Chapter One – Kira

The Ashwood ceremonial grounds smelled the way they always did on Unity nights; pine smoke, crushed grass, and underneath it, the particular tension of four packs standing close enough together to remember exactly how much they didn't trust each other.

I stood near the back, where the omegas and the unclaimed were expected to stand, wearing a dress my mother had chosen because it covered enough skin to be respectable and did little else. Around me, wolves who'd shifted a hundred times before they could walk stood in loose, easy clusters, wearing a kind of comfort in their own bodies I had never once felt in mine.

I was nineteen years old and I had never shifted. Not once, not during any of the eighty-some moons that had come and gone since my parents first realized something in me had simply failed to arrive.

Wolfless. That was the word the healers used, clinical and final, like a diagnosis instead of a life sentence. I had heard both the kind version and the cruel more times than I could count, standing exactly where I was standing now; at the edge of every gathering, watching everyone else's actual lives happen at just a few feet out of reach.

“Stand up straight,” my mother murmured, appearing at my elbow the way she always did right before something humiliating was about to happen to me. “Whatever else you are tonight, you are still my daughter. Try to remember that when they look at you.”

When they look at you. As though I could stop them.

Across the grounds, my sister Elena was already surrounded, sixteen and glowing with the kind of confidence that came from having a wolf that answered when called. I'd stopped blaming her for that a long time ago. It was easier to just go numb where the blame used to sit.

The horns sounded before I could spiral any further, it was three low notes that meant the Alphas were arriving. The Unity Ceremony wasn't just a party. It was a century-old tradition meant to remind the four Northern packs that peace was worth more than old grudges, and if the moon was generous, it was also the night mates got revealed, right there in front of everyone.

I had come to loathe this part more than any other. Every year I watched other people's lives change in a heartbeat, and every year I told myself it wouldn't happen to me, because whatever piece of a person made a wolf recognize its mate, I plainly didn't have.

I believed that, right up until the exact moment I didn't.

He came through the treeline with the Blackthorn procession, and even through a crowd of four hundred people, something in my chest turned over so hard it nearly buckled my knees.

Alpha Damien Cross. The strongest Alpha in three generations, the man who'd taken Blackthorn at twenty and doubled its territory by twenty-three. I had never spoken to him in my life.

The wind shifted, and it was like being struck by lightning through water; every nerve lighting up at once, a pull so sudden and complete that for one disorienting second I thought I'd actually shifted, that whatever had been broken in me my whole life had finally clicked into place.

Across the grounds, he stopped walking.

I watched it hit him too; his head coming up sharp, his eyes finding mine like there was nothing else standing between us at all. The crowd noise dropped to nothing. Somewhere behind me I heard my mother's breath catch. Everyone in a hundred-foot radius had just felt a bond snap into place between the strongest Alpha in a generation and the one girl in Ashwood who wasn't supposed to be capable of feeling anything like this at all.

For exactly four seconds, I let myself believe it meant something good.

Then Damien Cross's expression closed like a door slamming.

“No.” The word carried, flat and final, across grounds gone dead silent. He said it to the air, to his own pack, to anyone close enough to hear. Not to me, because he didn't so much as glance at me to say it. “Whatever that was. No.”

I heard someone laugh, a short, ugly bark of a sound. My mother's breathing turned shallow beside me. My own heartbeat went so loud I thought it might be audible from where the four Alphas stood.

My father stepped forward first, jaw tight. “Alpha Cross. Perhaps we should discuss this somewhere …”

“There's nothing to discuss.” Damien didn't look at him either. “I reject the bond.”

The words hit the crowd like a stone through glass. A public rejection at a Unity Ceremony hadn't happened in living memory. Not like this, not in front of everyone the treaty was supposed to bind together.

I don't remember deciding to move. I remember the ground under my feet, and then the treeline, and then nothing but trees and the sound of my own breathing tearing in and out of my chest.

Behind me, faint over the distance I was putting between myself and everyone who had just watched that happen, I thought I heard my name. Not shouted. Not chased. Just said once, quiet, like he wasn't entirely sure why he'd said it at all.

I didn't stop to find out.

I ran until the torchlight behind me was nothing but a smear, until the forest closed in dense enough that the moon only reached the ground in broken silver coins scattered across the path. Coins that seemed to brighten every time my bare feet passed over them, like the light itself had decided to pay attention. I told myself it was a trick of the tears blurring my vision.

I didn't stop running until my body simply refused to give me anything more, and I collapsed against the base of an old oak at the edge of territory I didn't recognize.

One night. That was all it had taken to lose whatever place I'd still had left.