THE PRICE OF BREAKING A CURSE

I did not open the page right away.

Cassian had led me to a small stone house at the edge of the Ironwood village, where a fire was already burning and a plate of bread and cold meat sat on the table. He left me alone with the folded paper and a quiet warning that I should eat first. I ate nothing. I sat on the edge of the bed with the page in my lap, my hands still sore from the rope and the river, and it took me a long time before I could make myself unfold it.

My mother's handwriting had gone ragged near the end, as if she had been writing with someone knocking at the door.

My darling, the curse has an anchor. Veda carved it from black moonstone and buried it beneath the altar of the moon temple, and every wolf she binds is tied to that stone. Moonborn blood, given freely and with full knowledge of the truth, will shatter it. But hear me, because this is the part that frightens me most. You must be whole when you do it. If your wolf is still sealed when the stone breaks, the curse will not fade away. It will turn on the one it holds and burn him from the inside. Do not break it until Seren runs free. I have asked Cassian Reed to help you take down the seal when the time comes. I am sorry I will not be there. I love you more than the moon loves the night.

I read it three times, and then I pressed the page flat against my chest and sat very still. It was almost funny. I had spent two lives believing Darian had chosen to hurt me, and now I held proof that the only thing that could free him might also kill him if I moved too fast.

Cassian knocked once and came in without waiting, which I was beginning to understand was his way. He took one look at my face and sat down in the chair across from me.

"She told you about the seal," he said.

"She told me I must break it before I break the curse." I looked up at him. "Why did she trust you with this?"

"She wrote to my father twenty years ago, and when he died, the promise passed to me." He turned his scarred jaw toward the fire. "Your mother pulled my little sister back from the edge of death when we were both children. In our pack, that is a debt you carry for life."

"How long does it take to remove a seal like that?"

"Three weeks, if the moon silver comes away cleanly. It has to be done in the Hollow of Stones, and it will hurt." He paused. "The next full moon is in twenty eight days. If Veda tightens the curse before then, we may not have time to spare."

"Then we start at dawn," I said.

DARIAN

They buried my father at noon, and I stood at his grave like a statue while the whole Silverfang Pack watched me not cry.

I had cried once already, in a dark room with his hand in mine, and the curse had punished me for it afterward. Now there was only a hollow where my feelings should have been, and a cold silver weight pressing behind my eyes. Veda stood at my right shoulder in her gray robes, speaking softly into my ear while the Elders prayed, and every word she said slid into me like a nail into soft wood.

"You will lead the hunt to Ironwood this evening," she murmured. "You will bring the healer's daughter back, and you will announce Naomi as your Luna elect in front of the warband. Do you understand?"

I tried to refuse, and the mark under my collar flared until my knees nearly buckled. "I understand," I heard myself say, in a voice that did not sound like mine.

Naomi stood on the other side of the grave, wearing black lace and a very good imitation of grief. When our eyes met, she lowered her lashes like a girl who was too shy to look at the man who would soon be hers, and I wanted to tear the whole world apart.

Kieran fell into step beside me as the crowd began to move away. He did not look at me. He only walked close and spoke so low that no one else could hear it.

"Brother," he whispered. "If you are still in there, blink twice."

I kept my face empty and my eyes forward, and I blinked twice, slowly.

His breath caught, and he said nothing more. He did not need to.

LIORA

The Hollow of Stones was a ring of ancient gray boulders in a high meadow, with frost still silvering the grass when we arrived at first light. Cassian stood me in the center and told me to sit, to breathe, and to let Seren come forward without fighting her.

I had been afraid of my own wolf for less than two days, and already I could not remember being afraid of her at all. She rose through me like warm water filling a cup, and when I opened my eyes, my hands were glowing faintly silver against my knees. At the edge of my vision, I could see a thin, bright line of moon silver wrapped around her like a chain around a gate.

It is thicker than I thought, Seren said quietly. But it is not unbreakable.

Cassian crouched in front of me with a small iron chisel in his hand, and I braced myself.

Then a horn sounded from the village below, long and deep, and I felt the whole meadow go still. It was the warning horn, the one that meant strangers at the border. Cassian was on his feet before the echo faded, and I was right behind him, running down the hill with the half cracked seal burning in my chest.

By the time we reached the line of iron nailed pines, the Ironwood warriors had already gathered in a tight ring behind their Alpha. On the other side of the border stood fifty wolves in Silverfang gray, and at their front was a tall man in black with his shoulders squared and his eyes glowing a flat, empty silver.

Darian.

My heart did something painful and stupid, and I hated it. He did not look at me the way he had in the cell. He looked straight through me, like a man reading from a script someone else had written.

On his arm, in a pale silver circlet that I had last seen on my mother's old portrait, stood Naomi.

"Liora Hale," Darian said, and his voice rang across the border without a single trace of the man I had begun to trust. "By order of the Silverfang Alpha, you are charged with the murder of Alpha Roderick Cross. Surrender yourself now, or Silverfang will declare war on the Ironwood Pack."

Cassian's hand closed around my arm. "Do not move," he said under his breath. "He is not himself."

"I know," I whispered.

Naomi stepped forward with a gentle little smile, and she lifted one hand as if she were about to wave. Two of the Silverfang wolves shifted, and a small figure stumbled out from between them with her wrists bound and a knife pressed against her throat.

It was Tessa.

She was the omega girl from the pack kitchen who had slipped me bread through the cell bars in my first life, when no one else would so much as look at me. Her face was bruised, and her eyes found mine across the border, wide and terrified.

"I thought you might need a reason," Naomi said softly. "You have until sunset, sister."