Chapter one

CHAPTER ONE

HAZEL'S POV

Everyone in the Blackwood pack agreed that a mute, wolfless stray had no business being their Luna.

Julian Blackwood was the strongest Alpha the Massachusetts packs had seen in a hundred years. Every unmated she-wolf from the Berkshires to the Cape had dreamed of wearing his mark. His wife couldn't speak, and she couldn't shift. I knew what they said about us, and most days I agreed with them.

But I loved him. I had loved him since I was five years old. I kept believing that if I was patient long enough, one day he would look at me and love me back.

At nine o'clock that night, I looked at the kitchen clock for the tenth time.

The venison roast had gone cold an hour ago. Julian wasn't coming home for dinner. I'd known it since seven, but I'd kept the table set anyway.

I was scraping the plates when my phone buzzed.

Nightfall. Come get me.

I typed back one word. Okay.

Every other wolf in the pack would have heard that order in their head. Julian could mind-link any of his three hundred wolves from twenty miles away. He couldn't reach me that way, because he had never marked me. In five years of marriage, there had never been a bite on my neck, and so there was no bond and no link between us. He had to text me like a human.

Twenty minutes later I pulled up outside Nightfall. It was a club on neutral ground by the harbor where the packs drank together, and Julian kept a private room on the top floor.

The door was half open. Laughter and music spilled out of it, and something else I couldn't hear at all. Half the conversations in that room were happening in silence, mind to mind. I'd watched them do it my whole life. Somebody would grin at nothing, and three people would laugh at a joke I would never hear.

"Julian lost!" one of them shouted out loud. "It's a dare. Ten minutes kissing Sienna. Come on, that's hardly a punishment."

The whole room howled.

My hand stopped on the door handle.

Sienna Lowe was the daughter of the Lowe pack's Beta. She had been Julian's first love, the she-wolf everyone had expected him to mark before his grandfather made him marry me instead.

Through the gap, I could see Julian sprawled on the leather couch in a white suit, his gold-rimmed glasses low on his nose. His cheeks were flushed. It took a lot of whiskey to put color in a werewolf's face.

Sienna sat beside him in a red dress, with her face tipped up toward his, waiting.

"Hazel?"

I turned. Cole Garrett, one of Julian's lieutenants, was coming up the hall behind me with two drinks.

I smiled and signed, "I'm just going in."

Cole was one of the few in the pack who'd bothered to learn more than a few signs. He reached past me and pushed the door wide open before I could stop him.

The room went quiet. Every head turned. Their nostrils flared, the way wolves always did when someone walked in. Then they caught my scent, faint and flat and almost human, and lost interest.

Julian sat up. "What are you doing here?"

"I sent for her," Sienna said, lifting her chin. "Off your phone. Somebody needs to make it clear to her, Julian. You certainly won't."

The air in the room changed. Julian's eyes flashed gold behind his glasses, just for a second, and every wolf in the room dropped their gaze to the floor.

He stood, grabbed his jacket, and took me by the wrist. "We're going home."

He dragged me into the hallway so fast that I stumbled.

"Julian!" Sienna came after us and caught his other arm. "You can't just leave. A dare is a dare."

He looked back at her, and a low sound came out of his chest. I felt it through the hand on my wrist. It wasn't quite a growl.

She flinched. Then she looked straight at me, smiled, rose up on her toes, and kissed him.

I kept my eyes on the floor. My free hand curled into a fist at my side, and I made it open again.

Julian turned his head. Her mouth slid across his cheek.

Her eyes filled. Julian sighed. "Sienna. Stop."

It was only two words, but he said them so softly that they hurt to hear.

"Drinks are on me," he called over his shoulder. "I'm taking her home."

He put me in the passenger seat of his car and slammed the door. Then he got in and lit a cigarette, and the smoke filled the car. I held in a cough.

"What's the rule?" he said.

"I don't go out alone at night," I signed.

"Why?"

"Because I can't shift, and I can't scream. If something finds me in the dark, nobody will hear it."

He was quiet for a long time. "Then why did you come?"

"I thought the text was from you. I'm sorry. It won't happen again."

He looked at me for ten long seconds. "Make sure it doesn't."

I touched his sleeve and signed, "You've been drinking. Let me drive."

Half an hour later I parked in the garage of the Alpha's house on the ridge above Weston. Inside, I turned to sign that I'd make him something for his head.

He caught the back of my neck and kissed me.

His mouth was hot and tasted of whiskey. His other hand slid down my spine, and I felt the sharp prick of his nails, half a breath from turning into claws. Then he pulled me into the dark living room, and I stopped thinking.

Later that night, I woke up screaming without a sound.

It was the old dream. There was the fire, and the locked room under the stairs. I could hear wolves howling as they burned, and smell their fur catching. I sat bolt upright with my heart slamming, and I reached across the sheets.

Julian's side of the bed was empty and cold.