Chapter 3

Point of view: Wren

“You are not Ivy Thorne,” Kade said, closing the study door behind me with a quiet click that somehow sounded louder than a slammed one. “So you can stop pretending, starting now.”

My whole body went cold. I had rehearsed a dozen versions of this moment on the ride here, imagined slipping up in front of a servant, a guard, even his father, but somehow I had never once let myself imagine it would be him, this fast, alone, with nowhere to run and no one to blame but myself.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, and even I could hear how thin the lie sounded.

“Ronan pulled the official portrait my father commissioned during the treaty talks two years ago. Ivy Thorne has a birthmark under her left eye. You don’t.” He crossed the room slowly, the way you approach something you are not sure will bolt. “I gave you the whole dinner to correct it yourself. You didn’t. So I’m asking you directly. Who are you?”

There was no version of this where lying again would help me. I felt the truth rise up my throat like something physical, and for one wild second I thought about jumping through the window behind me and running for the border, consequences be damned.

“Wren,” I said instead. “My name is Wren Thorne. Ivy is my sister.”

Something moved behind his eyes, quick and sharp, gone before I could name it. “Your sister.”

“She ran the night before we left. There was someone else, someone our father would never approve of, and she chose him over the treaty.” My hands had started shaking and I hated that he could probably see it. “My father panicked. He said Thorne blood was all the treaty required, so he sent me instead, and I didn’t have a choice, and I know that isn’t an excuse, but it’s the truth.”

“You lied to an Alpha,” he said, “under a blood moon oath. Do you understand what that means under our law?”

I did. I had grown up on stories about broken oaths the way other children grew up on fairy tales, except ours never ended well. “It means you have every right to send me home in chains and let the war start again,” I said. “So go ahead. I won’t fight you on it.”

He did not move for a long moment, studying me with an expression I could not read, somewhere between anger and something that looked, impossibly, like curiosity. “You would rather be punished than lie your way out of it.”

“I’m done lying tonight,” I said. “It hasn’t worked out well for me so far.”

A short, humorless breath left him, almost a laugh, gone before it finished forming. He walked to the window, looking out at the last red edge of the blood moon sinking behind the tree line, and when he spoke again his voice had dropped, quieter, like he was thinking out loud rather than speaking to me.

“If I expose you tonight, the treaty is void. My father declares war within the week, and half my pack dies fighting a fight none of them chose, over a lie your father told, not you.” He turned back around. “If I don’t expose you, I’m the one lying now. To my father. To my pack. To every wolf who watched us swear that oath believing it was real.”

“I’m not asking you to protect me,” I said, even though some cowardly, hopeful part of me clearly was.

“I know,” he said. “That’s the only reason I’m considering it.”

I did not understand, not yet, what he had felt in that courtyard when our eyes first met, the word that had landed in his chest like a stone dropped into still water. I only knew that something had shifted between us the second our hands touched during the ceremony, something I had spent the whole dinner trying to convince myself was nerves, or grief, or the strange dizzy fear of being somewhere I was never supposed to be.

“Why would you protect a stranger’s lie,” I asked quietly, “when exposing it would be so much easier?”

He was quiet long enough that I thought he would not answer at all.

“Because when you stepped off that wagon,” he said finally, “something in me reacted like it had been waiting for you specifically, and not for the woman my father chose. I have spent my whole life being told that instinct is a weakness, that the mate pull is a story wolves tell themselves to excuse bad decisions. I don’t know what to do with the fact that it happened anyway. And I definitely don’t know what to do with the fact that it happened for you, and not for the sister I was promised.”

The room went very still. Somewhere outside, the last of the blood moon light faded from red back toward silver, and I understood, with a kind of dread that felt shockingly close to hope, that whatever had just been said between us could not be unsaid.

“That doesn’t change what I did,” I said.

“No,” he agreed. “It doesn’t. But it changes what I’m willing to do about it.”

He crossed the room again, close enough now that I had to tilt my head back to hold his gaze, close enough that I could feel the same charged pull from the courtyard humming quietly between us, patient, undeniable, entirely unwelcome.

“You have until the wedding to prove to me you’re not a liability to this treaty,” he said. “Ronan already suspects something. My father must never know. If either of them finds out before I decide what to do with this, I will not be able to protect you. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” I whispered.

He studied me a moment longer, something unreadable moving behind his eyes, and then he stepped back, putting careful distance between us like a man testing whether he could still trust his own hands.

“Good,” he said. “Because Wren Thorne, there is something else you need to know before you sleep in my pack’s territory one more night, something about your own mother that even you might not know yet.”