Chapter 4

Garrick came down to the cells one last time, carrying a property transfer agreement.

He wanted me to hand over the blood seal of Blackstone Manor, to state in writing that the Ashbourne family had never wronged me, and to acknowledge publicly that Viola was the family's only daughter and heir. Helena and my brothers stood behind him. Not one of them would look at the state of me.

With tears in my eyes I signed the property transfer, and I pushed the confession back across to him.

I wanted to know whether, once I had lost my rank, the manor, and every last bit of usefulness, they would still admit they had raised me.

Helena reached out and took the moonstone pendant off my neck. It was the only thing that had come with me when I was brought to the Ashbourne family. She had once told me she would keep it safe for me my whole life. Now she fastened it around Viola's neck herself.

"What belongs to this house should go back to the daughter of this house."

I held her eyes. "If I die down here, after you have taken back everything, will you regret throwing away the daughter you raised?"

Helena's fingers trembled, but all she said was, "Admit what you did and nobody wants you dead."

She never answered the question about regret.

After they left, Damian brought the rejection oath. If the old mate mark was dissolved before the blood moon rose, he could marry Viola and keep the territory's line of succession in order.

"I accept the rejection." I stopped asking where his heart had gone. "But before you go, put your hand on my chest. My heartbeat is getting weaker."

A mate mark cannot miss the approach of death. The cold, the pain, the struggle to breathe, all of it traveled down the bond into him.

Damian's hand touched my chest and jerked back as if he had grabbed a red-hot iron.

"Stop using your weakness to manipulate me. Stop playing the victim!"

The oath glowed faintly, and the mate mark that had sat on my shoulder for so long peeled away layer by layer. I used to think that mark was the home the Moon Goddess had given me. It turns out that when a person decides to shut his heart, not even a goddess can stop him.

The coronation bells rang somewhere far off. Viola walked into the cells in the Luna's gown that should have been mine. She wanted the real blood seal of Blackstone Manor. First she ordered the guards to push concentrated wolfsbane into my veins. Then she picked up a silver whip.

The first lash landed, and I bit down hard on my lip.

On the second lash, Aunt Maeve's agonized scream tore through the door.

After the seventh, Viola leaned down close. "Admit it. You never deserved a single thing they gave you."

"What I do not deserve," I said, fighting for breath, "is every charge you invented."

Aunt Maeve shouldered the cell door halfway open and threw herself in front of me. Viola kicked the old woman into the stone wall, then set a long silver spike against my chest.

"A daughter born of the eclipse hides a wolf in her shadow." She recited the fragment of the old rhyme, her face alight with excitement. "Good. If you really do have a wolf, let it come and save you now."

No wolf came.

All I could feel was my own heartbeat, one, then another, slowing down.

Pieces of the past kept sliding through my head. Helena's warm hand at my sickbed. The red rims of Garrick's eyes the first time he called me his daughter. My brothers hauling me through the snow on their backs. Damian in the Elders' hall, promising that he would love me the same even without a wolf.

All of that love had been real.

And because it had been real, every time they threw me away afterward it cut down to the bone.

In the instant the silver spike went through my heart, my last thought was not hatred. I was only thinking that a child taken in by a family would always be sent back where she came from, no matter how hard she tried.

The healer, Corbin Hale, pressed two fingers to my throat and declared that my breathing and heartbeat had stopped.

On the coronation platform, the last of the mate mark faded from Damian's shoulder. Viola took the moonstone pendant, now stained with my blood, and ordered the guards to dump the body of the "worthless former Luna" into the Forsaken Pit.

The cells went silent again.

Beyond the wall, every wolfhound went flat on the ground, and every moonstone in the territory cracked apart in the same instant.

Right up to the moment I died, I did not know that I had never been without a wolf.

I had only lost the memory of her.

One second after the old heart stopped for good, just below the wound the silver spike had made, a second heart, black as pitch, beat for the very first time.