Chapter 1

Point of view: Wren

“You will marry the Ashborn Alpha before the next blood moon, or this pack burns,” my father said, and for the first time in my life, he actually looked at me.

I stood at the back of the pack hall, where Omegas always stood, close enough to hear everything and far enough that no one expected me to speak. My father, Alpha Damian Thorne, was not talking to me. He was talking to Ivy, my sister, the one whose name had been written into the treaty since she was six years old. I only understood, later, that the way he looked at me in that moment was not an accident. It was the first crack in a plan he had not told anyone about yet.

The hall smelled like old wood smoke and older fear. Every wolf in that room had grown up on stories about the Blood Moon War, the one that had taken half our pack and left the other half small enough to be swallowed whole by the Ashborns if the peace ever broke. My father was not a cruel man. He was a frightened one, and frightened men make promises with other people’s lives.

“The wagon leaves at dawn,” he said. “Ivy, you will be dressed and ready.”

Ivy did not answer. I noticed that before anyone else did, the way I noticed most things nobody else bothered to look at. Her hands were folded too carefully in front of her, the way you hold your hands when you are trying not to let them shake.

That night, I could not sleep. I told myself it was worry for my sister, being handed over like a peace offering to a man none of us had ever met. I did not let myself admit, not yet, that some small ugly part of me was also grieving my own invisibility, the fact that even in a decision that would decide the fate of our entire pack, no one had once considered that it might be me.

I went looking for Ivy an hour before dawn, meaning to help her dress, to say something that might make this easier for both of us. Her room was empty. The window was open. On the bed was a single folded note, and my name was not on it, because of course it was not.

I read it anyway.

She had gone. Run, in the middle of the night, to a wolf from a border pack she had loved in secret for over a year, someone our father would never in a hundred lifetimes have approved of. The note begged forgiveness. It did not offer a solution.

I should have woken my father immediately. Instead I stood there holding that note until my hands went cold, doing the math every Omega learns to do without meaning to: what this would cost. War. My little brother Cody, only twelve, learning what it meant to lose a pack the way our parents’ generation had. Every face in that hall last night, waiting to burn.

When I finally brought the note to my father, I watched something break behind his eyes, and then, worse, I watched something rebuild itself in its place.

“Wren,” he said, and it was strange hearing my own name in his mouth after so many years of silence, “get dressed. You are leaving within the hour.”

“Father, I am not”

“You are her sister,” he said, cutting me off the way he always did when a decision had already been made without me. “You are Thorne blood. That is all the treaty requires. No one on Ashborn land has ever met either of you.”

I wanted to scream that this was not a solution, that it was theft, that I was not a spare piece to slot into my sister’s place like we were interchangeable. But I looked past him at the hall doors, thinking of every wolf sleeping behind them, trusting a peace they did not know was already breaking, and I understood that my father was not really asking.

Briar found me an hour later, shoving what few things I owned into a traveling bag with hands that would not stop moving. My best friend since we were children, human, and the only person in this pack who had ever treated me like I mattered before today.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said.

“Yes I do.”

“Wren.” She grabbed my wrist, forcing me to stop. “You are about to walk into enemy territory wearing your sister’s name. If they find out you lied to an Alpha before the wedding is even finished, that’s not embarrassment. That’s a reason for war all over again.”

“Then I won’t get found out,” I said, with far more certainty than I felt.

The ride to the border took most of the day, and I spent it memorizing everything I could about a life that had never been mine, Ivy’s favorite color, the way she laughed, small details my father rattled off from the front seat like a man cramming for an exam he could not afford to fail. Cody rode with me for the first hour, silent, gripping my sleeve the way he used to when he was small enough to be scared of thunder.

“You’re coming back,” he said. It was not a question.

I told him yes. I did not know yet if it was a lie.

By the time we reached the border markers, the sun was low and orange, and the trees on the other side stood taller and darker than anything on Thorne land, like the whole territory had been built to remind visitors exactly how small they were. Four Ashborn wolves waited there in human form, arms crossed, expressions carved from stone. One of them, a broad shouldered man with pale eyes and a scar along his jaw, stepped forward as our wagon slowed.

“You’re later than expected,” he said, gaze sweeping over me in a way that made my skin prickle, cataloguing, assessing, deciding.

“My apologies,” my father said quickly. “This is my daughter, Ivy.”

The man’s eyes stayed on me a moment too long before he finally nodded and turned toward the gates.

“The Alpha is waiting,” he said. “Pray he does not smell the lie on you the moment you step inside.”