Chapter 1

The arena smelled like wet iron and fear. Three weeks of blood had soaked into the stone floor and no amount of sand could cover the stink anymore. I stood near the edge, my back against the rough bark of the old oak tree, watching my little brother Antonio throw the last punch of his semifinal.

His opponent folded like paper. The crowd roared.

Tony turned toward me with that look on his face, the one he learned from our father. That look that told me I was next and he planned to enjoy every second of it.

My fingers found the silver pendant hanging around my neck. My mother's pendant. The metal was warm against my skin, always warm, like she was still in there somewhere, still pressing her hand over my heart.

"Seraphina," I whispered to the wolf curled inside my chest.

I see him, she growled. He is nothing.

She was right. Tony was fast and strong but he fought angry. He always fought angry. And angry fighters make mistakes. I had beaten every single opponent in this tournament without dropping a round. Five years of training, five years of proving myself in the quadrennial games that served as the proving ground for every pack in the western territories, and tonight everything would come to a point.

The title of Alpha heir to the Moretti Vanguard Pack. My birthright. The thing my father had spent my entire life telling me I could never have, simply because I was born a woman instead of another son.

I pushed off the tree and let my gaze climb to the royal platform above. There he sat. Alpha Salvatore Moretti. My father. His jaw was set hard, his dark eyes empty when they found mine. No pride. No warmth. Nothing at all. Twenty two years of breaking my body on training grounds and fighting rings and battlefields, and that man had never once looked at me like I was his daughter.

All I wanted was for him to see me. Just once.

But the man sitting beside him made my blood turn cold for a completely different reason. Dark Alpha Vittorio Falcone. The ruler of the eastern territories. Even from this distance his presence pressed against me like a physical weight, suffocating and enormous, and the wolves sitting near him kept their eyes on the ground like they were afraid to breathe in his direction. His face was unreadable, carved from something harder than stone, and the darkness rolling off him made my wolf shrink back inside my ribs.

I almost missed Enzo sitting behind his father. Almost. But then he caught my eye and smiled at me, soft and secret and just for me, and something tight inside my chest loosened just enough to let me breathe.

Focus, Seraphina warned.

Right. Focus. Not on the boy with the warm eyes. Not on the monster sitting beside my father. On the fight.

"Ladies and gentlemen," the announcer's voice boomed across the arena like thunder. "Your challenger for the title of heir to the Moretti Vanguard Pack. The undefeated. The unstoppable. Gianna Moretti!"

The crowd split in reaction. Half of them were on their feet, cheering so loud the stone shook beneath me. The other half just stared, whispering behind their hands, shaking their heads because I was a woman and no woman in the entire history of the games had ever reached this stage.

I did not care about either group. I cared about one man, sitting above in the platform, and the hollow space behind his eyes where his pride in me should have been.

I walked into the center of the ring. The lights above were blinding, white and hot, and they turned the sand beneath my bare feet into something that glowed almost golden. Tony's blood stain spread across the middle of the floor like a dark map. He stood on the other side, cracking his knuckles one by one, grinning like a kid about to pull wings off a butterfly.

"Well, well," Tony called out, rolling his shoulders loose. "Look at you, Gia. Standing in the big ring with the big boys. The crowd must be thrilled. A little warm up show before the real fight starts."

I kept walking toward him. Slow. Steady. The pendant hummed against my collarbone.

"You know what Dad told me this morning?" Tony went on, raising his voice so the audience could hear every word. "He told me not to hurt you too bad. Because damaged goods are harder to sell."

The words landed somewhere deep in my stomach but I did not let them reach my face. I had spent my whole life keeping pain off my face. Instead I stopped ten feet away from him and tilted my head.

"Funny you bring up Dad," I told him, loud enough for the front rows to catch it. "Because the last time I checked, my record in this tournament is twelve and zero. Yours is nine and three. And one of your wins was a forfeit because your opponent slipped on his own blood." I paused and let the crowd's laughter spread through the stands like a wave. "So which one of us is the warm up act, Tony?"

His grin collapsed.

"You think you're clever?" he snarled, stepping closer. "You think that smart little mouth of yours changes anything? When the horn sounds, all your words disappear. You're still just a girl playing a man's game."

"And you're still just a boy riding your daddy's name. Take that away and what do you have? A nine and three record and a whole lot of ego."

That one hit deep. I watched the red climb up his neck, watched his nostrils flare and his jaw clench so tight the muscles in his temples jumped. The crowd went quiet, sensing the shift, the way animals go silent when thunder rolls in.

There it is, Seraphina murmured. He is already losing.

Tony circled me, his footsteps heavy on the sand. "You think this is some kind of fairy tale, Gia? The brave little girl beats the big bad brother and Daddy finally loves her? Is that what you think is going to happen tonight?"

"I think you talk too much for someone who's about to lose."

"I'm going to enjoy this," he breathed, and his voice dropped into something low and ugly that I recognized from our father. That same cold, dismissive tone Salvatore used whenever he spoke to me like I was something stuck to the bottom of his boot. "When I put you on your back in this ring, everyone is going to see what you really are. A mistake. That's what Dad calls you, you know. Did he ever tell you that to your face? Probably not. He says it behind closed doors. His only mistake."

The words were designed to break me. And somewhere behind my ribs, in that soft place I never let anyone see, they did. A crack ran through something I had been holding together for years. But I had learned a long time ago that breaking and falling down are two different things. You can break and still stand. You can bleed inside and still swing.

The final horn blasted across the arena, deep and long and ancient, and the sound went through my bones like a current. Everything else fell away.

The crowd, the torches, the weight of my father's empty stare from above. All of it disappeared until there was nothing left but my brother standing across from me in the blood stained sand and the closing space between us.

Together, Seraphina whispered.

Together, I answered.

Our claws came out. And we surged forward.