CHAPTER 1

Murielle's POV

Three years in, and I'd learned exactly which sounds meant something and which didn't. Boots in the corridor after dark, that was nothing. Boots that stopped outside my cell door, that was different, and that day they stopped.

"Alpha's here for you. Get up."

I didn't move right away. I'd learned that too: good news didn't exist down here, so anything that sounded like it was probably a trick, or a test, or both.

"You deaf?"

I got up. My legs didn't want to hold me at first, they never did anymore, not since the guards had decided breaking them twice was funnier than breaking them once. I braced a hand against the wall and made myself stand straight anyway. Whatever was waiting on the other side of that door, I wasn't giving it the satisfaction of watching me crawl.

The clothes I walked out in were the same ones I'd walked in wearing three years earlier. They hung off me now, off shoulders that used to fill them out, off a body that used to be strong enough to hold its own in a training ring. My hair had grown out shaggy in the dark, dark brown gone flat and dull without proper care, and I shoved a loose strand of it back before it could hang in my eyes. I caught myself almost laughing at all of it. Almost.

Callum was waiting past the gate, and for one stupid, traitorous second, my chest actually lifted at the sight of him.

He came. He actually came for me.

I hated that part of me. I hated it and I couldn't kill it, not completely, not even after everything.

He was broader than I remembered, his dark hair cropped shorter than he used to wear it. Harder around the eyes, the way a real Alpha was supposed to look. Looking at him felt like looking at a stranger wearing my brother's face.

He didn't look back.

"Get in the car."

Three years earlier, the pack had learned Colette was the real Ravensworth daughter, switched with me as a baby, and overnight she became the one who mattered. A month after she came home, battle plans she had no business seeing reached exactly the wrong person. Good wolves died. Callum lost people he'd trained since they were pups.

Someone had to answer for it, and it was never going to be her. She was too fragile for a cell, everyone said, too important to the bloodline. I was the other option sitting right there, already resented for living her life for eighteen years by accident.

I let them. I told myself it was because I loved her too, in whatever twisted way you can love a stranger who arrived one day and was told that everything I'd ever called mine had belonged to her all along. Other days I thought I just hadn't had the strength left to fight a family that had decided who I was before I opened my mouth.

Back then, Callum had stood in front of my cell and told me Colette would never survive the place, that I owed her for every year I'd unknowingly lived hers, that he'd come get me out before long. I'd believed every word for three years. Right up until a guard said "Alpha" that morning, and some small, humiliating part of me still hoped it meant him keeping his promise.

"The Alpha King's searching for his mate," he said, eyes fixed somewhere past my shoulder. "Every unmated female in the pack has to show up for it. That's the only reason you're out."

It wasn't him keeping any promise. It was the King he was here for, not me.

I kept my eyes on the ground. Three years had taught me exactly how much safer that was.

"Thank you, Alpha."

He made a sound low in his throat, disgust dressed up as impatience. "Why are you talking like that. Like you're still somebody's prisoner. You're still a Ravensworth."

Am I, though. 

The thought came sharp and fast, the old version of me trying to claw back up through everything prison had flattened out of me. I swallowed it. Three years, and I still knew exactly how much that particular truth would cost me if I said it out loud.

"Enough with the act," he snapped, when I didn't answer fast enough. "Get in."

I moved as quickly as legs that didn't fully work would let me. It wasn't quick enough for him. He was already in the car, door half shut, by the time I was still ten feet away.

"If you'd rather crawl back to that cell, that can be arranged." He didn't even bother looking at me to say it. "Or is the limping part of the performance too? Making sure everyone feels sorry for you?"

I wanted to ask him, plainly, whether he'd ever once considered that I didn't leak that battle plan. That I'd taken the blame because the alternative was watching this family throw Colette to the wolves instead, and some idiot, loyal part of me still couldn't stand to watch that happen, even to her.

I didn't ask. I'd learned that too.

"You had eighteen years of her life," he said instead, filling the silence I left. "I don't want to hear a single complaint out of you for three."

The door slammed before I'd fully processed it.

"Find your own way home. You remember the road."

I watched the car pull off, dust rising slow behind the tires, and I didn't cry. I'd used up whatever tears I had for this family a long time ago, somewhere around the second year, in a cell that smelled like rot and my own blood.

I started walking anyway. Every step dragged at bones that had never healed right, and by the time the pack house was just a shape on the horizon, the sun was already sinking behind it.

A car slowed beside me.

I didn't turn to look right away. Whatever this was, I already knew it wasn't my brother coming back for me.

When I finally did, the window came down. A voice I hadn't heard directed at me in three years said two words.

"Get in."