Chapter 1

Rain had turned Silverpine Town slick and dark by the time I left Blackthorn Keep. I only wanted distance from the council hall and the sound of Kane’s voice saying I was not the woman he wanted. Instead, I turned into the market and found a stall crowded three people deep.

A merchant was waving charcoal sketches over his head. “The Alpha and his Luna,” he called. “Last copies. If you miss this batch, don’t blame me.”

I took one from his hand before I knew what I was doing.

The first showed Kane and me in his study. The second had been drawn beside the stables. The third was from the terrace after the council banquet that same evening. None of them hid what they were selling. My body was rendered with enough detail to make the crowd laugh behind their hands, and beneath the highest-priced page someone had written, in thick black ink:

Released through Blackthorn channels.

Not forbidden by the Alpha.

The merchant tried to snatch them back. “Careful with that,They started as a private Blackthorn set. No one expected half the market to be selling copies by week’s end.”

I let the pages drop into the rain.

For three years I had done everything expected of a Luna. I learned the council’s rules, the keep’s accounts, the old rites, the endless quiet labor that held a pack together.

I stood beside Kane in public and waited for him in private. I bandaged him when he came back from the border, soothed him through the worst of his Alpha cycles, and learned to accept tenderness only in scraps.

Because there had been scraps. He always knew when I was unwell before anyone else. When nightmares woke me shaking, he pulled me back against him without asking what I had seen. Last winter, when fever pinned me to bed, he sat there through the night, changing the cloth on my forehead with his own hands. At dawn he said, “Do not misunderstand. I simply do not want the council forcing another Luna on me.”

I had believed him anyway.

That was the most humiliating part. I had spent three years turning every contradiction in him into hope. A thumb resting for one extra beat at the inside of my wrist when he fastened my bracelet.

The way he reached for me in sleep after speaking to me like a stranger over dinner. The silence in which he stood at the door and let me unfasten his cloak after patrol, as though that small ritual belonged to us alone. I had built a marriage out of fragments and called it devotion.

Now I knew better.

The rain followed me all the way to the Moon Temple.

Its steps shone white in the storm. I had come there before to kneel beside Kane at pack rites, to pray for his safety before a border clash, to thank the Moon Goddess when he came home alive. I had never imagined I would come to ask for release.

Elder Edwin was alone at the altar when I entered. Water ran from my hair and sleeves onto the stone.

“I want to enter the Moon-Severing Tower,” I said. “I want my bond with Kane Blackwood dissolved.”

“Once it opens, you do not only sever a mate bond. You surrender your claim as Luna, your place at the Alpha’s side, and every right the contract ever gave you. The mark will be burned away, the vow broken, the pull between your souls cut clean. ”

He stared at me for a long moment.

“I understand.”

“If you survive, you will walk out of that tower as no one’s mate—least of all Kane Blackwood’s.”

“That is exactly what I want.”

He let out a slow breath, “Come back on the full moon. I will open the tower for you.”

“That is exactly what I want.”

When I stepped outside again, the clouds had thinned just enough to let a pale wash of moonlight through. It was not hope I felt, only certainty. Kane and I had reached the end, even if he did not know it yet.

There were only a few days left between us.