Chapter 1: The Night They Forgot Me (1)

Mira's POV

The first person to forget me was my mother.

I watched the recognition leave her eyes. Twenty-five years of love, gone between one heartbeat and the next, as easily as a candle being pinched out.

But the worst part wasn't losing her.

It was knowing that, only hours earlier, the man responsible had kissed me and promised we would never be separated.

* * *

Six hours before the Moon Ceremony, Alpha Ronan Thorne held me against the stone wall of the palace gardens.

The roses had been cut for the hall that morning, and the bushes stood half-stripped around us, thorny and bare, smelling of green sap and frost. Somewhere beyond the hedges, servants were shouting about tablecloths. Someone dropped a tray. Nobody came looking for us. Ronan had chosen the spot well; he always did.

His forehead rested against mine. His fingers were tangled in my hair, ruining an hour of my mother's careful work.

"You're shaking," he murmured.

"It's freezing."

"You're lying."

I smiled despite myself. "I'm allowed to be nervous. Tonight changes everything."

Something dark passed behind his golden eyes.

"Yes," he said quietly. "It does."

I should have noticed how tightly he was holding my hand. I should have asked why he kept glancing up at the palace windows, or why, for three nights running, he had answered every one of my questions with a kiss instead of words.

But I had loved him since I was nineteen, and love makes you very good at not noticing things.

So I reached up and kissed him.

He answered at once, one arm sliding around my waist to draw me closer. The kiss began gentle and familiar, the way it always did, and then it changed. It turned slow and deliberate and almost desperate, as though he were trying to memorize me. As though he were afraid that if he let go, he would never find me again.

When he finally pulled away, he kept his eyes closed.

"Promise me something, Mira."

"Anything."

His thumb brushed my cheekbone. "No matter what happens tonight, don't stop fighting."

I laughed softly. "Fighting what? Your mother? I'm fairly certain she already hates my dress."

He didn't smile.

"Promise me."

The weight in his voice crept under my skin.

"Ronan, what's going on?"

"Nothing you need to worry about." He opened his eyes, and they were steady again, the Alpha's eyes, the ones that ended arguments in council rooms. "Just promise."

"All right," I whispered. "I promise."

He kissed my forehead and held his lips there for a long moment.

Then he stepped back, straightened his collar, and was gone through the hedges before I could say another word.

I stood alone among the stripped rosebushes, touching my forehead, and for one foolish moment I believed I was the luckiest woman in the Northern Territories.

I didn't know I was saying goodbye.

* * *

My mother found me twenty minutes later and took one look at my hair.

"Wind," I said, before she could ask.

"In the walled garden."

"Very localized wind."

She marched me back to my rooms to repin it, and while her fingers worked, I watched her in the mirror and kept my secret.

Three weeks ago, cataloguing a crate of water-damaged ledgers from the old Blackmoor reign, I had found a page with a name scraped out of it. One name, in a list of children presented at court, removed so carefully that only a faint, pale scar remained in the vellum. When I held it up to the lamp, the shape of it had looked like my own.

Since then I had been dreaming of a corridor full of black candles and a man's voice counting backward. I hadn't told anyone. Not Mother. Not Ronan.

Though now, remembering how he had avoided my questions, I wondered if someone had told him anyway.

Behind me, the ceremonial gown waited on its stand: silver-grey silk, with stars embroidered across the shoulders. Mother had stitched every one of them by hand. Two hundred and twelve. I had counted once as a girl, and she had swatted my fingers and told me that counting a blessing was the surest way to lose it.

My mother was not a soft woman. But a few times a year I heard her crying behind a closed door, and in the morning she would only say that some grief simply came without a name.

She caught my eye in the mirror and cupped my face in both hands.

"Your father would have been so proud of you. I made those stars the way my mother made them for me. One day, you'll make them for your daughter."

From the doorway, my younger brother Daniel made a loud gagging noise. "Can we finish the emotional part before dinner? Some of us are starving."

Mother glared at him. I laughed.

It was such an ordinary moment.

I would spend the rest of my life wishing I could return to it.

* * *

The Moon Hall had never looked more beautiful.

Silver lanterns floated beneath the vaulted ceiling, held aloft by magic older than the palace itself. White roses, the ones cut from the garden that morning, climbed every marble pillar. Wolves from all seven northern packs filled the long benches in their finest furs and silks, and the air was thick with perfume and woodsmoke and the low, restless hum of hundreds of conversations.

At the center of the hall stood the Moon Altar, carved from a single block of pale stone. Upon it rested the silver crown worn by every Thorne Luna for nearly four centuries, delicate as frost and set with seven moonstones, one for each pack.

Tonight, it was supposed to become mine.

I stood at the foot of the altar steps with my mother on one side and Daniel on the other, and tried very hard to remember how breathing worked.

"Stop fidgeting," Mother whispered.