Chapter One: The Culling

The silver rope bit into Elara's wrists like a snake that had forgotten how to let go.

She did not struggle. Struggle meant the rope tightened. Struggle meant the guards noticed she was still alive. And being noticed, in the Shadowfang Pack, was the first step toward being hurt again.

So she knelt. Naked except for the frost that painted her skin blue. The mud of the Culling Square soaked into her knees, colder than any grave she had ever imagined digging for herself.

Alpha Derrick stood on the platform above her, his fur cloak heavy with the scent of cedar and blood. Her uncle. Her mother's brother. The man who had fed her father to rogue wolves when Elara was six.

"Elara of no rank," he announced, and the crowd of two hundred wolves fell silent. "For the crime of being blood-ranked Omega—Null—worthless—this Pack casts you out."

No one spoke in her defense. Why would they? She had spent five years sleeping in the kennels, eating the scraps that the actual Omegas refused, and serving as a practice target for pups learning to fight. Her back, even now, wept serum from wounds inflicted three days ago. A twelve-year-old boy had wanted to test his claws. She had let him. It was easier than being beaten for refusing.

Derrick descended the steps. His hand closed around her brand—the Ω-NULL seared into her lower back when she was seventeen. The mark glowed faintly, a curse that pulsed with her heartbeat.

"Strip her further," he said. "Let the moon see what it rejected."

There was nothing left to strip. But the guards cut the thin shift anyway, just to watch her flinch. She did not flinch. That, at least, she had learned: never show them the pain. They feed on it.

A child in the crowd—a girl of perhaps eight—tugged her mother's sleeve. "Mama, why is her blood black?"

The mother hushed her sharply. But the word rippled through the pack like a thrown stone. Black blood. Null blood. Curse blood.

Elara looked down at her own forearm. A cut from the rope had welled dark, almost purple. Not red. Never red. The healer who had tested her at seventeen had screamed and dropped the vial. Black blood meant no wolf. No wolf meant no mate. No mate meant no protection, no future, no reason to exist.

Derrick crouched before her. His breath smelled of the wine he drank while his wolves starved. "You could have been beautiful," he said quietly, for her ears only. "Like your mother. Before I killed her."

Her mother had died of a fever. That was the official story. But Elara had seen the bruises on her mother's throat the night before. She had been six. She had not forgotten.

She opened her mouth. No sound came out. Her vocal cords had been damaged two winters ago, when a guard held her head underwater for laughing too loudly. She could whisper now, sometimes, on good days. But not scream. Never scream.

Derrick smiled. "Say something, niece. Beg."

She closed her mouth. And said nothing.

His smile vanished. He backhanded her across the face. Her head snapped sideways. Blood—black, useless blood—dripped onto the snow.

"Walk," he ordered. "The border is three miles. If you run, we hunt. If you crawl, we let the crows have you."

They cut the ropes. Elara rose. Her knees screamed. Her ribs—three cracked, from last week's "training session" with the twelve-year-old—ground against each other with a sound only she could hear.

She walked.

The first mile, the crowd followed, throwing snow and laughing. The second mile, only the guards remained, bored now. The third mile, she was alone.

The forest was silent. Not the peaceful silence of snowfall. The hungry silence of predators watching. She felt eyes on her back. Wolves, probably. Shadowfang scouts making sure she didn't double back.

By the time she reached the border marker—a dead oak split by lightning—she could no longer feel her feet. Frostbite had claimed her toes. Her lips were cracked and bleeding. Her vision swam with white spots.

She fell.

Not dramatically. Not with a final sigh. She simply stopped being upright and became horizontal in the snow, facing a hollow log. The log was rotten, soft, warm with decay. She crawled inside.

This is where I die, she thought. In a worm-eaten log, three miles from people who will celebrate my death with wine.

She closed her eyes.

And then she smelled it. Rain on hot stone. Pine smoke. And underneath, something else: blood that remembered how to be red.

She did not see the eyes open in the dark behind her. She did not feel the enormous black wolf step out of the shadows, shake the snow from its fur, and lower its great head to sniff her matted hair.

But she felt the warmth.

For the first time in five years, Elara was warm. And as unconsciousness took her, she heard a voice—not with her ears, but with that hollow place where her wolf should have been—growl three words:

"Not yet, little one."