At twelve, she pulled a wolf-blood boy from the snow.
Ten years later, he became the Alpha King ruling the North, while she knelt at his feet—a prisoner.
Elena Veyrmont was once the most noble daughter of Saint Crow City—sending back three trays of pastries merely because the frosting roses weren't symmetrical enough, marriage proposals stacking up on her father's desk like cordwood.
Overnight, the Blood-Treason Law descended. Her father's head hung from a pike, her mother's body cooling at her feet, her young brother dragged away by soldiers—that small hand reaching for her never quite reaching, until his very last breath...
Reduced to a prisoner on the death march toward the border, she kept herself alive with a pair of hands that could read illness and diagnose ailments—she detected the escort captain's hidden affliction, trading three diamonds and her medical skill for temporary refuge.
But she did not know that the true hunter had long been waiting in the snowy night.
The door of the ruined chapel exploded inward, and the stench of blood, pine resin, and beast musk poured in. Beneath a silver-grey wolf-skin cloak, those amber vertical-slit pupils locked onto her—
It was him. The boy she had once saved—then crushed his token beneath her heel, publicly humiliating him: "A Moonspawn doesn't deserve to speak my name."
"What I despise most in this world," he pressed the blade to her throat, his voice low as a lover's whisper, "is humans. Every. Last. One."
Yet the blade stopped at her neck.
"But killing you now would be too dull." He bent down, threw her across his horse like prey, and wrapped her frozen body in his cloak. "We have a long road ahead, Elena. Plenty of time to settle old debts."
