Chapter 1: The Night He Chose Her

The Blood Moon cleared the ridge at nine minutes past eight. By nine, I knew who my mate was.

I'd known for three years, if I'm honest. Since I was seventeen and Kael Draven walked past me in the training yard and my wolf sat up inside me like she'd heard her name. But knowing and being told are different things. Tonight the Moon Goddess would tell everyone.

"Drink this." Cassia pushed a cup into my hands. "You're white as a sheet. People will think you're sick."

The tea was bitter and too hot. I drank it anyway. In eleven years under the same roof, my stepsister had never once handed me anything, and I was fool enough to think tonight might be the start of something.

"And stop fidgeting." She jabbed a pin into my hair. "You look like a stray."

She'd spent two hours on her own dress, silver silk cut low at the back. She'd spent about four minutes on me. I smoothed my skirt, my mother's old grey one, let out twice at the waist, and tried to remember how breathing worked.

The clearing was already packed. The unmated wolves stood in a loose ring around the old stone, and the rest of Ironmoor watched from the trees, including half the warriors who'd told me for years I was too slow for patrol. People's eyes slid over me the way they always did, like I was part of the furniture.

Then Kael walked into the firelight and the talking stopped.

He wasn't handsome the way the boys in the village were handsome. It was more the way he stood, as if the ground had been his first and he was only letting the rest of us use it. Dark hair pushed back off his face. The Alpha mark black against his throat. He'd taken Ironmoor at twenty-two and nobody had managed to take a yard of it back.

The moon broke clear of the pines.

I felt it low in my stomach first, then in my hands, then in my teeth. Cedar and rain. A pull that moved my feet before I'd decided anything.

Mate.

My wolf didn't whisper it. She threw her head back and howled.

Across the circle, Kael's head came up. His eyes found me and flared gold, and for the space of one heartbeat the look on his face was so open it frightened me.

Then his gaze moved past my shoulder, to Cassia, and whatever I'd seen was gone.

I've replayed that heartbeat more times than I can count. I still don't know what he saw.

"Alpha?" Elder Maren said, very carefully.

Kael crossed the clearing. Wolves stepped aside for him without being asked. He stopped close enough that I could feel the bond between us, taut and humming, and close enough that I saw his right hand curl into a fist at his side. The knuckles went white. They stayed white.

"You're the omega's girl," he said. "From the east cottages."

"Yes, Alpha."

He looked at the dress. At my hands. At the shiny burn scar on my wrist from the kitchen fire when I was twelve. He took his time about it.

Somebody behind me laughed. I'm fairly sure it was Cassia.

"The Goddess has made a mistake," Kael said, and he pitched it to carry to the trees. "Ironmoor needs a Luna who can hold a line in a war. Not a girl who gets winded carrying laundry."

More laughter then. Not from everyone, but from enough.

"Kael." I had never said his name aloud before. It came out smaller than I wanted. "Please. Not here."

His jaw set. The fist didn't open.

"I, Kael Draven, Alpha of the Ironmoor Pack, reject you, Seraphina Ashby, as my mate and my Luna."

I'd always imagined rejection would feel like heartbreak. It felt like surgery nobody had asked me about. Something tore loose under my breastbone and the ground came up to meet my knees. My wolf was screaming. Under her screaming was something stranger, a dragging weight in my arms and legs, as if my blood had turned to wet sand.

By the time my eyes cleared, Kael had his back to me.

His hand was out to Cassia.

She took it without a second's hesitation, which told me she'd known what he was going to do. Maybe she'd known before I did.

"Ironmoor will have its Luna by the next full moon," he said. "The rejected one is off pack land by dawn."

No one spoke up for me. My stepmother stood by the pines with her arms folded and watched me the way you'd watch weather. The women I'd cooked for looked at their shoes.

I got up. It took me two goes.

I didn't say please a second time. I'd heard what the first one was worth.

I should have turned and walked into the dark then. Instead I looked up at the Blood Moon, swollen and red over the old stone, and deep down, beneath the grief and beneath my wolf, something I had never felt before opened its eyes.

It was cold, and it was patient, and it was very old.

Not yet, it said.