Chapter 1

By the fifth year of my marriage to Damon, I finally understood—some men are not worth spending a lifetime trying to prove yourself to.

He missed our daughter’s awakening ceremony, gave away her inheritance to someone else, and tore my Luna cloak from my shoulders in front of the entire pack for another woman.

Everyone laughed at me, calling me a failed Luna.

Until the day I left the border pack with my daughter and returned to Wolf King City.

The bloodline I had buried for years awakened. I reclaimed everything that had always belonged to me—my royal legacy, my power, and my own destiny.

And the man who once let me walk away would finally realize…

What he lost was never just his wife.

It was the true heir of the Northern Wolf Clan.

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The training ground goes quiet the second Wren steps into the circle, and I feel that silence in my chest before I hear it, a held breath passed from wolf to wolf until it reaches me.

"You've got this," I whisper, tugging her braid straight one last time. She nods, small and solemn, her eyes darting past me toward the pack elders, then toward the gates. Still open. Still empty.

I scan the crowd again. No Damon.

He was always pulling stunts like this and ignoring his family, neglecting his child but he doesn’t miss the chance to show off when it comes to Seraphine.

The moon hangs low and full over the Obsidian ring, and around us the pack presses in, mothers, fathers, grandmothers who awakened their own wolves decades ago, all here for their cubs, every single one of them. I count the fathers standing at the circle's edge, hands on shoulders, murmuring encouragement. I don't see mine, Wren's, I mean. I don't see Damon.

The elder calls her name. Wren steps forward alone.

She kneels at the sacred stone the way I taught her, palms flat, breath steady, and I watch her reach for the wolf inside her the way I did at six years old, the way every Voss and every Kade before her did. The stone stays dark under her hands.

Nothing.

She tries again. The pack starts to murmur, and I know that sound too, I've heard it aimed at me before, back when I was the princess who chose love over a crown. It sharpens now, aimed at my daughter.

"A useless Alpha gave birth to a useless cub."

Someone laughs. Not loud. Just enough.

Wren's shoulders curl in on themselves, and she looks up at me with her father's eyes and asks the question I don't have an answer for.

"Mom, why didn't Father come?"

Something in my chest cracks clean down the middle, and it's the first time I feel it—not the slow ache I've carried through five years of his absence at my side, but a sharp, sudden break, right through the center. I kneel and pull her into me, right there in front of the whole pack, and I don't care who watches.

"He's coming," I say, and I hate that I still believe it enough to promise her.

He comes twenty minutes later.

He walks through the gates like he owns the moonlight, Callan's hand tucked in his, our son trailing a step behind with a grin he inherited from nobody I know. The pack parts for him. Nobody laughs now.

"Sorry we're late," Damon says, not even looking at Wren first. He looks at the stone.

"The ceremony's over," I tell him, and I keep my voice even, the way I've trained myself to for five years. "She didn't awaken."

Something flickers across his face, not guilt, I realize. Disappointment. Like she's failed him instead of the other way around.

Then he reaches into his coat and pulls out the sacred stone. Wren's stone. The one that's been in his family for six generations, the one he swore on our bonding night would pass to our first daughter.

He hands it to Callan.

"Try it," he says.

Callan kneels, presses his palms flat, and the stone lights gold beneath his hands before he's even finished breathing in. The pack erupts—cheering, howling, stamping the ground—and somewhere in the noise, I hear Damon laugh, low and proud, a sound I haven't heard directed at me in years.

"He's more talented."