Chapter 2

Vane

The carriage smelled of perfume and fear, and I caught myself sitting the way I'd been trained to. Spine straight. Weight forward, ready to come off the bench at the first wrong sound.

I made my shoulders drop. Alpha daughters didn't brace for a fight.

Elara's dress hung loose at my waist and pulled tight across my chest. The pendant rested cold against my collarbone, and I pressed it flat to be sure it was still there.

It was. So was the silence where Ashen used to be.

Three days on the road, and I still wasn't used to that silence. I couldn't feel my wolf. I couldn't shift.

The pendant made me smell like a lord's daughter and left me hollow in the place she'd always filled. Hollow was the price. Hollow kept Elara home and breathing, and my pack still standing behind their broken gate.

I could carry hollow.

Five other girls shared the carriage. Not every beaten pack had a daughter to hand over, so they'd given what they had: a beta's girl, an omega, a cousin in borrowed silk. Two of them couldn't stop talking about him.

"They say his eyes are pure gold," said the youngest, a round-faced girl named Sable. She had her hands pressed flat to her chest.

"Only the oldest bloodlines have gold eyes. Imagine being chosen by that."

"Chosen," I said, before I could stop myself.

Sable turned to me, glowing. "He has no fatedmate yet. One of us could be his Luna by the next full moon."

I thought of the twenty graves I'd dug with my own hands. I thought of the dirt still under my nails, no matter how I scrubbed.

"He filled those graves," I said. "And you want to marry him."

A sharp-jawed girl across from me lifted her chin. "Who wouldn't follow an alpha strong enough to take ten packs?"

She looked me up and down. "Strength is the only thing that keeps you breathing out here. You'd know that, if you'd ever had any."

I didn't answer. There was nothing in it worth winning.

But I didn't agree, either. I never would.

The forest thinned, and Darkspire opened up in front of us.

I had braced for something ugly. Raiders lived off other people's blood, and I'd expected their home to show it. Scorched fields, the stink of rot over everything.

What I got was a city.

Stone houses climbed the hillside in neat rows, smoke curling from a hundred chimneys. There were orchards heavy with fruit, and a mill turning slow on a bright river. Children raced a dog down a clean street, shrieking, fat and unafraid.

The people didn't look like monsters. They looked like wolves who had never once gone hungry.

That frightened me worse than scorched fields would have. Cruelty I understood. A pack grown soft and happy on what they'd torn from packs like mine, I had no name for.

The carriage stopped at a long hall near the heart of the pack. A man in grey waited on the steps.

"Out," he said. "All of you."

He was lean, silver at the temples, with the bored face of someone who had done this many times. He didn't offer a hand down. He watched us stumble onto the cobbles, and he didn't hide what he thought of us.

"My name is Lucan, steward of this house." His gaze traveled the line of us.

"This is the tribute house. You will all live here, the same."

I counted the exits while he talked. Three doors, two windows, four guards I could see and likely more I couldn't. A warrior counts the room before she trusts it.

Sable curtsied. The sharp-jawed girl did not.

"The same," the sharp girl repeated. "I am an alpha's daughter. I will not share a room with an omega."

Lucan looked at her the way you'd look at a stain. "In this house there are no alpha's daughters, only tributes. You sleep where I put you, eat what I give you, and you will be grateful for both."

His voice never rose. "Was that unclear?"

She opened her mouth.

She didn't get the chance.

The girl at the end of the line went down into a bow so fast she nearly fell.

"Alpha Corvus," she whispered.

The whole line folded after her. I bent my head with the rest, because that was what Elara would have done, and I watched from under my lashes.

He came in without hurry. That was the first thing I noticed, that a man who could empty a hall with one word felt no need to rush into it.

He was young. Too young. Black hair, a still face, and eyes the color of cold gold, the purest blood, just as Sable had said.

Nothing about him said butcher. He had the stillness of a man who had never once needed to raise his voice, because the world simply did as he wished.

Lucan bowed. "Alpha. We weren't expecting you."

"I won't be long." Cain's gaze moved down the row of us, unhurried, weighing. "I came to see whether my mate is standing in this room."

No one breathed.

I kept my head down and willed myself smaller. I had not come here to be looked at. I had come to learn what this place did with my father, and then to leave it.

His boots crossed the stone. Slow. Deliberate.

The sound of them was the only sound in the hall.

Then the scent reached me.

I don't know how else to put it. Warm, dark, with something underneath that pulled low in my stomach and would not let go. It was the best thing I had smelled in three days of perfume and fear, and I hated my body for noticing.

The boots stopped in front of me.

"Your name." Not a question. A command, low and even.

I lifted my head. Gold eyes, very close. I made my voice soft, a daughter's voice, nothing like my own.

"Elara, Alpha. Of the Pinewatch pack." I dropped my lashes. "An alpha's daughter."

He said nothing. His eyes went distant for a breath, the way a wolf's do when he's listening to the beast inside him. I would have given anything in that moment to hear Ashen and know what he was.

Then he reached out and drew the collar of my dress back from my throat.

His fingers brushed the bare skin of my neck.

It went through me like a current. A hot, helpless jolt that arched my spine before I could stop it, that left me trembling in front of the whole silent hall.