CLAIMED BY THE RUTHLESS ALPHA KING

Chapter One: The Ceremony

I'd tried the dress on four times that week. Silver silk, hand-sewn, and every time I turned in front of the mirror I thought I looked like someone about to become Luna. Now it just sat wrong on my shoulders, too tight, like it belonged to a different night than the one I was standing in.

Three hundred people packed the clearing. The bonfire threw heat across my face and I had one hand pressed flat against my stomach because if I didn't hold still I thought I might actually throw up. Eighteen tonight. The age the moon decided things.

I already knew what it would decide. Caleb stood on the other side of the fire in his ceremonial black, hair still wet from the ritual bath, and two years ago he'd carved our initials into the oak tree behind the training grounds and told me, face red, that he didn't need some ceremony to tell him I was his.

I'd believed that. Still did, mostly, even with my heart going too fast.

Elder Marsh lifted his arms and the drumming cut off.

"Tonight, under the eye of the Moon Goddess, we witness the joining of true mates. Caleb Danvers, future Alpha, step forward."

Caleb walked to the center. I moved with him without really deciding to, because for two years the whole pack had called me future Luna every time I passed, and some part of me still expected this to go the way everyone expected.

Then his eyes came up and they didn't land on me.

They landed on Brynn.

Gold light gathered at my cousin's feet. Her mouth came open. Caleb made a sound in his throat that I'd heard about my whole life in old wives' stories and never once thought I'd watch happen to someone I loved.

"Mate." His voice broke apart on the word in a way it had never once broken for me. He crossed the fire in three steps, dropped to his knees, pressed his mouth to Brynn's knuckles like he'd rehearsed it his whole life without knowing.

"You're my mate."

Nobody gasped. Nobody looked stricken on my behalf. The clearing just lit up, happy, loud, somebody already crying good tears, somebody already grabbing Brynn's mother by the shoulders. The drums started again, quicker this time, and I stood there in my silver dress feeling like furniture nobody had noticed yet.

Brynn found my eyes once, over Caleb's bent head. Just a flicker. Like she was asking permission for something.

I didn't give it. I turned and left before she could get an answer out of me, because I didn't have one.

I made myself walk first. Chin up, shoulders back, because if I ran now every wolf in that clearing would smell exactly how bad this hurt. I walked past the dessert table nobody had touched yet. Past two of the older women already murmuring behind their hands, not cruel exactly, just talking the way people talk when someone's luck runs out in public. My mother caught my wrist once and said my name, and it sounded like sorry, which fixed nothing.

I kept walking until the fire was just an orange smear behind the trees, and then I ran.

I didn't stop until the party sounds were gone and the dress had torn twice on brambles and my legs gave out on the lower slope of Silver Peak. That was the line. Past it was rogue country, no pack, no law. Nobody from Silver Hollow came out this far unless they were done being sensible.

I wasn't being sensible.

I hit my knees in wet grass and let out one sound, ugly, torn out of me.

I'd been supposed to be Luna tonight. Instead I was eighteen and humiliated in front of everyone I'd grown up with, and even my wolf had gone still inside me, waiting to see what I'd do with all that.

I didn't know how long I'd been kneeling there when the heat started.

It came on low, under my ribs, and it had nothing to do with the crying. It climbed fast up my spine and out through my arms until my own skin felt too small to hold me. My wolf woke up and started pacing behind my ribs, hungry for something I couldn't put a name to yet.

I'd overheard the older women talk about this once, in the kind of low voice reserved for things you didn't say at the dinner table. First sign of a true mate. It hit a she-wolf with no warning at all, because somewhere close by, the other half of me had started breathing the same air I was.

Not tonight. God, not tonight, not on top of everything else.

The moon didn't care what a person could take. It had never once cared.

I got a hand on a tree trunk to keep myself upright. The whole forest seemed to be leaning. Something was near, I could feel it the way you feel weather changing, and my wolf was already turned toward the dark treeline like it knew exactly where it was going.

I took a step that way.

A branch snapped. Too heavy for a rabbit, too even for a spooked deer.

I stopped moving. Some old animal part of me screamed run, and underneath it, quieter and a lot more stupid, something told me to stand still instead.

A man stepped out between the trees. Tall, blood soaked dark into most of his shirt, more of it than one person should be able to lose and stand upright. He stopped at the edge of the clearing where I could finally see him properly, the hard line of his jaw, a scar through one eyebrow, eyes pale enough to pick up what little moon came through the leaves.

He didn't smile at me. He didn't come any closer either.

"You shouldn't be out here." Rough voice, like he hadn't used it in days.

I was shaking now and it had nothing to do with the cold. "Neither should you."

Something moved through his expression and was gone before I could read what it was. He took a step backward instead of forward, which I noticed, because it clearly cost him something to do it.

"Go home." A pause. "I'm not safe."

My wolf didn't care what he said. She kept straining toward him, the heat in me climbing every second he stood there not leaving, and I knew, without being able to explain how, exactly why the moon had picked tonight of all nights to do this to me.

I still didn't know his name.

I didn't move to leave either.