Chapter 2

Aria's POV

In my last life, I'd found out what Myrna Croft really was.

A rogue spy.

When Joren named her his Luna that night, I didn't stop to think. I was terrified she had her claws in him, and I told the whole hall exactly what I knew.

The tables went up like dry brush. Rogue. Kill the rogue. Wolves were on their feet, half-shifted, snarling.

Myrna looked at the faces closing in around her. Then she slipped a tiny glass vial from her sleeve and drank it down.

Wolfsbane. She was dead before she hit the floor.

Joren had smiled at me over her body. "Good thing you caught it in time. That could have been a disaster."

I believed he was grateful.

He wasn't. He hated me for it—quietly, patiently—for ten years. He spent those years earning back every scrap of my trust, and then he used it to destroy me. And he made me watch while he destroyed my pack.

I could still see it whenever I closed my eyes.

Elders. Mothers. Pups barely old enough to shift. The wolfsbane in the wells meant none of them could, and they died on two legs, screaming. The snow in the Prehnite courtyard turned red and stayed red.

I begged him. Chained, on my knees, I begged him to spare them.

He set his boot on my chest and leaned his weight into it.

"So what if Myrna was a rogue, Aria? She'd put all that behind her. If you hadn't exposed her in front of everyone, she'd never have had to die."

"You owe her. Your whole pack's lives won't come close to paying it back."

The memory went through me like ice water.

If Joren wanted Myrna so badly, fine.

Let him have her.

Back in the Great Hall, Joren was staring at me as though he didn't understand what had just happened. One hand had drifted up to his chest, pressing at the place where the bond used to be.

The rest of the hall was just as stunned.

"She's letting it go? Just like that?"

"Aria Ashcroft? She was mad for him. Everyone knows she'd never have anyone else."

"He wouldn't even be Alpha without her. And she's walking away from the Luna's seat?"

Even Myrna was staring at me, her lips parted. She clearly hadn't expected me to go without a fight.

They'd all been waiting for a scene. The Prehnite heir, cast off in front of every pack in the Territories—surely I'd scream, or draw steel, or tear the hall apart.

I didn't give Joren so much as a second glance.

The truth was, my last life had already taught me everything I needed to know.

To Joren, soft, sweet Myrna was everything a woman should be. Me? I was all leather and blades, with blood under my nails. Never polished. Never gentle. Not someone he’d ever look at twice.

Prehnite raises its daughters to fight. Our she-wolves have held the line beside our men for as long as the pack has had a name.

For years, the rogues had raided the borderlands—burning homesteads, butchering whole families, taking whatever they pleased. If Prehnite hadn't stood with Zircon, Joren would never have driven Malachai Vane and his rogues north into the frozen wastes beyond the Hollow Peaks. And the packs would never have sworn the Accord to him.

I gave him the best of everything Prehnite had. My warriors. My pack's war-craft. My blood. I put him on that dais.

And he used it to shame me in front of the world.

It was almost funny.

I let out one short, bitter laugh. My chest felt like it had been cracked open and left out in the wind.

Enough. I was the one who'd been blind. I'd trusted the wrong man. I'd loved the wrong man.

From now on, I wanted nothing to do with Joren Calder.

I turned and led my people out of the Great Hall, and I didn't look back.

Within a day, the story of Joren's rejection had reached every pack in the Territories.

Prehnite was furious. Half my warriors wanted to ride for Zircon that same night and drag an apology out of him by the throat.

I stopped them in the training yard.

"The rogues aren't finished," I said. "Malachai Vane didn't crawl north to die. He'll come back, and when he does, I want us ready—not worn down from a fight with Zircon. Train. Sharpen your blades. That's how we answer this."

My father watched from the edge of the yard. When the warriors had gone, he came over and rested his hand on my shoulder.

"That's my girl," he said quietly. "You know when to hold on and when to let go. I'm proud of you, Aria."

My eyes burned.

In my last life, Joren's claws had opened my father from ribs to belly. And with what little life he had left, my father had dragged himself onto his knees in the snow and begged Joren to let me live.

Joren took his head with one swing.

"Beg all you like, old man. This is what Aria owes Myrna. I'll take it back from her a thousand times over."

I could swallow the rejection.

What he'd done to my pack, I would never let go.

That night, I took a lamp down to the vault beneath Ashcroft Hall, where Prehnite kept the oldest things it owned. At the very back, wrapped in oilcloth, lay the Ashcroft Codex—the journal of our pack's first Luna, Seraphine Ashcroft.

Every Prehnite pup grew up on her story. Seraphine was the first to carry the healing gift in her blood, the gift that had come down through the Ashcroft line to me. And in the last pages of her journal, half-finished, in a hand that grew shakier toward the end, she had recorded a rite.

A rite that would temper a pack's blood against wolfsbane. For good.

No Ashcroft had managed to complete it in two hundred years. In my last life, I'd been too busy fighting Joren's wars to even try.

Not this time.

Wolfsbane in the wells was how he'd killed my pack. So I would make sure wolfsbane could never touch us again.

The only way to keep anyone from forcing us to our knees was to become strong enough that no one could.