Chapter 3

Before he stood up, Cain pulled off his coat and laid it over the dead Gamma, gentle and reverent.

I drifted along behind him in a daze, following his broad back back into the heavy quiet of the Bureau.

The trackers he'd sent out to the neighboring packs were filtering back in, one by one. Nothing. The scent trail was dead.

The Beta Garrett had sent to the eastern cottage hadn't found me either.

Garrett's patience finally snapped. He strode to the desk, snatched up the ring my father Marcus had left behind, the ring that marked the Alpha, and slammed it down in front of Cain.

"Iris hasn't been heard from. Three days, and you, her own brother, don't care." Garrett's voice shook with disgust. "Marcus passed the Alpha title to you on his deathbed. He didn't do it so you could play handmaid to Selene at her ceremony."

Cain reared up like a struck animal. "I don't have time for Iris's lunacy right now. Selene's ceremony tonight is the most important thing happening in Sterling territory, and that's the end of it!"

Hearing him say that, somehow my dried-up ghost of a soul found a few more tears to drop.

His phone rang on the desk. It was another healer, calling in a panic. Why hadn't Iris handed over the procedure notes the ceremony needed?

Cain's eye twitched. He grabbed the phone and hurled it at the wall. Then he turned to the guard by the door, face like winter.

"Go tell Iris. If she so much as misses tonight, I'll take a silver blade to that old scar on her neck, the one she got blocking a rogue for me, and I'll cut it twice as deep myself. And then she's out. For good."

I heard him.

My soul went still as stone.

I looked down, numb, at the side of my own neck, at the place that scar used to be. The rogues had carved it off me, skin and all. There was nothing left to cut.

Before the guard could leave, Selene burst into the hall, sobbing, beautiful in her distress. She had one hand clamped over her neck. Blood was leaking through her fingers.

"Cain. Half an hour ago, on the middle trail through the territory, I ran into Iris…" She sobbed, pulling her hand back to show him the angry, ragged scratch along the side of her neck. "She came at me like she'd lost her mind. She tore my ceremonial robe, ruined the hem, and she clawed me. She was laughing, Cain. She said no one was going to take her place tonight."

The second Cain saw the blood, his eyes flooded red.

He didn't think. He just gave the order.

"Get a team. Bring Iris in."

He wasn't thinking at all. Just rage.

I watched his bloodshot eyes, weakly. He was sending men to arrest me.

I was already dead.

He couldn't be bothered to walk to my cottage and check on me himself. But the second someone else cried in front of him, he'd put me away without a second thought.

Right then, for the first time, I thought: maybe being torn apart wasn't the worst thing. At least I didn't have to stand here, like some pitiful clown, watching him pick her over me anymore.

Garrett hadn't lost his head.

He stepped closer, expression hard, and studied the scratch. The line of the wound curved, front to back, in an odd arc.

Anyone who knew anything knew a healer's claws, in a half-shift, ran straight. They didn't curve like that.

Selene had done that to herself. Reached back and dug it in with her own hand.

Garrett was about to call her out when one of the guards searching the forest came running in.

"Alpha. We tracked the scent from the body in the woods, and we found Iris's phone."

Cain went white. "What?"