The Wolf Queen Rises

"Callum Draystone accepts the mate the Moon Goddess has given him."I was still smiling when the words left the elder's mouth because for six years, I had practiced hearing that sentence with my own name folded quietly inside it.I was three steps from him when the bond took hold. I watched his whole body jolt, watched his head turn — not toward me, but toward Selene Marsh, standing at the edge of the firelight, looking as stunned as I felt."Selene," Callum said, soft and hungry and immediate, and the way he said her name told me everything before he ever looked back at me at all."Callum." My voice came out smaller than I wanted. "Callum, please."He looked at me then, finally, with nothing behind his eyes but mild, distracted apology. "Wren. You understand. Fate doesn't ask permission. I can't exactly argue with the Goddess.""You could act as if it costs you something," I said, voice cracking despite everything I did to hold it.He didn't answer. He was already crossing the fireli

I stood at the border of Ravenhollow three days later, Skye's hand wrapped tight in mine."Mama," Skye said, tugging my hand. "Why does it feel scary here?""Because it belongs to someone new now, baby. But we don't get scared of new things. We get ready for them."My mother's funeral was somber and sparse. I stood at her graveside with Skye pressed to my side, forcing myself to stay standing exactly the way four years of Odessa's training had prepared me to.An old sentinel two rows back — one of my mother's contemporaries, a woman I only half remembered from childhood — went rigid when her gaze landed on Skye. She didn't say anything, not then, but I caught her elbowing the woman beside her, both of them staring at my daughter with an intensity that had nothing to do with grief. I told myself it was only curiosity about a child nobody recognized. I would learn later that it was something closer to disbelief — the specific disbelief of someone seeing a color they'd been taught belong

The room went utterly silent."Say that again," Roman said, low and dangerous, without ever looking away from my daughter. "What bloodline did you just name?""The Vayle line," Callum said, barely above a whisper. "My father used to tell stories. A pack from the northern peaks wiped out three generations back in a massacre, so brutal the survivors scattered and changed their names. He kept an old portrait. Golden eyes, exactly like—""The Vayle line was my mother's line," Roman said quietly, each word costing him something visible. "The massacre that wiped it out is the same massacre that killed my family and made me the last survivor of my birth pack. I've spent twenty years being told there was no one left."I stared at Skye's eyes — eyes I'd told myself for three years were simply a quirk from some ancestor too far back to trace — and felt my entire understanding of my own daughter collapse and rebuild itself in the space of a single breath."That's not possible," I said, voice sha

The pack hall had a war room nobody used for war anymore — a long stone chamber beneath the main hall, lined with old maps of territories that had changed hands so many times the ink barely agreed with itself. Roman brought me there three nights after Callum's failed bargain, Skye asleep upstairs under Odessa's watch, a single lantern throwing long shadows across a table covered in papers that weren't maps at all.They were records. Names. A slow, careful accounting of every surviving Vayle line he'd chased down over two decades, most of them dead ends, false rumors, families who'd simply shared a surname and nothing more."You kept all of this," I said, running my fingers along the edge of a page filled with his handwriting, cramped and careful, the writing of a man who'd learned early that details were the only thing standing between him and being erased entirely."I kept everything," Roman said. "For twenty years, this was the only thing I had left of them. My mother used to braid

The bond hummed between Roman and me every hour we spent in the same room, a low, constant pull I hadn't asked for and wasn't sure I wanted, not this soon, not with everything else demanding my attention. It made itself worse at night — an ache that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with a body that had apparently decided, without consulting me, exactly what it wanted."You're avoiding me," Roman said, catching me in the training yard after I'd spent three straight evenings finding reasons to be anywhere he wasn't."I'm not avoiding you. I'm prioritizing. There's a coalition possibly hunting my daughter. Romance isn't at the top of my list right now.""I didn't ask for romance," he said. "I asked why you flinch every time I stand too close to you."I didn't have a clean answer, so I gave him the honest one instead. "Because the last time a bond told me I belonged to someone, it was wrong. Or lying. Or whatever you want to call what happened with Callum. I don't know how