THE BLOOD MOON AND THE BETRAYAL

CHAPTER 1: THE BLOOD RED MOON AND THE BETRAYAL

The moon turned red at 6:47 p.m.

Vivienne Hale would remember the exact minute for the rest of her life, which, as it turned out, would not be very long.

She had been standing at the kitchen window of the pack house, rinsing Mina’s little cup, when the silver light drained out of the sky like blood from an open vein. In its place came a color she had no name for. It was deep and wet and crimson, spreading across the heavens until every pine in the Silverbrook Pack looked dipped in red.

Then the howling began.

Vivienne didn't just hear the sound of one wolf howling; she heard the sound of several wolves howling together, a sound of pure horror.

Her own wolf, which had never once raised its head, suddenly lurched awake and screamed: Run.

The cup slipped from her fingers and shattered on the tile.

“Mama?”

Mina stood in the kitchen doorway in her yellow pajamas, clutching the worn stuffed rabbit she never slept without. Mina was five years old, with her father’s dark eyes and Vivienne’s stubborn little chin. Her small face was white with fear.

Vivienne crossed the floor in two strides and swept her into her arms. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you, baby. Hold on to me.”

Confused and curious about what was going on, Vivienne glanced through the window, and that was when she saw it. Above the mountains, the sky tore.

A black seam seemed to split the red moon down the middle, wide as a river, and pouring out of it were things that Vivienne had never seen before. Things that she couldn't describe.

They were long-limbed, glistening, and wrong. They did not howl like her kind. They screeched, and the sound made Vivienne’s teeth ache.

The pack house erupted into chaos. Doors slammed. Wolves in half-shifted skin tore down the corridors, mothers dragged children by the wrist, and somewhere a window exploded inward. Vivienne ran with her daughter pressed against her chest, down the east hall, past the portraits of Silverbrook’s Alphas, toward the one place she had been told, years ago, would be safe.

The cellar stairs.

Alpha Dorian Silverbrook had built the shelter beneath the pack house three years earlier when the pack had been attacked by a rival pack, causing more than half of the Silverbrook warriors to be slaughtered. Dorian had been so afraid of losing Celeste, his first love, and had built that vault three months after the attack.

It was a vault of reinforced steel and stone. For emergencies, he’d said. Vivienne had never seen the inside. Omegas were not given the codes.

But she was his mate. His wife. And the mother of his beautiful daughter. Surely, tonight, that meant something.

She took the stairs two at a time, her bare feet slapping against the stone as she fled. At the bottom, the great steel door stood half-closed, spilling yellow light into the dark.

Dorian stood in the gap.

Tall, broad-shouldered, his black hair tousled from the run, golden Alpha power rolling off him in waves. Behind him she could see the Beta, a dozen of his strongest warriors, and a handful of others she recognized: the elders’ favorites, the high-ranking families.

And Celeste.

Her cousin stood just inside, one hand resting on the soft swell of her belly, the other curled around Dorian’s arm as though it belonged there. Her eyes met Vivienne’s across the threshold, and she did not look afraid. She looked triumphant.

Vivienne tried getting into the vault, but Dorian stood like a wall of defense, pushing her back and making her stagger, Mina still clinging to her shoulders.

“Dorian.” Vivienne’s voice cracked. She was gasping, soaked in sweat, Mina trembling against her shoulder. “Dorian, they’re coming. Please, let us in.”

He looked at her. Then he looked at the child in her arms. Something cold moved behind his eyes, and in that moment she understood that the decision had been made long before tonight.

“There’s no room,” he said.

“What?” She laughed, a thin, broken sound. “There’s space. I can see there’s space in there, big enough to—”

“There’s room for the ones who matter.”

The words landed like a blow to the stomach.

“Then take Mina.” She was already moving, already pushing her daughter toward him with shaking hands. “Take her. And save her. I’ll stay out here, I’ll fight, I don’t care what happens to me, but she’s your daughter, Dorian, she’s your blood, please—”

“My blood?” His lip curled. “She’s a girl. An Omega’s whelp, with no Alpha strength in her and none ever coming. She can’t inherit the pack. She can’t carry the line.” His gaze slid over Mina with the indifference of a man looking at a broken tool. “She is useless to me.”

