Chapter 1

Vane

I had blood under my fingernails by the time the last grave was filled.

Our pack had lost the battle. Twenty wolves were dead.

I dug every grave myself, because I was the only one left who could still lift a shovel. We had lost the war, and the wolf who won it had already sent word of the price.

His name was Cain Corvus, and he had never given back a thing he'd taken.

My hands wouldn't stop shaking. Dried blood had set into the creases of my knuckles and under my nails, and no amount of well water moved it. Most of it was my brothers'; some of it was mine.

Ashen paced under my ribs through all of it, grieving the way I couldn't let myself. She was the only thing that still felt like mine.

I wanted Elara. That was the only clear thought left in me as I came back through the broken gate. My best friend's arms, one quiet minute to fall apart before I had to be a warrior again.

I found her father first.

The Alpha's door stood open a crack, and his voice carried through it, low and final. "We have to send Darkspire a tribute, Elara. It has to be you."

I stopped where I stood. My stomach dropped before my head caught up.

Then the door flew open and Elara came through it sobbing, and she nearly knocked me off my feet.

"Elara." I caught her. "I've got you. Look at me."

She couldn't get the words out in order. They came in pieces, wet against my shoulder, and I put them together while my own grief sat down and waited its turn.

Elara had always been the gentle one between us, gold-haired and soft-handed. I was the one who'd been raised to bleed.

She was the tribute. Her father was handing her to Cain Corvus.

I knew what that meant. When a pack loses, the victor takes whatever he wants to seal the win. Sometimes land, sometimes gold, sometimes the Alpha's daughter.

“He’s taken ten packs, Vane.” Her fingers dug into my arms. “They say his wolf is even crueler than he is.”

She pulled back to look at me, her face wrecked. "Papa says Corvus has no fatedmate. That if he keeps me, the pack stays standing, that I might even be his Luna." Her voice cracked. "He's sending me to die and calling it an honor."

Twenty graves. I had just closed twenty graves with these hands, and now the closest thing to family I had left was being traded across a border to a man who collected packs like coins.

To hell with that.

I was done burying people.

"Then you don't go," I said. "I do."

She was already shaking her head. "No. Absolutely not."

"Elara—"

“I don’t want to go. I’m terrified. But letting you die for me isn’t better, Vane. It’s worse.”

She meant it, and shouting wouldn't move her. So I reached for the one lever that would.

"My father went to Darkspire," I said. "Three months ago. He went to beg Corvus for peace, and he never came home."

That part was true. The rest I bent to fit. "He's the only family I've got left, the man who took in an orphan nobody wanted. If I go in your place, I can look for him. No one else ever will."

He had taught me to fight, and then taught me when not to. He was the only person who had ever chosen me on purpose.

I didn't say the part that sat cold and certain in my chest. A man does not walk into Cain Corvus's house and come out three months later. My father was almost certainly already dead.

But Elara's shoulders came down a fraction, and I knew the lie had found its mark.

"We're nearly the same height," I pressed. "The same build. I've spent half my life at your side. I know how you stand, how you'd curtsy to a man you hate."

I took her wet face in my bloody hands. “I’ll come back. I swear it on everything I still have left. I will walk out of Darkspire alive."

It took her the rest of the night to say yes. It took me three days to stop feeling her tears dry on my neck.

On the third day, I stood at the edge of our territory in a hard, dead-season wind, waiting for a carriage I did not want.

The border post was empty. No one had come to see me off; that had been my idea, not theirs. A tribute who left in tears would only make Elara's lie harder to keep.

I wore Elara's clothes: a soft grey traveling dress in fine wool, the kind a warrior never owns. Around my throat hung the necklace she'd pressed into my palm at the gate.

It was plain old silver, still warm from her skin. "Wear it the whole way," she'd told me. "It'll make you smell like me. Like an alpha's daughter."

She hadn't told me the rest until the clasp was already shut. The necklace didn't only change my scent. It sealed my wolf.

Ashen went quiet.

I reached for her the way I had every day of my life, and found nothing. No voice, no warmth pacing under my skin, just a flat ringing silence where she had always been.

I had survived the battlefield without breaking. This was the thing that nearly did it. Even in the worst of the fighting I'd had Ashen at my back, and now I had a borrowed name and a hollow where she used to live.

The carriage came at midmorning, black and wheel-worn, two grey horses steaming in the cold.

The man who swung down wore Darkspire's colors and a sneer to match. He looked me over the way you'd price a goat at market, and whatever he saw bored him.

"You're the tribute?" He didn't wait for an answer. "Get in. The Alpha doesn't like waiting."

I didn't argue. I didn't curtsy either, and caught the mistake a breath too late. Elara would have.

I climbed into the dark of the carriage and folded my hands in my lap the way she folded hers.

The door shut. The horses leaned into the harness, and everything I had left in the world began to slide away behind me.

I pressed the necklace flat to my throat and made myself a cold, flat promise. They could never find out what I was.

Whatever was waiting at Darkspire, it would never meet Vane Blake.

It would meet Elara. And it would never know the difference.