Chapter 2

Faela

Something was wrong with my body.

The rogues were gone. The black wolf stood at the mouth of the alley, its shape swallowed by the moonless sky, and behind it, those green eyes. Steady. Watching me where I sat on cold stone.

I should have run. My throat stung raw where my mother's chain had been ripped away, and my hands were still trembling.

But fear wasn't what I felt.

Heat crept under my ribs. Slow at first, then building, spreading through my chest and down my arms until my fingers tingled. Something inside me was pushing toward the surface, pressing against my skin from within. Urgent and fierce and completely unfamiliar.

I pressed my palm flat against my sternum. My heart pounded under my hand hard enough to bruise.

The eyes moved closer.

Footsteps. Deliberate. Too quiet for a man that size. I couldn't see his face. There was no moon, he was nothing but a shape. Tall. Broad at the shoulders.

But his eyes. Those green eyes stayed, impossibly bright, burning steady in the pitch dark.

When he touched me, my mind went blank.

His palm pressed flat against my ribs and dragged upward, pulling me into him.

His other hand gripped the back of my neck, fingers threading deep into my hair, tilting my skull back. Not gentle. Not asking. He gripped me the way his hands had been aching to. Rough and desperate and consuming, mapping my waist, my hips, the curve of my spine, crushing me against his chest until I felt his heartbeat hammering through his skin.

I grabbed his shoulders and held on.

Muscle. Thick bands of it under palms that burned. I ran my hands down his arms, felt the ridges of his forearms, traced up the column of his throat where his pulse slammed against my fingertips.

I couldn't see an inch of him. But my hands told me everything. Every ridge of tension, the sheer furnace-heat of his skin. He was massive and burning alive.

A wolf. A real one. Something more powerful than anything I'd ever touched.

His mouth found mine.

His teeth caught my lower lip. His hand tightened in my hair until my scalp ached.

I kissed him back just as hard, tasting smoke and salt, and something behind my ribs cracked wide open. The heat that had been building inside me poured out. Not warmth anymore. A blaze that stole the air from my lungs.

I opened my eyes.

A wolf stood behind him in the dark.

White. Enormous. Its fur blazed with a light that had no source, pale and luminous, bright enough to carve shadows into the alley walls. It watched us with eyes I couldn't look at directly.

My vision swam. The ground tilted under me.

Too much whiskey. Too much adrenaline. The rogues' hands still printed on my skin. I was hallucinating.

But the white wolf didn't fade. And something in me recognized it the way you recognize your own heartbeat. Instant, wordless, certain.

The man pulled me tighter against him. I let him. I couldn't have pulled away if I'd wanted to.

I had never felt anything like this. A warmth that went all the way to my bones, unknotting muscles I didn't know I'd been clenching, silencing the raw sting at my throat. My body stopped shaking for the first time since the rogues had slammed me into that wall.

So this was what it felt like to be near your mate.

On my eighteenth birthday. The night my father had sentenced me to die in a king's bed. I'd stumbled drunk into an alley and found the one person in the world who was made for me.

My father had never loved me. My pack had never wanted me. But this stranger's hands on my body said I belonged, and I believed them more than I'd believed anything in eighteen years.

I would walk away from all of it. Greyrock. My father's house. The marriage. The whole miserable life that had never once made room for me.

I would go wherever this man went and never look back.

His mouth moved down my jaw to my neck. Teeth closed on the nape, just below my hairline. The pressure built. Sharp and unmistakable.

A mark.

I dropped my head forward and bared the back of my neck. Every nerve in my body said yes. A thread of connection spooled out between us, thin and shimmering, and I held my breath, waiting for it to lock into place—

He stopped.

His jaw unlocked. His hands dropped from my body. And then he was gone — ripping away so fast the cold rushed in and hit me like a wall of water.

I heard his footsteps. Rapid, retreating. Then nothing.

I reached after him. My fingers closed on empty dark.

"Wait—"

The alley was silent. Wind and the distant hum of a car. And the wild, useless hammering of my own heart.

Conri

The wind carved through my shirt and I let it.

I stood on the roof above the alley, gripping the ledge until my knuckles went white, trying to breathe through the fire still raging under my skin.

"I marked her." The words tore out before I could stop them. Too loud in the silence. "I put my teeth in her neck and I—"

My fist cracked against the stone ledge. Dust and chips scattered into the dark below.

A white wolf spirit, said a voice in my skull, smooth and unhurried. Bright as moonlight. The girl attached to it must be stunning.

A low, appreciative hum. Shame it was so dark. I couldn't see a thing.

Varg. My inner wolf. In his calmer moments he had the air of a gentleman holding a wine glass at a dinner party he found beneath him.

"This isn't a joke, Varg." My voice came out raw. "She could die. Because of me."

She could not.

"Every woman I've ever touched. Every one. I lose control. I black out. I wake up and there's blood on my hands."

The first wife flashed behind my eyes. The one who'd drugged me into a frenzy. I'd woken next to her with scratches on her throat and bruises in the shape of my fingers.

"I could have killed that girl tonight." I stared at my hands. "I accepted it a long time ago. No mate. No Luna. Just the crown and the silence until I die."

But you didn't. The amusement left his voice.

You stopped, Conri. Teeth in her neck, wolf on the edge, every instinct howling at you to finish. And you stopped. When has that ever happened?

I said nothing.

We both know the answer. Quieter now, a pressure behind my ribs. The only one who can keep us sane. Our true Luna.

A beat of silence. Then, sharper:

You searched for fifteen years. Ten wives who were never yours. And tonight a girl with a white wolf spirit bright enough to burn a hole in the dark. You truly believe she was just some girl?

I stared down at the lights of the city. Fifteen years. Ten dead wives, all planted by the Elder Council, all killed when they stopped being useful. None of them mine. Not one.

"I need to go back."

I was already moving. Over the ledge, three stories down, boots striking stone without slowing.

Her scent still clung to my hands. Warm sugar and something feral underneath. I already missed her, the she-wolf with the white spirit and the mouth that tasted like fire. I wanted to finish the mark. I wanted to bring her to the palace and never let her out of my sight.

For the first time in fifteen years, I wanted something that was mine.

I reached the alley at a dead sprint.

Empty.

The wall where I'd pressed her against the brick. The patch of ground where she'd sat, still warm. The ghost of her scent dissolving in the wind.

She was gone.