He paused, his eyes on the map in front of him but his mind obviously on that long-ago day. His voice carried a note of wonder Charles was fairly certain his da didn’t know was there.

His voice a bare whisper, Bran murmured, “Of all of those people, she was the last survivor, Charles. When I bound her to my pack, the first of all that pack, I understood why. Her spirit … so strong.” He half closed his eyes and breathed in as if he were still in that desperate moment. Under the lowered eyelids, Charles could see the glimmer of gold. “Such determination, so much fight in her.” He let out a breath and smoothed a fold in the map with a flattened palm. “But not, alas, enough strength to allow her to survive without help. And making her pack was not enough. She’d been ill for a long time, and fighting for her life through the Change for several days.”

Surviving the Change was not something one usually did for days—or even hours. In Charles’s experience, the Change from human to werewolf happened in under an hour or it didn’t happen at all. He imagined the agony of it, to be hung suspended in the middle of a Change from human to wolf, neither one nor the other. The confusion would make the pain all that much worse.

“I think if I had been less broken,” Bran said, “or less moonstruck, I would have made other choices, but I cannot know that. I could simply have let her die. I could have helped her along. Sherwood would have died, too—but that was a choice he had made.”

His voice trailed off and his body went very still. “I have done a lot of things I am ashamed of,” Bran said. “This was not the worst.”

“You bound her as your mate,” said Charles, who had seen where this was leading—had grown up with the result of that decision. “But you couldn’t have done it without her consent.”

He knew that, remembered the tension of waiting to see if Anna would accept him. A person could be forced into the Change. Could be forced into a pack. But the mating bond could not be forced—it required acceptance by both parties.

“Could I not?” asked Bran, his mouth twisting. “She had been forcibly Changed, left in agony, then forcibly bound to a pack. I don’t think she was capable of giving consent.”