LOGINThe pain started as a dull ache behind my sternum, easy enough to ignore the first morning, easier still to blame on training. By the second day it had sharpened into something colder, spreading outward from that same spot in slow, deliberate pulses, like ice working its way through water.I told myself it would pass. It didn't.During drills the following afternoon, the cold hit hard enough to buckle my knees mid-strike, and the world tilted sideways before Gregory's arms caught me on the way down."Chelsea." His voice came from somewhere far away, edged with alarm. "Chelsea, what's wrong?""I don't know," I managed, and that was the truth, and it frightened me more than any answer would have.He carried me to Erin without waiting for permission, and she had me sitting upright within minutes, her hands pressed flat against my chest and sternum, her expression sliding from concern into something graver the longer she held them there.She sat back finally, and the seriousness on her fa
The morning drill was supposed to be routine—a patrol simulation along the eastern border, the kind of exercise Gregory ran twice a month to keep the guild sharp when nothing was actually threatening us. I was still technically a junior warrior, folded into the formation near the back, more focused on not embarrassing myself than on anything resembling real danger.The tree line broke apart all at once.Twenty wolves, maybe more, came out of the trees in a coordinated line that had nothing sloppy about it, and for one disorienting second my mind refused to accept that the drill had become real. Then a body slammed into the warrior beside me, and there was blood on the grass, and the refusal didn't matter anymore.I shifted without thinking, the same way I had the night of the border chase, and something in me that wasn't training took over the moment my paws hit the ground. I didn't move the way Gregory had drilled into me. I moved faster than that, lower, reading gaps in the fighting
Gregory asked me to stay behind after training, waiting until the last of the guild had drifted off toward the mess hall before he finally spoke, and something in the careful way he'd timed it told me whatever this was, he'd been building up to it for a while. We sat on the bench near the cage, the same one May had nearly taken my face apart in weeks ago, and for a long moment he didn't say anything at all, just turned a strip of leather wrapping over and over in his hands like he needed something to do with them. "I've tried talking myself out of this," he said finally. "For a while now. It hasn't worked." "Out of what?" He looked at me then, and there was none of his usual easy humor in his face, just something plain and unguarded. "I'm falling for you, Chelsea. I've tried to call it something smaller. Gratitude, maybe, or just liking having someone new around who doesn't look at me like I'm only the Beta. It isn't smaller. I've stopped pretending it is." I let him finish.
Victoria sent for me before dawn, while the pack house was still dark and quiet, the kind of hour where the only sounds were early birds and my own footsteps on the stone floor of the library. She was already at the table when I arrived, the same table from before, except now it was buried under a small mountain of books, some so old their spines had cracked into fragments, others hand-copied in ink that had faded to brown. "Sit," she said, not looking up from the text she was smoothing flat. "There's a great deal to go through, and I'd rather you hear it from me, in order, than piece it together yourself from half of it." I sat. Something in her tone had shifted since our first conversation—less caution now, more weight, like she'd crossed some internal threshold about how much I was owed. "The Lunara were not simply rare," she began, without preamble. "They were considered sacred. Not by the packs—by the Moon Goddess herself. The old texts describe them as a bridge. A bloodline ca
I woke before dawn, restless in a way sleep hadn't touched. The argument in Turner's study kept playing itself back in my head—his voice cracking around the edges when he said he wouldn't forgive himself, the heat of him standing close enough that I'd forgotten, for one unguarded second, to be afraid of anyone.I told myself I wasn't going to the border to meet Mira. I told myself that the whole walk there, as if repeating it made it more true.Training that morning was thin, half the guild still recovering from the festival two nights before, and it wasn't hard to slip an excuse past Gregory's assistant when he wasn't looking—a claim about needing more red ribbon from the healers, a direction that happened to run past the edge of the training field and straight toward the tree line. I told myself I only wanted to see for myself. Not to meet her. Just to look.The border forest thinned the farther east I went, the trees older and closer together, the ground marked with the kind of qui
The border guard found me near the guild armory, a folded, sealed piece of parchment held out at arm's length like he wasn't entirely sure what to do with it."This came through the eastern checkpoint an hour ago," he said. "Addressed to you. Specifically." He read the front of it aloud before handing it over, like he needed to confirm the name matched the girl standing in front of him. "Chelsea Keith. Formerly of Silverclan."My hands went cold before I'd even broken the seal. I knew that handwriting. I'd grown up watching it fill the margins of shared schoolbooks, watched it scrawl birthday messages and grocery lists and, once, a note slipped under my door the night before my wedding that only said good luck, though I understood now how little those two words had meant coming from her.Mira.I waited until the guard had gone before I opened it, standing alone at the edge of the armory with my heart beating too hard for a piece of paper.Chelsea,I don't expect you to read this witho
Chapter One“I, Alpha of the Silverclan Pack, hereby,reject you as my mate.”Alpha Jordan announced loudly and I knelt in front of the whole pack grabbing him by the leg in silent pleading.I had just been named his mate, and without delay, he outright rejected me.For the first time since the Silv
“That went better than I thought it would,” Erin said as we sat down in her room, but I wasn’t paying attention. My mind was on Gregory, who was probably asleep in the next room. After Turner had put me in his care, he had moved me out of the shabby room I’d been staying in and into their own home.
“Fifteen against fourteen. I guess you’re staying then,” Lady Victoria said, and a wide grin spread across my face. I turned to the Beta—the man whose vote had just saved me. He smiled at me, and his handsome features, which the tension-filled moment had stopped me from noticing, dawned on me. Befo
The room was empty save for Erin, who had offered to get me some clothes and also show me to the pack house. I looked at myself in the mirror after Erin applied some concealer on my face to cover up the bruises.“You are really pretty, you know? You are going to turn heads here,” Erin said.“Thanks







