Chapter 2

Asher’s POV

“Drive,” I said.

“Alpha.”

“Drive, Micah.”

The black SUV pulled away from Silver Lake in a spray of gravel. Behind us the bonfire shrank to a small orange smudge. I kept my eyes on the road. I did not look at the mirror. If I looked in the mirror, I would see her kneeling on the shore with her hand pressed flat to her chest, and I would open the door and jump out at sixty miles an hour.

My wolf was already trying to make me.

Go back, Ari snarled. His voice shook the inside of my skull. Go back. Mate. MATE.

I pressed my palm to my ribs. Pain rolled through my chest, hot and wet and wrong, and it had nothing to do with the old wound on my left side. It was worse. It was the sound of a rope tearing in two.

“You’re bleeding,” Micah said.

“I’m fine.”

“Sir. You’re bleeding on the seat.”

I looked down. The white cuff of my shirt had gone red. The silver wound had split open again under my coat. It did that when I was angry. It did it now, when I had done the single worst thing of my life in front of two hundred people.

Micah Hale pulled into a gas station and killed the engine. He’s my Beta, and he has been my best friend since we were seven years old, when he pushed me out of a tree and then cried harder than I did. He’s broad and quiet and calm, with a face like a good dog’s. Right now, that face looked as if it wanted to punch me.

“Say it,” I said.

“You rejected your mate.”

“Yes.”

“In public.”

“Yes.”

“The only mate your wolf has ever wanted.”

“Micah.”

“Six years, Asher. Six years you told me there was nobody. You told me you’d stopped waiting.” He gripped the wheel. “Then you walked up to that girl, and I watched you go pale. I’ve seen you take a knife to the ribs with less face than that. And you looked her in the eye and said it. Why?”

I closed my eyes.

The answer was ugly. It had been ugly in my head for the whole hour of the drive up the mountain.

“The council,” I said.

“What about them?”

“Vane’s law. Section nine. Any Luna of Ironwood must hold a wolf, a rank and a fight. If she doesn’t, any council member can call a challenge.” My voice was flat. “They’d force her into the ring, Micah. An unshifted girl against a trained female. It would take ninety seconds.”

Micah went very still.

“He’d do that.”

“He’d smile while he did it. Reuben Vane has been trying to put his own daughter beside me since the day my father got sick. If I’d taken Noa Bennett as my mate tonight, she’d be dead by the next full moon. And I would have had to watch.”

“So you made her nothing.”

“So I made her nobody’s problem.”

“You made her a joke in front of the whole valley.”

The words hit like a fist. I let them.

“A joke can walk away,” I said. “A Luna can’t.”

Micah stared at me. His anger slid slowly into grief. He knew the rest. I hadn’t said it, but he knew. He was one of four people alive who knew what was under my coat.

“And the other reason?” he asked, softly.

I didn’t answer.

He looked at my ribs. At the dark spreading on my sleeve. At the silver poison working its way toward my heart, an inch a month, and the healers who’d told me that if I was lucky I had one year.

“Say it, Asher.”

“I don’t take a mate into a widow’s grave.”

Micah closed his eyes.

“That’s not your call,” he whispered.

“It’s the only call I have.”

For a long time, neither of us spoke. The station’s yellow light buzzed. A moth beat itself against the glass. I sat there with my hand on my ribs and let the pain come, and I thought about the way she’d looked at me.

She had lifted her chin.

That was the part I couldn’t stop seeing. Two hundred wolves staring. Her own family laughing. And Noa Bennett, shaking, with her round face and her wide brown eyes and flour still on the hem of her dress, had tipped her head back and said, Say it. Just say it.

Nobody had ever looked at me like that. Not with hatred. Not with fear. With courage. Like she’d decided that if the world was going to break her, it would have to do it to her face.

And she’d smelled like bread. Warm bread and cinnamon and a deep golden sweetness. For the first time in three years, the moment I caught her scent, the pain in my side had gone quiet. Just for one breath.

I’d thought I imagined it.

“Micah.”

“Yes.”

“Send someone back to watch her.”

“Sir?”

“Not to touch. Not to speak. Just to watch.” My throat was rough. “If anyone in that pack lays a hand on her, I want to know before they finish the thought.”

“You just rejected her.”

“I know what I did.”

“And now you’re posting a guard.”

“Yes.”

Micah let out a slow breath. Then, unbelievably, he almost smiled. “You’re an idiot.”

“I’ve been told.”

“You’ll be sorry.”

“I already am.”

He turned the key. The engine growled back to life.

My phone buzzed. I glanced down. The screen glowed with a name I didn’t want to see.

Councilor Vane. Well done, Alpha. Reports say you rejected the girl in front of the whole valley. I’m proud. Come home. Leah will be waiting for you at the pack house.

My stomach turned over. He’d known. Of course he had. He’d known before I did.

“Vane’s daughter,” Micah said, reading over my shoulder.

“Don’t.”

“They’re already sending her.”

“I said don’t.”

I threw the phone onto the dashboard. It slid, spun, and bounced off the glass.

Ari had been silent for a full minute. That should have warned me. My wolf was never silent. He raged, he sulked, he tore at my thoughts like a dog at a rug. But now, in the deep, quiet dark behind my eyes, I felt him lift his head.

Asher, he said.

“What?”

Look at the sky.

I looked.

Through the windshield, above the black shoulder of the mountain, the moon had risen. It had been pale white when we left the lake. It wasn’t white now. It was gold. A slow, shining, honey-colored gold, like a lamp turned up in a dark room, and it poured light over every peak and pine in the valley.

Micah swore under his breath and braked.

Far behind us, echoing off the mountains, a howl rose from Silver Lake. It was young and raw and shaking, and it rolled up the slopes and across the water and over our heads like a wave. It was the howl of a wolf that had just been born.

Every hair on my neck stood up.

“That’s not possible,” Micah whispered. “She had no wolf.”

“I know.”

“Asher. What is she?”

I stared at the gold moon. Deep in my head, Ari spoke, soft as a prayer, a single word I’d only ever heard in my grandfather’s oldest stories.

Hearth.