Chapter 3

Third Person

Nobody in the clearing breathed properly until Layla's back had vanished past the fire and into the dark between the tents.

Alpha Thorne straightened his collar, drew himself to his full height, and addressed the remaining guests with the composure of a man who'd spent decades commanding a Pack. "The evening continues," he said. This was a family matter.

The guests took the hint. Conversations resumed, politely steered away from what they'd just witnessed.

Then Aurora let her held breath go, and the first tear came with it.

"I'm sorry." Her voice cracked in exactly the right place. "This is all my fault. Layla has every reason to feel the way she does."

Sienna was at her side before the second tear fell, gathering her against her shoulder, and Cole was already reaching for the water. Around them the ceremony guests had found somewhere else to look, which was its own kind of mercy.

"You have nothing to apologize for." Marcus's voice was iron. "That girl has no idea what she's been given."

"She's right, though." Aurora wiped her cheek with two fingers, careful of her eyes. "About the border. About all of it. I've had everything and she's had nothing, and I've never once—" She stopped, and shook her head, and did not finish.

Never once said thank you. Never once thought about it.

It cost her nothing to say, and it bought everything. She watched it land: her mother's face crumpling with love, her father's jaw loosening, Cole looking at her the way he looked at a wounded bird he'd been allowed to carry.

"You're too good," Cole said. "You always were."

"She'll come around." Sienna stroked her hair. "She's young, and she's angry, and she's been alone a long time. Give her a few days. A girl like her should be grateful she's even allowed through the gates."

Aurora let herself be led. That was the whole art of it: never argue with the comfort, just stand close enough to it that it happened.

The pack house had a side room kept warm for her, with a fire already lit. As her mother guided her through the door, Aurora reached back and caught Kaelen's arm, her eyes still wet and pleading. He covered her hand with his.

"I only have you," he said, quiet enough that Sienna pretended not to hear.

Her mother made a small sound of understanding and stepped out, closing the door behind her.

"Are you all right?"

"No." She kept her eyes down, which meant she watched him through her lashes. "She humiliated me in front of everyone."

"She'll regret it."

"She won't." Aurora lifted her head. "Kaelen. What she said about the Lycan king. It's true. The betrothal has been in place since we were children."

His jaw moved once.

"I don't want it." Her voice was thin now, and true, because this part didn't need performing. She had seen the Lycan king exactly once, from the back of a hall, and the stories were enough: the wolf who slaughtered his own council, the king who went mad in the dark. "He's a monster. I won't spend my life in that castle."

Kaelen's eyes went flat and cold for half a second, which he never let anyone see but her.

"It will be resolved tonight," he said.

She went still. "Tonight."

"Yes."

"What does that mean."

He came closer, and his voice dropped to the register he used when he was most certain of himself. "Aurora. Do you know who has been funding your pack for the last six months? The expansion. The horses. The tribute your father has been paying the crown with, so they'd overlook the size of his guard."

Aurora frowned. She hadn't thought about it. Someone was always paying for things.

"The border," Kaelen said. "The Night Veil."

Aurora's eyes went wide. "The Night Veil? The biggest neutral power in the kingdom... But they don't take sides. They sell."

"They sell to whoever's coin is good. And the one who runs them—the hidden one, the one nobody has a face for — the border calls him Phantom." He watched her face as he said it, and enjoyed what he saw. "The kingdom's been hunting that name for ten years. And he's ours. He has been since the spring."

"Ours," Aurora repeated.

"With Night Veil behind us, your pack and mine together don't have to fear him." His mouth curved. "Say it out loud once, so you hear it. The Lycan king is not immortal. Kings die all the time, and no one ever agrees on who held the knife."

The fire popped. Aurora looked into it, and let herself want.

"And then?"

"And then the two strongest packs on the northern road have one crown between them." He took her chin between his fingers, gently, the way he did everything until the moment he didn't. "I'll be king. You'll be this country's queen."

She smiled at him, small and sweet and grateful, and she meant it more than she had ever meant anything.

*

Layla

I cut across the pack's private grounds with my shoes in my hand.

There was a servant road behind the kitchens and a game trail behind the servant road, and I took the trail, and I did not make a sound. Twelve years on the border teaches you two things: how to be fast, and how to be nothing at all. I slipped through the dark like a phantom, which was fitting, since that was exactly what I was.

Guards along the wall. Two at the east gate, one walking the fence line with his torch high. I went over the low stone stretch by the kennel, where the wall had crumbled and grown back over, and the dogs knew me by scent and did not bark.

Then the lawn was behind me, and the forest was around me, and I could breathe.

Tonight. It was tonight.

Back there, with their lamps and their wine, they celebrated the night my wolf would be torn from me. But tonight the Lycan king's convoy would also be ambushed inside these packlands.

After that, the assassination's curse would twist him into the mad king the stories were about, and the whole country would come apart at the seams.

Every pack feared him. Every council, every neighboring kingdom wanted him dead.

But I knew he wasn't an evil man.

Because in my last life, when Kaelen shoved me into a pack of frenzied Rogues, I had no wolf, no strength, no way to fight back. I thought I was going to be torn apart. And then the Rogues were dead, and a man stood over me.

The Lycan king, cold as death itself, looking down at me like a grim reaper deciding whether to swing. But that grim reaper didn't swing. He took me back and had me healed.

I stayed with him after that.

I became his ghost guard, the shadow behind his throne that nobody knew about. I wanted to repay my debt, to reverse his fate, to save both him and the country that was crumbling around him.

But the curse from the assassination drove him deeper into madness with every passing month, and all I could do was watch. This man who had stopped on a road to save a stranger he'd never met, this king who had once been just and kind. I watched him lose control of himself piece by piece, and I couldn't stop any of it.

The moon has her laws. She doesn't send people back for nothing.

If you sent me here, then help me. Because I am not going to watch it happen twice.

I ran harder.

And then the change took me.

I don't have the words for it, even now. The border warriors used to shift in the yard at dusk when I was small, and I would stand at the fence and watch them go, all that power dropped onto four legs, and I wanted it so badly it ached. I died without ever once knowing how it felt.

It feels like being more.

My legs moved differently. The ground went close and fast and loud. My wolf came up through me with no fear in her at all. She knew exactly where we were going, and I let her have it.

The trees blurred. The moon cut through the branches in stripes and I ran through them, faster than any horse on this estate.

Faster. Faster.

The air changed. Cooler. Open.

The treeline broke, and there on the border road, black cars and headlights, was the convoy of the Lycan king.

My heart stopped.

I saw all of it in one clear, frozen piece: guards leaning out of the windows, shouting something I couldn't hear yet. A lamp on the lead car swinging. And beyond them, high in the dark at the edge of the road, the small cold glint of an arrowhead.

I screamed at them. It came out of the wolf as a sound no human throat makes.

Then I was in the air, twisting toward the arrow, and my paw caught it.

I felt it touch. I felt it.

It went into the window anyway.

Cold went through me, worse than the arrow. I landed on all fours ahead of the convoy and heard the glass break, and everything in me went down with it, because I had come back, I had run the whole way, and I had still been half a second late.

I turned around.

The lead car had stopped at an angle. The window was starred white and broken. And the arrow was not in the man inside it. It was behind him, buried in the leather of the seat by his shoulder, quivering.

He was sitting very still. Then he turned his head and looked at me, and I could not move, and the whole night went quiet around the two of us.

He had the darkest eyes I had ever seen in either of my lives.

Valerius.