Chapter 1

On the eve of our wedding, my Alpha fiancé, Ethan, broke off our engagement for the daughter of the man who once saved his father's life.

My brother took me to confront him, and Ethan threw my brother into the dungeon.

Then he used my brother's life as leverage to force me to hand over the five hundred silver vaults my grandfather had left me.

I swallowed my pride and begged him. He tipped up my chin and gently wiped away my tears.

"Celeste, I'm not really breaking it off. I just want you to agree to let Chloe move into the main house after the wedding, and to get along with her."

"Otherwise, your brother will never get out. Your only other choice is to take those vaults and beg that cursed beast of the Thorn Pack to marry you. You're a smart girl. I know you'll make the right choice."

I didn't say anything.

He thought I'd finally given in, and he smiled, satisfied.

"Good girl. I'll come for you on the wedding day."

What he didn't know was that on the morning of the wedding, I would already be in the bridal car the Thorn Pack sent for me, and I would pass him on the stone bridge between our two territories.

Later, Ethan knelt at the gates of the Thorn Pack and wept as he begged me to forgive him.

•   *   *

"Mr. Thorne, if you agree to marry me, all five hundred of the Holloway silver vaults will come with me as my dowry."

It was the heaviest storm of the year. I had been kneeling before the boundary stone of Thorn Pack territory for three straight hours.

Rain ran down my hair and under my collar. I was shaking with cold.

In the black pine forest behind me, countless eyes were watching.

I could smell them. The Thorn Pack's patrol had been tracking me from the shadows since the moment I set foot on their land.

No one came forward. No one drove me away either.

They were waiting for their heir to speak. The heir the legends said was cursed by the Moon Goddess, violent and bloodthirsty.

Kieran Thorne.

Every pack in the North knew that name.

Some said that on the full moon he couldn't complete his shift, that he was trapped in a body half man and half wolf, and that the pain drove him to tear his own bedroom to pieces.

Some said he had ripped out a challenger's throat when he was sixteen.

Others said that no woman who married into the Thorne family had ever lived to see the end of her first winter.

Ethan had counted on exactly that.

He was certain I wouldn't dare come here.

Three days earlier, I had stood outside the Blackwood Pack's council hall from dawn until noon.

I had set aside every scrap of Holloway pride to ask Ethan Blackwood for one thing: let my brother go.

For that, I would have given up our engagement.

Ethan sat in the seat at the head of the council hall and frowned. There was a note of reproach in his voice, as if he were scolding a child who didn't know any better.

"Celeste, what kind of nonsense is that? Am I the kind of man who just walks away?"

He came down the steps, lifted my chin, and wiped away my tears with the pad of his thumb, as gentle as he'd always been.

"I'm not really breaking it off. I just want you to let Chloe move into the pack's main house after the wedding, and to get along with her."

"Her father took a silver bullet for my father. Now the Rivers family has fallen, and she has nowhere to go. I can't just abandon her."

"Be good. As long as you behave, I'll think about letting your brother go."

I looked into those gray-blue eyes that had once made my heart race, and for the first time, they felt like a stranger's.

That afternoon, word came from the dungeon.

Liam Holloway had come down with silver fever and died.

I still remember how he looked when they carried my brother out.

He was lying on a rough wooden plank, covered with a dirty gray tarp.

The moment I lifted the tarp, everything inside me drained away.

That was no silver fever.

One side of his skull had caved in. His arms and legs were twisted at impossible angles and bound behind his back. Around his wrists were ring after ring of blackened burns. The marks of silver chains.

A werewolf can heal from knife wounds, bullet wounds, broken bones. But not from silver.

Someone had hung him up in silver chains and then broken his bones, one by one.

My brother had been tortured to death.

That night, I knelt at his fresh grave, cut open my palm with a silver blade, let my blood fall on his headstone, and swore a blood oath.

In the name of the Moon Goddess. By the blood of the Holloways.

I would not spare a single one of the people who killed him.

And the Blackwood Pack's greatest enemy in the North was the Thorn Pack.

Ethan thought I had no one but him.

He thought the Holloways were a small, insignificant pack, and that without Blackwood's protection, the other packs would tear us to shreds.

He thought I would bow my head before I would ever dare set foot in "the beast's" territory.

He had forgotten one thing.

My grandfather had been the last master silversmith in the North.

Every silver weapon he forged in his lifetime, every bundle of wolfsbane he sealed away, was hidden in five hundred secret silver vaults scattered across the North.

Enough to arm ten packs. Enough to wipe out any pack in existence.

Before he died, my grandfather left a will: the vaults would pass to my mate on the day I took the mate vow.

Ethan had always known that.

That was why he'd dared to treat me the way he did three days ago.

He thought those vaults would belong to the Blackwood Pack sooner or later.

Through the storm, the iron gate behind the boundary stone finally opened.

A tall, middle-aged man came out holding a black umbrella. It was Marcus, the Thorn Pack's Gamma.

He stopped in front of me and looked down at me, his expression hard to read.

"Miss Holloway, our heir has agreed."

"Go home. No one in the Thorn Pack will ever speak of what you did here tonight."

The iron gate closed in front of me again.

I finally let out a breath. I tried to move my numb legs, and suddenly the world went black. I pitched face-first into the mud.

In the last flicker of consciousness, I thought I caught a faint scent.

Cedar. And the cold wind of a winter night.

It was close, so close it was as if someone had bent down in the rain and lifted me into their arms.

But before I could see who, everything was gone.

That storm gave me pneumonia. I was in bed for a week.

I don't know how the story got out.

All of Crescent Valley was saying that the Holloway girl had been jilted by the Blackwood heir, and that in her despair she'd stood out in the rain on purpose, trying to die.

The next day, one gown after another from the newest season was delivered to my hospital room. Every one of them was from Ethan.

Then he called. His voice was full of impatience.

"Do you like the dresses? I know you're upset, but do you have to threaten to kill yourself every time something doesn't go your way? Who are you putting on this pitiful act for?"

"Do you know Chloe cried all night when she heard you got sick standing in the rain on purpose? She blames herself."

"Fine, the wedding will go ahead as planned. Happy now? But on the wedding day, you'll transfer all of your grandfather's silver vaults to Chloe. Consider it compensation."

"Otherwise, your brother will never get out of that dungeon."

The moment he finished, I heard broken sobbing on the other end of the line.

It was Chloe.

Ethan's voice went soft at once. He hung up with a click and hurried off to comfort her.

I put down the phone, leaned back against the headboard, and started to laugh.

I laughed until the tears came.

My brother was already dead.

He had been dead for ten days, and the heir of the pack that killed him was still using his life to threaten me.

What could possibly hold me now?

The Rivers family had embezzled Council funds. They'd been reported, sunk deep in debt, and struck from Crescent Valley long ago.

Ethan wanted to take my grandfather's vaults for nothing and use them to put Chloe's family back on its feet.

I wiped my tears and looked out the window at the waning moon.

All right, then.

I'll use that silver to bury you all.