CHAPTER 1

Ivy's POV

The wolves are watching me unpack.

Not literally, but the two Pack sentries stationed outside my bedroom door haven't moved in forty minutes, and every time I cross near the window I catch the shift of their shoulders and the slight turn of their heads.  

I hang the last of my clothes in the carved wooden wardrobe and try to look like a woman who isn't counting exits.

Ashveil is nothing like home. Home is underground in neon and concrete and the permanent smell of generator fuel and ambition. This place is timber and firelight and mountain air so clean it almost hurts to breathe. My bedroom alone is bigger than the entire floor I shared with two other girls back in the Syndicate compound. 

Stone walls. A window that looks out onto a forest that goes on forever.

It's beautiful but I hate it. 

I hate it because beautiful things in my experience always come with a price tag I find out about too late, and I hate it because I've been here less than six hours and I can already feel it; something about this place pulling at something in me I don't have a name for.

I close the wardrobe and sit on the edge of the bed.

One year. My father's voice echoed in my head, smooth and certain the way it always is when he's already decided. One year, Ivy. Then you come home. Like home is a thing I'm being lent out from and not a place I was managed in. Like I have a choice about either.

A knock at the door. Actual knocking this time, which already makes it different from Rook.

"Come in."

The girl who enters is around my age, dark-haired, with the kind of face that smiles before the rest of her has decided to. She's carrying a tray with tea, bread and something else that smells like honey. She kicks the door shut behind her with her heel like we're already friends.

"I'm Maren," she says, setting the tray on the side table, "Pack healer. I also volunteered to be your official welcome committee because everyone else was too intimidated and I thought that was embarrassing for us as a Pack, " She tilts her head, "You're smaller than I expected."

"People say that."

"Is it annoying?"

"Extremely."

She laughs, bright and unguarded, and something in my chest loosens, slightly, in a way I immediately don't trust. I don't make friends easily. I don't make friends at all, if I'm honest. Friends are people who can be used against you.

"Eat something," Maren says, nodding at the tray. "The Alpha's welcome dinner is in two hours and you'll want something in your stomach before you sit across a table from Soren Dusk on an empty one."

I reach for the bread. "Is he that bad?"

"He's not bad. He's just…" she pause, "a lot. He has this way of looking at you like he's already read the last page of you and found it unsatisfying," She pauses again, "You'll be fine though. You have the face."

"What face?"

"The one that looks like nothing bothers you," She says it without any cruelty, just observation, "It's a good face to have in this territory."

I eat the bread and don't tell her how long it took me to build that face, or what it cost.

***

The dinner is in the great hall, long table, firelight, and I walk in beside Maren and feel twenty sets of eyes land on me at once.

I keep my chin level and find my seat.

Alpha Soren sits at the head of the table, exactly as cold as advertised. He nods at me once when I sit, the greeting of a man who has fulfilled his social obligation and considers the matter closed. Around him, senior Pack members whose names I won't remember until I've heard them three times. Conversation I'm not included in. 

I'm fine with all of it. I know how to sit in a room where I'm not wanted. I've been doing it my whole life.

What I'm not fine with is the chair directly across from mine being empty for the first twenty minutes of dinner, and then suddenly not being empty; and the man who fills it looking up and catching my eyes before either of us is ready for it.

I know his face. I saw it at the border gate this morning, lit by a lantern, when our convoy rolled in and he went so still it stopped me mid-breath. I'd asked Rook who he was and Rook had taken just a half-second too long to answer.

Caelum Dusk. The Alpha's brother.

"Sorry," he says, to me specifically, like the empty chair was a slight he owes me for, "I got held up at the eastern boundary."

"It's fine," I say.

"Did Maren feed you before this?"

I blink, "Yes."

"Good." He reaches for the bread like that's a normal thing to open with, like he didn't just sit down across from a Syndicate stranger at a politically loaded dinner table and lead with whether she'd eaten. "She does that. It's her version of making sure you survive the first night."

Something about the easiness of him throws me. I'm good at reading rooms, at reading people, it's the skill my father prizes most in me and I cannot get a read on Caelum Dusk. He's not performing warmth and he's not concealing anything as far as I can tell, which in my experience means I'm missing something.

Nobody is just warm. There's always something underneath.

I'm still trying to find it when Rook appears in the doorway of the hall.

He wasn't invited to dinner. I know because I saw the seating arrangement and his name wasn't on it. He's standing at the edge of the room with a glass he isn't drinking from, and his eyes are moving between me and the man sitting across from me with an expression I have never once seen on his face in eight years.

I know every version of Rook's face. Focused. Cold. Dangerous. Bored. Patient.

This isn't any of them.

Caelum follows my gaze across the table, looks at Rook, and something shifts; barely, a fraction in his jaw.

He looks back at me.

"How are you finding Ashveil so far?" he asks, like nothing just happened.

And I almost answer him. I almost say it's beautiful or it's fine or something composed and safe.

Instead, from somewhere outside and beyond the hall, deep in the dark tree line of the mountain territory, low and resonant and pulling at something animal and inexplicable in the base of my spine, a howl rises.

Then another.

Then the whole Pack at the table goes quiet in a way that doesn't feel like fear.

It feels like a call.

And every hair on my body stands up.