LOGINShe was meant to be a sacrifice to save her family. He was a resurrected monster who used her body to quiet his dark curse. When Lyra ventures into the forbidden mountain forest, she expects to harvest medicinal herbs—not to be hunted by a beast risen from the dead. Reborn Alpha King Valerius is burning alive from an ancient fever, out of his mind with dark magic and desperate for relief. In the cold mud beneath the pines, he claims Lyra with brutal, unyielding force, pouring his feverish soul into her ears with sweet, possessive promises of stone palaces and eternal devotion. But as dawn breaks, the sweet promises evaporate into the icy mist. Valerius vanishes without a trace, leaving Lyra naked, bruised, and abandoned in the freezing dirt. Desperate to hide her shame and return to her village before the elders mark her as unclean, Lyra drags her broken body up from the slush. But as she takes her first agonizing steps down the mountain, a horrifying truth reveals itself: a thick, pitch-black line of blood trickles down her thigh, and wherever it touches the earth, the grass instantly turns to ash. His dark, cursed blood is now running through her veins, turning her into the very thing her people fear most. Trapped between a village that would burn her at the stake and an intoxicating Alpha King who used her as a cure, Lyra must navigate a world of deadly wolf politics, toxic secrets, and a bond that threatens to consume her entirely.
View More"Put that down, Lyra."Her father said it from the middle of the square, with his hands held out in front of him like a man calming a horse.It was dawn. A thin grey light lay over the cobbles, and a mist drifted off the well, and the red hands on the doors looked almost black in it. Lyra stood on the top step of the cellar stairs with the sky above her for the first time in a night and a day. The kitchen knife was in her right fist. Her left arm was hooked around her stepmother's neck, and the old woman's breath came in short, sobbing wheezes against her sleeve.Behind her, Brielle stood in the cellar doorway, white to the lips, with a bruise across her cheek the color of a ripe plum.Four of Gorath's men had been at the head of the stairs when she came up. They had seen the knife at the throat of the woman who would be their lord's mother in law, and they had stopped, uncertain, while somebody ran to fetch the master of the house. Now they ringed the stair at a careful distance. Pas
"Smell his lips, my lord."Lyra said it quietly.She stood with her back against the wall of the cellar and the small knife held low at her side, and she did not raise her voice. Across the flagstones, Brielle had stopped in the middle of her crossing, one slippered foot in front of the other, with the baby in her arms and a smile spreading over her wet face. Gorath had not moved from the foot of the stairs. His huge red hand was still held out, palm up, waiting."What did you say, widow?""The boy's mouth." Lyra did not look at her stepsister. She looked at the warlord, steadily, the way she had once looked at a hanging rope. "Put your nose to it. If I am lying, my father's men can drown me in the river with my son.""Lyra," Brielle breathed, sweetly. "Do not make a scene."Gorath's pale eyes slid from one woman to the other. He had the look of a man at a market stall who has been offered two loaves and told only one of them is poisoned."Give him here," he said.Brielle laid the bab
"You pointed at my window in front of everyone. You gave me to him."The kitchen knife shook in Brielle's hand.It was a small, ordinary knife, the kind used for peeling turnips, and she held it low and out in front of her like a girl who had never held a weapon in her life. Candle stub, cold cellar, the breath of both of them rising in thin white threads. Lyra stood on the bottom step with her chained wrists hanging in front of her and thirty armed men waiting above, and she looked at the stepsister she had not seen in nearly a year.She had changed. Brielle had been a round cheeked woman of twenty when Lyra left, with ribbons in her braids and a way of tilting her head when she wanted something. Now she was tall and pale, in a nightgown and a man's coat, with her hair hacked off at the shoulder, and her eyes were red and wide and brimming. She looked like the victim in a ballad. That was what Lyra noticed first.She had always looked like that when she wanted something."Give me my
"I asked," said Gorath, "whose child that is."He did not raise his voice. He had no need. The square had gone so quiet that Lyra could hear the creak of his saddle leather as he swung down, and the chime of the iron rings in his beard, and the slow, wet drip from a spear point where somebody's blood had not yet dried. Thirty riders sat their horses in a ring around the cart. Not one of them moved. Behind every shutter in the village, a hundred held breaths gathered like smoke."My lord," said her father.His voice cracked on the second word. He had slid down from his grey horse without being asked and stood with his cap crushed in both hands, and sweat ran in thin lines through the dust on his face. "A foundling, my lord. A babe left on the church step. My wife took pity, as women do. We meant to give him to the priest, only...""A foundling." Gorath rolled the word around his mouth like a bone. "That is a great deal of pity for a house with two daughters and a debt.""The cold, my l






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