Chapter 1

POV: Rhen

"Get your hands off him before I break both of yours, Alpha blood or not." I said it before I even looked up to see whose boots those were.

The pup under my hands was shaking so hard his teeth clicked, a hind leg torn open by a trap line the hunters had strung too close to Thornwolf ground. Blood was soaking into my sleeves. I did not have time to be polite about who was standing over me.

"Careful who you threaten, kennel girl." The voice was low and it did not shake at all, which is how I knew before I looked up that I had made a mistake.

Omegas do not speak to Alphas like that. Omegas do not really speak to Alphas at all, not unless spoken to first, not unless our eyes stay down and our voices stay soft. My mother taught me the rule before she taught me to walk. She never told me why it mattered so much to her specifically, only that it did, that the word Ashveil in her mouth always came out like something bitten off before it could hurt her more.

I looked up anyway. Of course I did.

He was Ashveil. I knew it from the crest stitched into his collar before I even placed the face, and once I placed the face my stomach dropped through the floor of the world. Kieran Ashveil. The heir. The one they were throwing a feast for tomorrow night, the one whose engagement to a Duskmoor girl was going to be announced in front of both packs like a business deal, because that is exactly what it was.

He was not looking at the pup. He was looking at me like I had said something in a language he almost remembered.

"He's bleeding out," I said, since neither of us seemed able to say anything smarter. "You can arrest me for insubordination after I finish."

Something moved behind his eyes, not anger, something closer to surprise wearing anger's coat. He crouched down across from me without another word and pinned the pup's shoulders still with hands twice the size of mine, steady as stone, while I packed the wound with what I had. It should have felt like an order given. It felt like being helped.

That was the first mistake. Noticing that it felt like being helped.

The second mistake was breathing him in. Pine smoke and something underneath it, something warm and unfamiliar that hit the back of my throat and made my pulse do something violent and stupid. My wolf, the quiet, mostly-asleep thing I carried around and rarely let out, sat straight up inside my chest like she had been waiting her whole life for exactly this scent to walk into a room.

"What's your name," he said, not a question so much as a demand he had forgotten to make sound like an order.

"Rhen." I did not offer a rank, though he clearly knew one anyway from the collar I wore, the plain gray one that marked every Thornwolf Omega on Ashveil land. "Thornwolf."

His jaw tightened at the pack name like it cost him something to hear it. "I know what you are."

"Then you know I shouldn't be talking to you."

"You started it."

I almost laughed. I caught it before it escaped, because laughing at an Alpha heir was probably a hanging offense on top of the talking. The pup whined under our four hands and both of us looked back down at him at the same moment, and for one strange, suspended second, it was just two people trying to keep something small alive, no collar, no crest, no rule between us at all.

Then footsteps crunched up the trail, fast, and the second stretched too thin and snapped.

"Kieran." A woman's voice, sharp with authority. Not Alpha Alaric. Someone younger, closer to Kieran's own rank, and when I glanced up I recognized the silver hair pin worn only by Duskmoor nobility. Elara. His intended.

Kieran stood so fast the movement blew cold air across the space he'd been kneeling in. Whatever had been sitting easy between us a second ago vanished behind a wall going up brick by brick in real time.

"Duskmoor patrol found a second trap line east of here," Elara said, eyes flicking to me, to the blood on my hands, to the pup, cataloguing all of it without a flicker of expression. "Your father wants you back before the feast prep starts."

"I'm coming." He did not look at me again. He should not have looked at me again. And yet right before he turned, his eyes cut back, just once, just long enough for the mate pull, because that is what it was, I understood that now with a kind of sick, falling clarity, to yank tight between us like a rope pulled taut from both ends.

He walked away like it hadn't happened. I let him, because what else was there to do.

I carried the pup back to the healer's den with my hands still shaking, and it was not from the cold. My mother's warnings ran through my head on a loop, the flinch every time someone said Ashveil, the way she used to pull me back from the border fence when I was small, the things she never explained. I had always assumed it was fear of the pack. I was starting to suspect, with a dread that sat heavy under my ribs, that it was something closer to home than that.

Sable found me an hour later scrubbing blood out from under my nails at the pump, and took one look at my face before her eyebrows went up toward her hairline.

"You look like you saw a ghost," she said. "Or worse. You look like you saw the Alpha heir."

I did not answer fast enough. That was answer enough.

"Rhen." Sable's voice dropped low, urgent, glancing over her shoulder like the trees themselves might be listening. "Tell me you didn't."

"I didn't do anything."

"That's not what your face says." She grabbed my wrist, the wet one, and did not let go. "Because if you did, if the pull is real, you need to understand something before tomorrow night's feast. It isn't just his engagement being announced. Alpha Alaric changed the ceremony. He's naming Kieran's mate in front of both packs at once, tomorrow, and sealing the bond with pack magic before anyone can object."

"Tomorrow," I repeated, and the word landed like a stone dropped down a well I could not hear the bottom of.

"Tomorrow," Sable said. "So whatever almost happened out there, Rhen, you have one night to decide if you're going to survive wanting something you're not allowed to have."