ONE

~Calla~

"Calla," Maeve hissed from the doorway. "Get up, girl. Get up."

I couldn't. Every wolf in Crescent Hollow knew what this night was. The Blood Moon Festival came once a year, and the pack gathered in the great hall in their best clothes to watch the eighteen-year-olds shift for the first time. The Moon Goddess was supposed to show them their mates on that night. Girls who turned eighteen at the Blood Moon were meant to feel something that changed their whole lives.

I had been up since four in the morning carrying firewood. I was an Omega, so my job was to serve, and nobody in the pack expected anything else from me. I also had no wolf. Most girls shifted at sixteen. I had waited two years, and my body had never once felt like anything but a girl's body, and the pack had started calling me the empty one.

That morning, Maeve had put a small moonstone on a silver chain into my hand. "The Goddess doesn't forget her children," she told me. "Not even the quiet ones."

I had hung it around my neck and tried to believe her.

I had lived in the Alpha's house since I was six years old, when Maeve brought me there with a single bag and a story about a dead mother. I knew every squeaky floorboard in the east wing. I knew which fireplaces smoked and which doors stuck, and I knew exactly how far to stay from the Alpha when he walked down a corridor, because Omegas who got in his way found themselves very quickly doing something else. In all those years, he had never once spoken to me. I wasn't sure he knew my name.

Now the scent of pine smoke curled around me and a strange heat ran up my spine, and the entire hall went silent. I looked up.

Alpha Dorian Ashcroft had stopped in the middle of the room with a goblet in his hand. He was tall, with dark hair and golden-brown eyes, and everyone in the pack knew he was engaged to Vivienne Marlowe, the daughter of Alpha Orsen of Ironclaw. He wasn't looking at her. He was looking at me, and the goblet slipped from his fingers and hit the floor.

Thin silver threads of light rose from my arms and from his, and wound together in the air between us. Every wolf in the room saw them.

"No," Dorian said, very quietly.

My knees weren't working. I stood up anyway, wiping my wet hands on my apron, because it seemed important not to be on the floor. "Alpha?"

"No. Not you." He took a step toward me, and then another, and I saw his hands shake. "Say it isn't true."

"Dorian." Alpha Orsen Marlowe had risen from the head table, a silver-haired man in a gray coat with a smile that never changed. Vivienne stood beside him, perfectly still. "Think of your pack. Think of the winter."

Dorian closed his eyes. When he opened them, something in his face had shut like a door.

"Calla Reeve," he said, and his voice carried to every corner of the hall. "You are an Omega without a wolf. A Luna must stand beside her Alpha and fight for her pack. You cannot do that. Crescent Hollow needs the Marlowe alliance to survive, and I will not risk it."

"Please," I whispered. I don't know what I was begging for.

"I, Dorian Ashcroft, Alpha of Crescent Hollow, reject you, Calla Reeve, as my mate and my Luna."

The pain was unlike anything I had ever felt. It began in my chest and tore outward, as if someone had taken a blade to every thread that held me together. I doubled over with my arms wrapped around my ribs. Somewhere far away, Maeve cried out my name.

There was one thing left to do. By the old law, the rejected had to say three words to finish it. I accept it. If I said them, the bond would break and the pain would end.

I opened my mouth, and nothing came out.

It wasn't bravery. It was shock. I could not make my tongue move, and the hall swam in front of me, and I could only stare at the man who had just torn me in half.

Dorian waited. His jaw was tight, and his eyes were bright, and for a moment I thought he might take it back. Then Vivienne laughed, a soft, pretty sound.

"She's too stupid to know when she's been dismissed," she said.

"Get out of my sight," Dorian said hoarsely.

I ran.

I ran past the pack and past the tables and past Maeve's outstretched hands, out through the front doors and down the stone steps into the cold. I didn't stop until I reached the iron gates of the territory, where I grabbed the bars and gasped for air, shaking so hard that my teeth clacked together.

The moon hung above the trees, huge and red, as if it were laughing at me. I pressed my forehead against the cold metal and finally cried.

Then I heard the horns.

They were deep and slow, the kind of horns that did not belong to any of the four packs. Hooves thundered up the road, and black banners with a silver crown snapped in the wind. A line of armored riders swept through the open gates, and the pack came spilling out of the great hall behind me, whispering a word I had only heard in stories.

Lycans.

The man at the front swung down from a tall black horse. He wore a dark cloak and a circlet of old silver, and he moved like something that had never been told no. Dorian stood on the steps with his face gone white.

"Kaius," he said.

The Lycan King didn't look at him. His head turned slowly, as if he had caught a sound only he could hear, and his eyes, the same golden brown as Dorian's, found mine across the courtyard. Something moved in them that did not look human.

"Mine," he said.