CHAPTER 2

Neva’s POV

The mask changed everything.

Mara and Tess had kept their side of the bargain. The dress was deep midnight blue, the mask silver lace across my eyes, my pale hair loose in soft curls for once instead of knotted out of reach. I looked in Tess’s mirror and did not know the girl looking back. She was not the charity girl. She was someone who belonged.

They dropped me at the edge of the pack lands and sped off to the party ahead of me, giggling, already forgetting I existed. I did not mind. For a few hours I did not want to be remembered. I wanted to be no one, which in Nightpine is the closest thing to being free.

I stood in the snow a moment before I went in, and I let myself think of my parents.

They went rogue when I was nine and never came back, and everyone here calls them the reason I owe a debt. But before the drugs, before the leaving, they had loved me. They made every birthday special no matter how little we had. They were mates, deeply and truly, and when I was small I used to dream of having a mate of my own one day, someone who would look at me the way my father looked at my mother.

I had stopped dreaming that a long time ago. Tonight, for one night, in a mask, I let myself remember what it felt like to want it.

Then I walked into the great hall, and it was gold and glittering and packed with every wolf in Nightpine come to honor the new Alphas, and up on the raised dais stood the three Kane brothers in matching black, crowned in everything I would never have.

Dorian, still and cold as carved ice. Cassian, loud and laughing, working the crowd. Lucian, watching the doors like he was waiting for something he could not name.

His eyes passed over me and caught.

For one impossible second Lucian went utterly still, the way you freeze when a scent tugs at a memory you cannot place. Then Cassian slapped his shoulder and the moment broke and I made myself breathe. He does not know it is you, I told myself. No one does.

I almost lasted an hour.

Then the great clock began to strike midnight, and every bone in my body caught fire.

The first shift does not ask. It came like a wave breaking over me, heat and pressure and a wild new voice rising in my chest, my wolf, awake for the first time, straining toward the world. I gasped and gripped a marble column to stay standing. And across the hall, three other wolves went rigid at the exact same moment.

The triplets.

Then the scents hit me, and I understood everything.

Coffee and dark cocoa, sharp and commanding. That was Dorian. Sweet coconut with something warm and tropical under it. That was Cassian. And warm chocolate, soft and gentle, the kind of smell that felt like being held. That was Lucian.

Three scents, all of them the most wonderful things I had ever breathed, all of them pulling at me at once. I felt the bond snap into place like three hooks behind my ribs, dragging my gaze up to the dais against my will.

Dorian’s head turned sharply. Cassian stopped mid-laugh. Lucian was already staring, his eyes wide, and I watched the same terrible knowledge crash over all three of them in one breath.

Mate.

The whole hall smelled it. A mate bond is not a quiet thing. It rolled off the four of us like a struck bell, and every wolf in that room turned to find its source, heads swinging from the new Alphas to the masked girl clutching the column.

For one heartbeat, it was the most beautiful feeling of my life. Three golden threads, warm and alive, telling me I was chosen. Wanted. That I belonged to someone at last.

Then Dorian crossed the hall, seized my wrist, and tore the mask from my face.

The silver lace came away, and the whole room saw.

The gasp went through the crowd like a blade, then the whispers, then my name, both of them, the real one and the cruel one.

“That’s the charity girl.”

“The Kanes’ servant is their mate?”

Dorian’s face, inches from mine, went to stone. I saw the exact moment he decided. Not shock. Not softness. Calculation. He was Alpha now, minutes into his rule, and he would not let it begin with this.

“No,” he said. Cold, flat, loud enough for the room. “I reject you, Neva Frost.”

The first thread snapped, and the pain was white and total, a rope torn out of my chest by the roots. I bit down on the scream. My vow. I would not cry. Not in front of them, not in front of all of them.

Cassian came next, and Cassian played to the crowd the way he always did. He looked at the hundred watching faces, and he chose them over me without a flicker.

“Come on.” He laughed, that big performing laugh, spreading his arms for the audience. “Our Luna? The charity girl?” He shook his head, grinning, and the room laughed because he told it to. “The Goddess has a cruel sense of humor. I reject you. Go find a mop to bond with.”

The second thread tore. I swayed. The laughter roared.

Then only Lucian was left.

He came down off the dais slowly, and he was not laughing. His face was pale, stricken, his hands shaking at his sides. He stopped in front of me, and for one wild second I saw it, the pull, the same warmth I had felt, alive in his eyes. He opened his mouth. He looked at me like I was a person. Like I was his.

Then he looked at his brothers.

Dorian’s jaw was set. Cassian’s grin was a warning. And Lucian, the sweet one, the youngest, the only Kane who had ever used my name, was not strong enough to stand alone against the two wolves he had followed his whole life.

He closed his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, so low only I could hear it. Then, louder, for them, for the pack, for the title he was too weak to risk: “I reject you too.”

The third thread ripped away, and the world went white.

I do not remember hitting my knees. I remember the cold of the marble through the blue dress. I remember a hundred wolves looking down at the charity girl kneeling in a borrowed gown while the three most powerful men in the pack turned their backs and walked away.

And I remember that I did not cry.

Eight years of practice, and I did not let a single tear fall in that hall. I got to my feet on legs that were not mine. I lifted my chin. And I walked out through a crowd that parted for me now only so they could stare.

The cold night hit me like a slap. I could not go back to my closet, not tonight, not under the same roof as three severed threads still burning raw in my chest. So I walked out into the snow in the blue dress, my breath clouding, toward the old lodge at the edge of the territory where the overflow guests drank and no one knew my face.

But someone was already there in the dark.

Tall. Broad. A black mask over his face, and moonlight catching the edge of a jaw I would have known anywhere.

One of them had followed me.

And with my face bare and his hidden, I still could not tell which one.