Chapter one

"Take my second daughter," my father had begged, shoving me into the dimly lit study while I kept my eyes pinned to the floor. "She carries the same royal bloodline. She will wear the dress. She will stand at the altar. No one outside these walls has to know the bride ran away until the treaty is signed."

I was twenty-one. Luca, Alpha of the Moonlight Pack, looked me over once, the way a man inspects an unwanted purchase, and said yes.Tonight I was twenty-four, and the woman I had replaced was sitting beside my husband.

The banquet hall glittered beneath a chandelier made of hand-cut crystal. Pack elders, military captains, and emissaries from three allied territories raised their glasses along the long mahogany table, laughing as though three years of famine and blood-soaked winters had been a bad dream somebody else had survived. The air hung thick with roasted lamb and spiced wine.

Luca sat at  the head of the table. His shoulders were rigid beneath his charcoal jacket, his jaw cut from granite. But his eyes, the dark, stormy eyes that had regarded me with cold detachment for thirty-six months, were wide and soft and utterly consumed.

He was looking at Lyra. My sister, she sat at his right hand in a gown of ivory silk that cost more than a winter's grain for the northern barracks. She leaned into his space as if it had always belonged to her, her fingers resting on his wrist, directly over the place where a mate mark should have bloomed. Mine never had. Three years of marriage, and Luca had never once spoken the words that would have sealed our bond.

"You look so pale, sister," Lyra said, her sweet voice slicing through the low roar of the room. She tilted her head and pooled fake pity in her eyes, projecting for the elders. "Perhaps you should retire early. Running Luca's home in my absence must have been such an exhausting burden.

The hall went quiet. Goblets froze in midair.My mother, Mary, sat at Lyra's left. She let out a soft, approving hum and rested a tender hand on Lyra's knee, beaming with a worshipful pride she had never once aimed at me. I sat three chairs down, a ghost haunting my own table. My fingernails dug into my palms until the sting of broken skin was the only thing holding me upright.

Inside my mind, my wolf paced and snarled. Tell them who rebuilt these walls, she said, but i keep pressing 

her down. I stared at Luca and begged him silently for one small thing. A sharp word in my defense. His arm drawn back from her touch. Anything.Luca did not look at me. His fingers simply closed tighter around Lyra's hand. I wasn't his Luna. I wasn't even his wife, not in any way that mattered. I was a replacement whose use had expired.

"You aren't eating, Adele," my father said from my right, his voice low and warning. Thomas Sinclair had a way of making a threat sound like table manners. "Don't embarrass this family on such an important night Adele, Smile and Congratulate your sister." I turned to look at him. This was the man who had dragged me into this very castle three years ago, who had sat me down beforehand and explained, kindly and reasonably, that a good daughter sacrifices so that the family might live. He had said it with tears in his eyes. I had believed the tears.

"Congratulate her?" I whispered. "For coming back only when the table was full?"

His eyes narrowed to slits. "Mind your tongue, girl. You served your purpose. Be grateful Luca let you wear the title as long as he did."

Grateful. A bitter laugh crawled up my throat. Grateful for three years of cold stares. Grateful for an empty bed while my husband drank himself senseless over a woman who had run. Grateful for sixteen-hour days spent counting grain, bartering herbs, and balancing ledgers so his warriors would not starve in the snow. His His Majesty’s qppp I thought of the night the supply convoys failed, when I had sat on the hospital floor stitching a warrior's side while Luca paced the corridor, grey with exhaustion. He had not thanked me. But he had stayed until dawn, and I had mistaken that for something.

Across the table, Lyra caught my eye. The innocence slid off her face for one heartbeat, replaced by a razor-thin smirk of pure triumph. Then she rested her head on Luca's shoulder.

"Darling," she cooed, smoothing a hand down his chest. "Tomorrow I would love to see the eastern gardens. I hear they've fallen into such disrepair under Adele's care."

The gardens were thriving. I had planted half of them myself, rows of yarrow and feverfew for the hospital's dispensary.

Luca cleared his throat. His voice rolled low and gravelly through the silence. "The entire estate is at your disposal tomorrow, Lyra."That was it. The hammer that shattered the last small spark of hope my wolf had been quietly nursing.

My mother laughed softly. My father lifted his glass. Somewhere down the table, an elder murmured that it was a mercy, really, to see the proper order restored.

The elders applauded, softly, politely, the way one applauds a performance. Not one of them looked at the woman who had paid for the meal.I should have felt rage. Instead I felt something stranger and far colder, the stillness of a held breath finally let go.I reached up to my throat. My fingers found the heavy silver chain of the Luna pendant, the ancient crest of the Moonlight Pack, which had never once felt like mine. I opened the clasp. The silver lay ice-cold in my palm.I stood. My chair scraped the polished stone with a sound like a dying gasp, and every head in the hall turned.

"Adele, sit down," Thomas hissed, his face flushing red.

I ignored him. I walked the length of the table with my spine straight as a drawn sword and stopped beside Luca and Lyra.

Luca's head snapped toward me, his brows crashing into a scowl. "Adele. What are you doing? "I didn't answer. I raised my hand and let the pendant fall into the center of Lyra's plate. It struck the china with a sharp, ringing clatter that carried to the rafters. Lyra gasped and jerked back in her chair.

"It's yours, sister," I said, and my voice came out smooth as polished steel. "Wear it in good health. I hope the throne is comfortable. It was built from three years of my blood."

"Adele!" Luca shoved to his feet so hard his chair crashed backward. His Alpha aura erupted, heavy and suffocating, a force that demanded instant submission. "Know your place!"

I looked him dead in the eye.

For three years, that voice had driven me to my knees. I had flinched at it, shaped myself around it, and apologized for taking up space beneath it. I waited for the old terror to come.

Nothing came. The pressure rolled over me like wind over a stone. I felt only the cool, strange freedom of a woman with nothing left to lose.

"I do know my place, Alpha Luca," I said quietly, stepping back from his reaching hand. "It just isn't here."

For one second, something flickered across his face. Not anger. Something rawer, like a man who had reached for a railing and found it gone. His fingers curled in the empty air between us.Then Lyra's hand slid back onto his sleeve, and the flicker vanished. Before he could throw another command at me, before my father could seize my arm, I turned on my heel and walked out. Leaving all the whisperes behind me. Guards I had fed and elders I had healed stared as I passed, and not one of them stopped me.

The great doors closed at my back, muffling the rising storm of voices. The corridor beyond was cool, dim, and blessedly empty. Behind the doors, the hall swallowed her name over and over, Lyra, Lyra, Lyra, as though the pack had waited three years for permission to say it aloud. I made it six steps before my knees began to shake. I braced one palm against the cold wall and breathed. In. Out. My wolf pressed close inside me, silent now, her warmth wrapped around my ribs like a shawl.

Behind the doors I heard Lyra's laughter, bright and unhurried. A woman who had never doubted she would be welcomed home. I straightened, wiped my face with the back of my wrist, and kept walking. Somewhere deep in my body, a tiny and unfamiliar flutter of unease stirred, but I was too tired, too hollowed out, to wonder at it.

Let her have the crown. Let them all have the throne, the title, and all the gilded lies.