Chapter 1

"You're my mate."

Kade whispered it against my ear. My mind went blank.

He was the alpha's son, and tomorrow the pack would be his. He was also my only friend. I had loved him for four years and never told him.

My sister was going to be his luna. Everyone assumed it. Nothing had ever been announced, but Celeste had been describing her own betrothal to me since she was fourteen, down to the flowers, and down to where I would be standing.

He stepped closer.

"Will you give yourself to me?"

Nobody had ever asked me for anything. That was what undid me.

"Tomorrow is your ceremony," I said. "You're supposed to be betrothed to Celeste."

He turned my face with one finger under my chin. Black hair, blue eyes, and a laugh he could pull out of a crowd whenever he wanted one.

"There won't be a betrothal," he said.

"You told her? You told your father?"

"It's done. I told him tonight."

I did not ask what he had told him. He answered fast, and fast sounded like the truth. "I'm wolfless. How would I be your mate? Even if I am, your parents would never accept me."

A wolfless wolf cannot shift. No strength, no scent, no gift of any kind. Even an omega ranked above me, and an omega ranked above almost nothing.

"Fated mates don't need permission," Kade said. "Not even mine. Tomorrow you'll stand with me."

A fated mate beats a betrothal. Every pack knows it. I did not know yet how often an alpha marries the other girl anyway.

I stepped back. I got as far as the door.

"Freya." He did not follow. He only said my name. "If it were a lie, would the bond let you feel this?"

Then he kissed me.

The bond caught me under the ribs. My body went hot and strange and stopped asking my permission. I stopped thinking about tomorrow.

Eighteen years of being told I had no gifts, and here was something that felt like one. I had nothing to compare it to.

I had spent eighteen years keeping my wants small. It took him one hand on my back to make them enormous.

I believed him. That is the whole of it. There is no cleverer way to say it.

Kade was gone before the light.

An alpha's heir cannot arrive at his own ceremony looking like he has been up all night. I explained that to myself twice.

I put on my only dress. It had been my mother's. She died the day I was born, and I kept it folded under everything else I owned. I had never grown into it.

The whole pack came to the square. A thousand people in the sun, only one of them wolfless.

Nobody watched me walk in. I took my place behind the pillar on the left, where nobody ever looks, and thought that was a good sign.

Kade stepped onto the platform and spoke about the border, his father, and the years ahead. I heard about half of it.

Then he smiled the smile he kept for crowds. He said today was special for another reason.

"I have found my mate," he said. "She will be my whole life."

My body moved before my mind did.

I came out from behind the pillar. The crowd made a sound, that low ripple water makes going over stones, and I did not stop. I thought I knew what it meant.

I looked like a girl walking toward her own celebration. I was smiling. I have thought about that smile for six years.

"Celeste," Kade said. "Come to me."

I stopped. The world tipped over. Sound went out of the square, and the blood in me turned cold.

"Celeste is my chosen mate," he said, and held out his hand. "The future luna of this pack."

My eyes blurred. I did not let anything fall.

Through the blur I watched my half-sister climb the steps to him. Her blue dress cost more than my whole life. She was my father's other daughter, the only legitimate child in our house.

I do not remember deciding to follow her. I was standing in front of him, and the pack was watching.

Everyone else had had their turn at me. He never had, and I let that make him different, and then I let different mean honest. I was an idiot.

"You said I was your mate." My voice did not sound like mine. "You said it last night. You told me there would be no betrothal. So all of it was a lie?"

"A wolfless girl?" He looked at me with nothing on his face at all. "How would you be my mate?"

"Last night," I said. "You know what last night was."

"I don't know what you mean." He turned his head. "Someone take her home. She isn't well."

Somewhere near the front, one person laughed. Then it spread. A thousand people had just been told what I was, and not one of them doubted him.

"Don't do this. If you said one true thing last night—"

Celeste stepped between us with both hands up, as if I had struck her.

"On my betrothal day?" Her voice carried. It was built to carry. "You couldn't hold your tongue for one morning?"

Then she turned and looked at the front row.

Our father sat in the front row. Beta Bram Vane. He served Kade's father; after today he would serve Kade.

I looked at him last. I think I was still waiting for him to be my father.

His was the only face in the square I could not read.

"Take her inside," he said. "Lock the door. Nobody speaks to her."

The door stayed locked for two weeks.

I had a bed, a window, and three times a day the cook with a tray she was not supposed to carry.

On the ninth day my body started to feel wrong. Tired in a way sleep did not fix.

I asked the cook for the one thing I could not ask my father for. Four days later she put it in my hand and did not look at my face.

Two lines.

I sat on the bathroom floor with my back against the tub and watched the window turn from grey to white.

I was eighteen. I was locked in a room I could not open from the inside. I was pregnant with the heir of a man who had told a thousand people he did not know me.

I did not know what I was going to do. I knew the test had to be gone first. If my father found it he would put us both under the east wall, where the ground was soft.

I wrapped the test in a rag and pressed it against my chest and went out.

At the top of the back stairs I reached for the rail and found the switch instead. The light came on, the narrow yellow bulb the cook always left burning. It lit the stairwell and it lit me.

I went down too fast. I reached the kitchen and opened the stove and held the rag over the flame.

"Where do you think you're going?"

I closed my hand over it and turned around with both arms behind my back, like a child.

Celeste stood in the doorway in her nightgown, smiling. That was the thing I should have feared more than my father.

"Freya." She came toward me one step at a time. "You're confined."

"I was hungry."

"You were hungry," she said, and took my wrist.

I tore my arm back and went for the stove. She had me again before the rag reached the flame, and she did not hurry doing it. She had a wolf and I did not. She opened my fingers one at a time.

She went very still. Something crossed her face before the smile did, and it looked a great deal like fear. Then she looked up at me, and I watched her understand exactly whose it was.

"Father!" She was already running for the stairs. "Father, come quickly. It's Freya. She's pregnant."