Chapter 2

Tony came at me like a battering ram. I expected it. My brother had always been a first strike fighter, all power and no patience,.and I had been watching his patterns since we were children scrapping in the dirt outside our.father's house. He threw a right hook that could have cracked stone. I ducked it, spun left, and drove my elbow into his ribs so hard the impact traveled up my arm.

He grunted and stumbled sideways. The crowd roared but I barely heard them. Everythingnhad narrowed down to the two of us and the space between.

"Come on, Tony," I breathed, bouncing on my toes.

"That was your opener? I've seen you hit harder in sparring practice." He swung again. Wider this time, sloppy with anger, throwing his whole body into it. I moved.

His fist hit nothing but air.

"Stand still!" he roared.

"Why would I do that?" I hit him twice more. Once in the kidney, once across the jaw. Clean, sharp, calculated.

Every blow was designed to push him further into his rage, because the angrier Tony got, the sloppier he fought. And right now his face was turning purple and his breathing was ragged and I could practically smell the control leaving his body.

His eyes were turning gold now. His teeth were lengthening behind his snarling lips. The shift was coming and he could not stop it, and when a wolf shifts in the middle of a controlled fight, it means they have lost their mind to the beast.

Tony, don't," I warned him. Not out of kindness. Out of something closer to mercy.

"I'll tear you apart!" he screamed, and then his body exploded. Bones cracked and reshaped with sounds that made my teeth ache. Muscle and dark grey fur rippled across his frame until a massive wolf stood where my brother had been, all fangs and fury and glowing golden eyes. He was enormous in this form, nearly twice my size, and a heavy silence dropped over the crowd at the sight.

He traded his intelligence for brute force, Seraphina observed. Typical.

In full wolf form, Tony charged. The ground shook beneath his paws. He was faster now, stronger by a wide margin, and every swipe of those enormous claws could have opened me from throat to hip without effort.

But speed is not the same as skill. And strength means nothing if you cannot land a hit. I slid under his first lunge, kicked off his flank, and landed three strikes to his exposed side before he could even turn his massive head. He swiped blindly and caught me with a claw across the shoulder.

The pain hit white and hot. And then I heard the snap. My mother's pendant. The chain broke and the silver charm tumbled through the air and for one terrible second, something inside me cracked open like a door being kicked in.

I felt it rise from somewhere deep, somewhere I had never been able to reach. Something old and massive and suffocating. My skin burned and when I looked down, thick veins were pushing through my flesh, pulsing with something that looked like liquid fire mixed with black tar. The edges of my vision rippled with shadow. Sounds warped and stretched. My wolf howled inside me but this was not Seraphina. This was something else entirely. Something enormous and hungry and wrong.

My eyes burned. I knew without seeing a mirror that they had turned crimson.

The pendant! Seraphina screamed. Grab it NOW!

I dove for the charm, snatched it from the sand, and slammed it against my chest with both hands. The heat stopped. The veins receded. The shadows pulled back like a tide going out,and whatever had been trying to claw its way to the surface retreated back into whatever cage the pendant kept it locked in.

I stayed on one knee, breathing hard, the pendant pressed against my skin so tight the edges cut into my palm. My whole body was trembling and my mouth tasted like iron and ash. What was that? What lived inside me that could warp the air and turn my blood to fire?

My mother had given me this pendant the night she died, pressed it into my small hands and whispered something I had been too young to remember. Whatever secret she had locked inside this silver, it was trying to get out.

Later, Seraphina urged. We deal with this later. The fight is not over.

The flash had lasted barely two seconds. The crowd had not noticed, too focused on the blood and the spectacle to catch the brief ripple of something unnatural. But when I raised my eyes to the platform above, two people had seen it.

Dark Alpha Vittorio Falcone was leaning forward in his seat, his dark gaze locked on me with an intensity that turned my blood to ice water. He turned his head and whispered something long and deliberate into my father's ear. My father's face did not change. It never changed.

Tony growled and lunged again. This time I did not dodge.

"You want to talk about my mother?" I spat, and the anger that filled me now was clean and sharp and righteous, fueled by every filthy thing he had ever called her. "You want to drag her name through the dirt in front of all these people?"

I caught his jaw with a right hook that snapped his massive wolf head sideways. He staggered. I hit him again before he could recover. Then a third time, each blow harder than the last, each one carrying twenty two years of swallowed rage.

"Say her name again," I whispered. "I dare you."

Then I spun and launched a kick that connected with the side of his skull so cleanly that all four of his wolf legs left the ground. His enormous body sailed three feet through the air and crashed into the sand so hard the whole arena trembled.

He did not get up.

The stadium erupted. Thousands of wolves on their feet, screaming, stomping, chanting my name until the sound bounced off the walls and came back even louder. I stood over my brother's unconscious body with blood on my knuckles and my mother's pendant burning against my chest, and for the first time in twenty two years, I felt like I had finally earned my place.

Then my father stepped to the edge of the platform. The crowd went silent so fast it felt like someone had sucked the air out of the room.

"Strength alone does not make a ruler," Alpha Salvatore Moretti announced, and his voice was cold and flat and carried to every corner of the arena. "The heir to the Moretti Vanguard Pack is my son, Antonio."

The words hit me like a blade between the ribs. I could not move. Could not breathe. Could not think.

"Gianna is a warrior," my father continued, looking at me the way someone looks at a tool they no longer need. "Nothing more. She will never be Alpha. She is not fit for it."

No, Seraphina whimpered inside me. No, no, no.

"And as for my daughter's future." He paused, and when he spoke again there was something cruel and satisfied in his voice that I would never forget.

"She will be wed in three days to Alpha Vittorio Falcone of the eastern territories."

Gasps tore through the crowd. Whispers erupted everywhere like wildfire. I heard someone cry out behind me and I did not know if it was for me or because of me.

I looked up at Vittorio. He sat perfectly still in his seat, one leg crossed over the other, watching me with those dark, amused eyes, like a man who had just won something he had been quietly betting on all night.

Every cell in my body screamed.

I will never marry him.