Mina’s small fingers tightened in Vivienne’s hair.

“Daddy?” she whispered.

He did not look at her again.

Celeste leaned into his shoulder and smiled, soft and sweet and poisonous. “Don’t be angry with him, cousin. He has to think of the heir.” She stroked her stomach in slow circles. “The doctor confirmed it last week. It’s a boy. Exactly what this pack needs.”

Vivienne stopped breathing. As she stood watching them, the memories of his late nights, his cold shoulder, and the times Dorian had turned away when she reached for him flooded back. It was all because of Celeste.

Her mate and her cousin had betrayed her. This was the same girl Vivienne had taken in when Celeste’s parents died, fed at her own table, and given her own clothes to wear.

“Seven years, Dorian,” Vivienne whispered. “After seven years of standing by you, this is what I get?”

Dorian scoffed. “Spare me the sermon. I don't need you anymore.”

Vivienne took a shallow breath as the memories came rushing back.

She had been nineteen when she found out Dorian was her mate. And shortly after that, Dorian’s father died. Vivienne was a nobody Omega on the edge of the pack, and Dorian had been a twenty-three-year-old boy wearing a dead man’s crown. His uncle Marcus had vowed that Dorian would never inherit the pack. He had challenged Dorian to a fight, and that challenge had ended in a silver blade buried deep in Dorian’s side. The healers had shaken their heads and walked away.

Vivienne had not walked away.

She had sat beside him for three days and three nights, drawing the poison out with her mother’s herbs and her own bare hands, until her fingers blistered and bled. She had spooned broth between his cracked lips when he was too weak to swallow. When fever made him weep for his father, she was the one who held him.

“You said you would always protect me,” she said, and her voice broke apart. “You promised me your everlasting love. Dorian, I bled for you.”

For an instant, something flickered across his face. Then it was gone, smothered under the gold of his Alpha’s authority.

“You were useful once,” he said. “Now you're not. So step aside, Vivienne.”

The Alpha command hit her like a wall. Her knees buckled. Her limbs obeyed him against every ounce of her will, dragging her backward from the doorway while she clawed at nothing and screamed his name.

“Dorian! Dorian! Please, save her, save our baby, please—”

The door swung shut.

The bolts slid home, one after another, a sound like coffin nails.

Vivienne hurled herself against the steel, hammering it with both fists until her knuckles split. “Open it! Open the door!” Mina was sobbing against her neck, small and hot and terrified. Behind the metal, she heard Celeste laugh with triumph.

Then the ceiling above them cracked.

Plaster rained down. Something heavy landed in the corridor at the top of the stairs, and the whole cellar filled with the wet, rattling sound of breathing that was not human.

Vivienne turned and curled her body around her daughter, pressing Mina’s face into her shoulder so that she would not see.

“Close your eyes, baby,” she whispered. “Close your eyes. Mama’s right here with you.”

The first claw went through her back.

She did not scream. She had no breath for it. The pain was white and enormous, and still she held on, folding herself tighter, a wall of flesh and bone around the one small heart she would have given her own to keep beating. She felt the second strike. The third. Warmth ran down her spine and pooled on the stone.

Mina’s hand was gripping her collar. Then, slowly, it wasn’t.

No, Vivienne thought. No, no, no—

The world dimmed at the edges. The red light from the stairwell swam and blurred, and the last thing she felt was the small, still weight of her daughter in her arms.

I trusted him, she thought. Goddess above, I trusted him. And he let us die.

If there is anything after this, I will not forget what he did to us.

Her eyes closed.

And in the silence where her heartbeat had been, a cold, bright voice spoke from nowhere.

[Host vitals terminated and hidden bloodline detected with maximum grievance intensity; would the host like to rewind?]

Vivienne Hale, dead in the dark with her child in her arms, did not hesitate.

Yes.