Chapter 2: Ninety Days

I did not stop walking until I reached the gravel drive, my sliced palm still dripping onto the white silk of my wedding dress.

Behind me, the courtyard roared like a storm tearing loose. A council clerk chased me down the stairs and pressed the stamped copy of the deed into my good hand, too frightened of the law to do anything else.

"Aurora! Stop right there!"

I turned. Alpha Richard Kingsley was striding down the marble steps, his face dark with fury. Dominic trailed a few paces behind him, jaw locked, a muscle jumping in his cheek.

"You have disgraced this pack in front of every noble family in the region," Richard snarled. His alpha aura rolled off him and settled on my shoulders like a heavy hand. "You will walk back into that courtyard, say you were out of your mind, and take the vow."

I let the quiet heat of my royal blood rise to meet it. It was not much, but it kept my knees from bending.

"The blood touched the sacred stone, Alpha Richard," I said. "The bond is broken, and the council watched it break."

"Do not quote ancient law to me, orphan!" He stepped closer. "You own nothing. Every meal you ate under this roof was paid for by Silverclaw wealth."

"Then you will be glad to see me go." I raised the deed. "And that land was never Silverclaw's to keep."

Richard's eyes dropped to the paper, then swung to his son.

"You signed away royal land? In front of the council?"

"She had a blade on me, Father," Dominic said through his teeth. "Let her have the rocks. It is nothing but frozen dirt. She will be crawling back in two weeks."

"I would rather eat dirt than set foot on your land again," I said, and slid the deed into the deep pocket of my gown.

Dominic stepped into my space and dropped his voice so his father could not hear. "You think you are clever? You have no allies, no money, and no pack. When winter comes, nobody is going to save you."

A small, bitter smile touched my lips. He had no idea what kind of winter was coming, or what it would do to his precious pack house.

"I do not need saving," I whispered back.

Then I turned to his father and spoke loudly enough for the guards at the steps to hear. "Your son signed that deed before the entire council. Try to void it, and I will finish what I started on that balcony. Ask Dominic what I know about Greywater."

Richard went still. His gaze slid to Dominic, and I watched the color leave his son's face. Something passed between them that neither wanted witnessed.

Richard snatched a pen from his coat, scrawled his name across a final release form a steward hurried over, and threw the page at my feet.

"Get off my territory," he growled, turning his back. "Any wolf who finds you past the southern gate after sunset may do as he pleases."

I didn't pick it up.

I looked at the guard.

"You. Pick it up."

He stared at me, then at Richard, then bent and picked it up with both hands and offered it to me.

"Those are terms I am happy to accept."

I took it and walked toward the iron gates without looking back once.

While I crossed the lawn, I pulled my phone from my pocket and booked a car with a shaking thumb. By the time I reached the outer boundary, a black town car was idling at the roadside. The driver stared at my bloodstained gown, but I ignored him and slid into the leather backseat.

"Where to, ma'am?" he asked nervously, watching me in the mirror.

"The central bank in the district capital." I pulled the ribbon from my hair and wound it tight around my palm. "And drive fast."

As the car pulled away, the green hills of Silverclaw land shrank behind us. I leaned my head against the cool glass and let out a long, ragged breath. My pulse was still racing, but for the first time in years, nothing was sitting on my chest.

I opened my banking app. My balance read less than two hundred dollars. To Dominic and his father, I was a penniless girl casting herself out into the cold.

They did not know what my grandfather had left me.

Safe deposit box 214 had sat untouched since before the royal line was wiped out.

In my first life, I only opened it after Dominic had drained every account I owned. By then the Frost was close, I had no money and no way to reach what the box pointed to, and I never got there in time.

Inside lay a worn leather journal. Tucked into a flap at the back cover was a small iron key shaped like a wolf's claw, beside a line of exact coordinates in the heart of the northern badlands. Beneath the journal lay my mother's sapphire set, worth enough to pay for what came next.

The Silverclaw pack believed the north was a dead stretch of ice. They did not know that beneath those black granite mountains lay the Royal Vault, a buried fortress raised by the first Lycan kings and stocked with three centuries of gold, ancient power cores, preserved rations, and armor-grade weapons.

I pictured the key in my hand. Ninety days. In ninety days the sky would split, red rain would begin to fall, and the Shadow Frost would roll across the continent and swallow it.

In my last life, I died in the snow, begging the man I loved. In this one, I would use every second, every coin, and every drop of royal blood to build a sanctuary nothing could break.

"Driver," I said, looking toward the dark mountain peaks on the horizon.

"Yes, ma'am?"

"We are making two stops. The bank first. Then the northern industrial zone." I closed my fist around the memory of the key. "I need to build a fortress."