Aria's POV
"Start talking," I said.
Lucian sat up and put the phone on the nightstand and I watched him decide how to begin, which already told me more than I wanted to know.
When Lucian stalled it was never because he didn't know what to say. It was because he knew exactly what to say and was figuring out how badly it was going to land.
"Serena and I grew up together," he said. "Our packs were neighboring territories. Her father and my father had an alliance that went back twenty years."
"Okay."
"When I was twenty-two and she was twenty, there was talk about formalizing that alliance." He paused. "Through a mating arrangement."
I stared at him. "You were arranged to be mated to someone."
"It never happened, both of us refused. We were friends, not mates, and neither of us wanted to turn it into something it wasn't." He met my eyes. "But our fathers spent about two years trying to make it happen and it created a lot of… history between our packs."
