Chapter One

The war horn sounded twice before I let myself believe it was real.

I stood at the top of the stone steps, my hands pressed flat against my stomach to keep them from shaking. Behind me, the great hall of Blackthorn Pack had been scrubbed and polished until the floors threw back the torchlight like water. Garlands of white lilies wound around every pillar. I had chosen them myself, three days ago, standing on a ladder while the pack tailor pinned the hem of my ceremonial gown an inch higher so I wouldn't trip walking down to meet him.

Tonight was supposed to be the night I told Marcus the truth.

Three years I had kept it buried. Three years of letting him believe he had married a powerless omega plucked from a border village, some quiet girl with no pack and no name worth mentioning. I let the other Lunas whisper about me at gatherings. I let his mother look through me like glass. I said nothing, because my father had taught me that power revealed too early gets you killed, and power revealed at the right moment changes the shape of a kingdom.

Tonight was the right moment. Marcus was coming home from war, a war he had won, and I was going to stand in front of the entire pack and tell them that the wife they'd dismissed for three years was the daughter of the Alpha King. That the blood in my veins could call wolves twice the size of Blackthorn's strongest warriors. That I had married Marcus not because I had nowhere else to go, but because I chose him.

I had rehearsed the words so many times I could feel them sitting in my throat like stones, ready to fall out the second he was close enough to hear.

The gates groaned open.

I straightened my spine and lifted my chin the way my father taught me, shoulders back, eyes forward, never let them see you flinch. The pack surged toward the courtyard, cheering, banging fists against their chests in the old salute. I stayed where I was, at the top of the steps, because Luna does not run to greet her Alpha like a pup chasing a scent. Luna waits.

Marcus came through the gates first, and for one full second my heart did something foolish and warm.

Then I saw her.

She walked beside him with her hand tucked into the crook of his arm like she belonged there, like she had always belonged there, and her cloak was open at the front because she wanted everyone to see the curve beneath it. She was pregnant. Visibly, unmistakably pregnant, round enough that she had to walk with one palm braced against the small of her back.

The cheering didn't stop. If anything it got louder.

I came down the steps before I could stop myself. Three years of careful patience burned off me in an instant, replaced by something colder and more urgent. This was not how tonight was supposed to go. This was not the story I had built in my head while I sewed lilies into garlands.

"Marcus." My voice cracked down the middle of his name. "Who is this?"

He looked at me the way you look at something stuck to the bottom of your boot.

"This is Lyra," he said, and he said it loud, loud enough that it carried to the back of the courtyard, loud enough that every wolf in Blackthorn heard it. "She's carrying my heir."

The words hit me like a fist to the ribs. I actually stepped back.

"Your heir," I repeated, because some part of me was still hoping I had misheard.

"Did you think I didn't notice?" He laughed, and it wasn't warm, it wasn't the laugh I used to fall asleep listening to. "Three years, Elena. Three years and not once did you give me a pup. A Luna who can't breed isn't a Luna. She's a decoration."

Somewhere behind me I heard the sharp intake of breath from the pack elders. I felt every eye in that courtyard land on me at once, and for the first time since I was a child hiding under my father's war table, I didn't know what to do with my own hands.

"I am your wife," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt, which was the only mercy I got that night. "I am your Luna. You don't get to replace me because a stranger walked into camp and told you what you wanted to hear."

Lyra smiled at me. Actually smiled, slow and satisfied, one hand resting on her stomach like she was showing off a trophy.

"Too late," she said, sweet as poison. "I'm already carrying his child. What are you carrying, sweetheart? Besides disappointment."

The crowd laughed. I heard it ripple backward through the courtyard, wolf to wolf, and something in my chest cracked clean down the middle.

Marcus didn't defend me. He didn't even look uncomfortable. He turned from me like I was a servant who had interrupted something important, and someone pressed a silver cup into his hand. He raised it high over his head.

"To my son," he called out, "and to the woman who will give him to me."

The courtyard erupted. Cups rose everywhere I looked, wolves I had fed at my own table, wolves whose pups I had helped deliver, all of them raising their drinks to a stranger with her hand on her belly while I stood there in my ceremonial gown with the truth still sitting unspoken in my throat.

I could have told them then. I could have opened my mouth and let the words fall out, I am the Alpha King's daughter, I could burn this pack to the ground with one call to my father's army, and watch every single one of them go pale and silent.

I didn't.

Because in that moment I understood something I hadn't let myself understand in three years of marriage. It wouldn't have mattered. Marcus wasn't rejecting me because he thought I was weak. He was rejecting me because he had already decided who he wanted, and my blood, my name, my worth, none of it had ever been enough to compete with a woman who could give him what I supposedly couldn't.

The cheering finally quieted. Marcus lowered the cup and looked at me one last time, and for a moment I thought, foolishly, that I saw something like regret pass behind his eyes.

I was wrong.

"You have two choices," he said, and his voice had gone flat, final, the voice he used on enemies and traitors, not on the woman who had shared his bed for three years. "Give up your title and crawl back to being a nobody omega. Or stay, and help raise my true heir."

The garlands I had hung with my own hands trembled in the wind coming off the courtyard, white petals scattering across the stones like something already dead.