I’m uncertain, but because every muscle I own has already rejected the lie.

“I cannot choose Mina.”

Four words, delivered with the simplicity I shouldn’t have had. North is north, and the bond is the bond, and I am done performing otherwise.

The hall doesn’t breathe. Two hundred bodies freeze mid-exhale, and the silence that follows is not the polite kind—this is the silence of the floor giving way beneath a room full of people who trusted it to hold.

My father’s hand falls from my shoulder. The absence registers like a temperature drop—warm to cold in the space between one sentence and the wreckage of the next.

“What did you just say?” His voice drops into a register I’ve heard three times in my life, and each time preceded something I didn’t recover from easily.

“A fated bond exists, Father.” I face the hall, not him, because this is not a private conversation anymore. “The mate bond—the tradition this ceremony was built to honor—has manifested.”

“That’s impossible.” His jaw barely moves around the words. “You would have reported a fated bond the moment it appeared.”

“I’m reporting it now.” My voice holds steady, and the steadiness costs me nothing because my wolf is providing it—absolute, immovable, finished with theater. “In front of the entire pack, exactly as tradition requires.”

“You’re telling me you’ve known.” His hand grips the edge of the podium, knuckles going white against the oak. “Known, and sat in my study, and said nothing.”

“I’m telling you now, in the only venue that matters.” I hold his gaze and give him the respect of not looking away while I dismantle his plans. “Choosing anyone other than the fated bond would betray the very system every elder in this room raised me to uphold.”

The murmurs begin—a low tide of whispered confusion rolling from the back rows toward the front. Heads turn, hands find neighboring arms, and the elders exchange glances heavy with a tradition they’re suddenly reassessing.

“Who.” My father’s question is one syllable, and it carries more threat than any full sentence he’s ever aimed at me. His eyes hold mine and I cannot read what’s behind them.

Mina’s face changes. The color withdraws from her cheeks the way water pulls back before a wave, and what’s left is the exposed bone of comprehension—she doesn’t know who, but she knows it isn’t her.

“Max.” Her voice cuts across from the foot of the steps, thin and precise, and every head in the hall turns between us like watching a serve return. “What are you doing?”

“What I should have done weeks ago.” I look at her and give her the only thing I have left to offer—directness, unvarnished and without theater. “I’m sorry, Mina.”

“You’re sorry.” She repeats it like she’s testing the weight of a word she’s never had to hold before. Her mother reaches for her arm and Mina shakes the hand off, fingers curling into white fabric.

“Who is it?” Father’s voice has gone past the heat into something far colder, more administrative. “Name them now, Max.”

I should hesitate. A better son would calculate the cost to every alliance in this room, every political arrangement under construction since before I was born. A smarter alpha would find a gentler way to demolish the architecture his father spent decades building.

My wolf offers no such calculus. He offers certainty—the kind that predates language, predates strategy, predates every duty installed in me since childhood. He has known since the training mat, since her scent broke through the suppression and rewrote every pathway I’d built around obligation. He suspected without proof for even longer.

My eyes find Kylie across the hall. Still pressed against the back wall, still gripping the pendant, still performing the invisibility that has kept her alive for thirteen years in a pack that never earned her quiet.

She looks up. Her grey-green eyes meet mine through two hundred heads, and the distance between us collapses into the singular, devastating fact that I have never been more certain of anything in my life.

“Kylie Donovan.”