Chapter 2

Aria · Five Years Ago

There are three of them, and I smell them a heartbeat before they hit me: rot and old blood and the wrongness that clings to a wolf gone rogue, the smell that makes every pup's hackles rise before they're old enough to know why.

I run.

I have never been fast. That was always the problem, wasn't it? Too soft, too slow, too little, the runt the Goddess shouldn't have wasted a mate on. 

The forest claws at me as I crash through it. Roots catch my feet. A branch opens my cheek. My lungs burn, my bare feet tear on the frozen ground, and still the rotten smell gains on me, splitting now, because they're flanking me, herding me the way wolves herd a deer they've already decided is dead.

The first rogue takes me down between one stride and the next, jaws closing on my shoulder, and the pain is so enormous it goes white and silent.

So this is how it ends. Cast out at the treeline and torn apart before midnight, and Kael will hear of it over breakfast and feel nothing at all. They'll say the runt didn't even last the night. They'll be right. The thought hurts worse than the teeth.

No.

The word comes from somewhere underneath my own. From her. My wolf, the one I've never once been able to reach, the one the healers clucked over and called small and weak like the rest of me, the one I'd half stopped believing was real.

She is not small.

She rises through me like a flood through a cracked dam, and there's light. I'll swear to it for the rest of my life, silver light, pouring off my own skin as the change takes me for the first time. Bone reshapes. Muscle floods with a strength I have never owned. 

The agony in my shoulder becomes something I can use. The rogue's teeth tear free of a body that is suddenly bigger, faster, furious, and I twist and throw two hundred pounds of snarling rot into a tree trunk hard enough to crack it down the middle.

I don't remember the rest in order. I remember teeth and snow and a sound that might be a scream or a howl. I remember the hot copper taste of it flooding my mouth. I remember standing, four-legged and shaking and steaming in the cold, over something that has stopped moving and will not move again.

I remember the moment two more shapes burst from the dark. Wolves, but clean, controlled, pack-scented and disciplined, nothing like the things that hunted me, and a man's voice barking at them to hold, hold, she's not feral, look at her, look at her color, by the Goddess, look at her.

Then there are hands. A heavy coat dropped around my shoulders as I shuddered back into skin, naked and bleeding and too stunned to be ashamed. A face I don't know leans into my line of sight: dark eyes, a thin scar splitting one brow, a steadiness that holds me together when everything else is coming apart.

"Easy," he says. "Easy, now. You're alive. You're going to stay that way; I didn't run all this way to watch you bleed out in the snow." 

He studies me like I'm a miracle and a problem wearing the same face. "A silver wolf. Goddess wept. I thought your bloodline died out three generations ago. Where in the realm did you come from, little blade?"

"Nowhere," I tell him through chattering teeth. "I came from nowhere. They threw me away tonight."

Something in his jaw hardens, and I will learn, in time, that this is what Cassian Royce looks like when he has decided to be loyal to someone. "Then their loss is the King's gain," he says. 

"My name's Cassian. I serve the Alpha King, and as of tonight, so might you." And he picks me up like I weigh nothing at all, and he takes me away from that place, and I let him.

The Citadel is half a day's run north, all grey stone and old wards that hum against my teeth. They give me a bed I don't feel I've earned, a healer with cold hands, and broth I'm too sick to keep down. 

I tell myself it's the shoulder. The shock. The bond-wound is still screaming its raw ends under my sternum, in the hollow place where Kael used to be, and now nothing is.

The healer is an old she-wolf with frost-white braids and a voice far gentler than her hands. She presses her palms to my belly, frowns, presses again. Goes very still.

"Child," she says softly. "When did you last bleed?"

The room tilts under me.

I count. I count again, because the first answer can't be right, because the first answer is the morning of the ceremony. Because the night before the Goddess named us, before I knew what dawn would bring, I went to Kael one last time the way I'd dreamed of for years, and he held me like he meant it, like I was something precious, and then at dawn he stood in front of three hundred wolves and called me a runt who'd be dead by winter.

The healer watches my face do the arithmetic. She has done this before. She knows the exact moment a girl's whole life rearranges itself around a single new fact.

"You're carrying," she says. "Very early. But you're carrying, and the pup is strong. Stronger than it has any right to be this soon."

I put both hands over the place where her hands were. Over the secret that has just become the only thing in the world that matters more than my own breath. 

His. Mine. 

Ours, and he will never know, because a man who throws away the mother does not get to keep the child.

And for the first time since Kael Thorne broke me on the ceremony grounds in front of his whole pack, I don't feel weak.

I feel dangerous.