Chapter 2

Vane

I fastened the necklace before Cain could see what it was. The clasp caught on the first try. The pendant settled against my collarbone, cool and heavy for its size.

"Saying goodbye," I said. "To my family."

His expression didn't change. "You're done now."

He turned and walked out. Didn't wait. Didn't look back.

I looked at Elara. She stood in the hallway with her arms wrapped tight around herself, holding together. Barely.

I wanted to say something that would fix this. Nothing came.

"Come back," she whispered.

"I will."

I didn't know if it was true. But a lie sat better than silence.

I followed Cain out into the late afternoon. My patrol jacket was still stiff with dried blood, the leather cracked at both knuckles. I hadn't changed. There'd been no time.

The pack grounds were quiet in the worst way. That heavy silence that comes after funerals, when nobody knows whether to leave or stay. Bodies still lay behind the packhouse. Nobody had moved them yet.

We passed the training field where my mother used to run me through drills before sunrise. Same packed dirt I'd scraped my knees on at ten. Same fence post I'd split my knuckles against at fourteen, throwing hooks until the skin broke and she told me to keep going. She'd made me run five miles in the rain the morning after my first heartbreak. Told me grief was fine, but grief that sat still turned to rot.

She'd found me as an infant and raised me as her own. A warrior raising a warrior. Hard, fast, no apologies. Everything I knew about fighting, tracking, and surviving without flinching came from her.

Three months ago, I came home and found her at the bottom of the ravine behind our cabin. Neck broken. Skin cold.

I still hadn't found who killed her.

I blinked hard. The training field was behind me. The border ahead.

Cain's wolves waited at the tree line. Black vehicles, a dozen men in dark coats, watching me with studied blankness. Nobody spoke. Nobody asked my name.

To them, I was cargo.

I climbed into the back seat. Black leather, tinted windows. Cain sat across from me, one ankle crossed over his knee.

The drive to Darkmoon took almost two hours. He didn't speak once.

But he watched me.

Every few minutes, I felt his attention move over me — the blood on my jacket, the set of my hands, the way I refused to shrink.

I met his gaze each time. He never looked away first.

That bothered me more than the silence.

Outside, the landscape shifted. My pack's territory was rolling hills and open ridgelines, oaks on the high ground, sky you could breathe in. Darkmoon's land was different. Dense pine forest pressed close to the road, so thick the last of the daylight barely reached the ground. The trees closed over us, and the air inside the car changed. Colder. Sharper. The scent of pine resin seeped through the vents.

The town was bigger than I expected. Stone buildings, iron gates, hedges cut to sharp angles. Street lamps already lit, though the sun hadn't fully set.

Nobody on the streets.

The alpha house sat on a hill at the center of town. Three stories of dark stone with lit windows and iron doors that looked built to keep things in rather than out.

Cain brought me inside and handed me to a woman in gray with a ring of keys at her hip.

"Clean her up," he said. "My room. One hour."

Then he was gone.

The housekeeper's gaze moved down my jacket and came back up unimpressed.

"Bath first," she said.

I didn't argue. I'd been awake since dawn, fought in a siege, and given myself to a man whose name I'd only heard in threat briefings.

The bathroom was all marble and brass. Twice the size of my cabin's main room. The hot water was the first kind thing that had happened all day. I stood under it until the blood softened and swirled pink into the drain, until the tension in my shoulders loosened enough that my hands started shaking.

I stopped the water before it got worse.

What came after wasn't kind.

The dress was red. Tight across the chest, slit up the left thigh, sheer at the shoulders. The heels added four inches. I'd never worn heels in my life. My patrol boots had steel toes and flat soles. These had nothing — just a thin spike and a prayer.

I stared at myself in the mirror. The woman looking back could've been someone I'd pulled out of a nightclub on a bad patrol night.

The housekeeper appeared behind my reflection. Her eyes stopped on the scar that ran from my collarbone to my left shoulder.

"Those scars are hideous," she said.

My jaw set. "I earned every one."

She didn't respond. She led me down a corridor of closed doors and stopped at the last one.

"Alpha Corvus is inside." Her gaze swept me one final time. "Try not to embarrass yourself."

I waited until her footsteps faded. Then I stood there, staring at the brass handles.

I wasn't going to sleep with Cain Corvus. That was decided. If he thought a red dress and four-inch heels turned a tribute into something willing, he was about to find out otherwise.

I just needed to make him want to send me away.

I straightened my spine and pushed the door open.

His room was more office than bedroom. A wide desk, two walls of books, a window overlooking dark grounds. The bed was against the far wall, half-hidden behind a wooden partition.

Cain stood by the desk with his jacket off and sleeves rolled to his elbows. His hair was damp. The room still carried him — clean, cold, impossible to ignore.

Without the army behind him and the conquest in the air, he looked different. The cut of his forearms, the breadth of his shoulders. My body noticed before my brain could shut it down.

I shut it down.

He looked up. His brow creased. Not appreciation. Not interest. Irritation.

"Who dressed you like that?"

Heat hit my cheeks before I could stop it. I was standing in a dress I hadn't chosen, in shoes I couldn't walk in, in a room belonging to a man who'd taken me from my pack as payment.

"Your housekeeper," I said. "She was very thorough."

Something moved behind his eyes that I couldn't read. Then he turned back to the desk and pulled out a chair.

"Come here."

Two words. No question in them.