Chapter 2

Wendy's POV

Three years ago, I still believed love was supposed to feel like being chosen.

His name was Drexel Pace, the Bloodmoon Pack's Alpha heir, handsome and certain of himself in the way only wolves born to power ever are.

I had loved him the way you love a fire when you're freezing—too close, and grateful for the burn. He didn't like me speaking to other males. He didn't like me leaving the den without him.

"You belong to me," he used to murmur against my hair, and I let it warm me, because no one else in the Whitlock Pack had ever wanted to keep the Alpha's scentless daughter at all.

I mistook his possessiveness for devotion. I mistook being watched for being loved. I was young, and I had spent my whole life being treated like a flaw in an otherwise perfect bloodline, so when a strong wolf held me too tightly, I called it safety.

Then he betrayed me—with my stepsister, a she-wolf who shared no blood with me at all.

The pain arrived before the proof did. Wraith moaned inside me, a low, broken sound I had never heard her make, and the mate bond told us the truth in the language of the body long before my eyes could confirm it.

I found Mabel's door unlocked, too careless even to hide it, and when I pushed it open the room swallowed me whole. Mabel was astride him, crying out, and Drexel was driving up into her with a focus that made bile climb my throat. I wanted to scream. I wanted to tear the smile off Mabel's face with my hands. But when I lunged forward, he shoved me back and put himself between us, shielding her.

"An Alpha heir can't take a defective wolf as his Luna," he said, unhurried, as if he were explaining weather. "You'll accept your place. The same as your stepsister accepted hers."

He told me what that place would be: Mabel's servant, his mistress, the Luna in name only if I knelt and begged him for the privilege.

If I agreed, my pack would receive Bloodmoon funding and I would be permitted to stay at his side. I refused. I refused the command, and I refused the bond that fate had chained me to.

Only then did his eyes widen. It didn't soften him. It enraged him. He struck me across the face, and when I still would not kneel, he told Mabel to get me out of his sight.

She dragged me the whole way through the territory, and the Whitlock Pack came out to watch. I searched every face for one that might stop this. I found my father instead.

Alpha George Vance stood among them, unmoving, while I called out to him.

"Wendy violated pack law and attempted to attack the Bloodmoon heir," he said, loud enough to settle the crowd. "She will be punished."

My heart dropped into ice. My own father had chosen Drexel and the stepdaughter who shared none of his blood over the child who did.

Mabel leaned close as she hauled me toward the tree line, her breath warm against my ear. "You should be grateful," she whispered, smiling for the crowd. "A scentless little ghost like you was never going to be missed." Then she pushed me through the gap in the fence, into the old hunting grounds we'd called the killing forest as children—the place where nothing ever came back.

Snow was already falling when the first beast found me. I fought it the only way a small wolf can, shifting into fur and teeth and grief, tearing at anything that came close, my silver coat soaked black with cold and blood. There were more of them than I could count, and I felt myself failing, felt the forest narrowing to a single point of white—and then something enormous pressed down over the whole of the woods.

The beasts around me broke and fled into the dark, and I was left shaking on the frozen ground, alive, saved by a power I never saw and could not name. When I could stand, I lifted my head to the black sky and spoke the words that severed me from everything I had been.

"I renounce the Whitlock Pack." I felt the bond to my father's line snap like a tendon, felt the last thread of home go dark.

The storm swallowed the moment whole, and I ran until the Whitlock territory was behind me and the human district swallowed my scentless body into its endless noise.

I changed my number. I found a job. I learned which store marked down its bread after eight and built a life small enough that no one could ever take it from me again. For three years it held. For three years the killing forest stayed a scar I only touched in dreams.

Then my phone lit up on the counter, and the past reached through the glass and put its hand around my throat.

[I know you survived.]

Drexel.

My hands went cold. I told myself it could be anyone, a cruel accident, a wrong number. Then the second message arrived.

[Wendy. Come home before I come to you.]

The phone shook in my hand. He had found me.

A single unmarried woman with no pack and no name meant nothing under Bloodmoon law—they could file a claim, send wolves, drag me back through the same silence that had thrown me out, and no one would raise a hand to stop it.

Alone, I had no shield at all. But a wolf bound by law to another Alpha's pack was a wolf even Drexel could not simply reach out and take.

Cassian's contract was still folded in my bag. Either party may leave without penalty. A man who had handed me an unlocked door before I'd even agreed to walk through it.

I called him before the fear could talk me out of it. "I'll marry you," I said when he answered.

A pause. "Are you sure?"

"Yes. But I want to do it tomorrow." Another pause—shorter this time. He sounded unsurprised, as if he'd already made room for whatever I needed.

"Then we'll go to the registry in the morning," Cassian said. And for the first time since the phone had lit up, my hands went still.